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Late last year, I received a touching and gratifying letter from Cory W. at Tucker prison. It read, in part…
“Hello, my name is Cory. I am 27 years old, and I am incarcerated for possession of methamphetamine. I have been in prison for about two and a half years and nothing compares to the priceless inspiration I receive from reading your newspaper, One Day at a Time.
“I find them in the chapel usually once a month. Sometimes I don’t receive one because I get to them too late, and they are already gone. But somehow God usually provides me a way to read it…
“I hope to help someone who may also be going through the painful experience that a life of using and partying and drinking can cause. I never imagined in my life that I would be in prison, but once I found meth, I didn’t care about anything else.”
Several years ago, we began delivering roughly 1,500 copies of One Day at a Time to Arkansas prisons through a small group of volunteers and prison chaplains with the encouragement and support of Larry Norris, head of the Arkansas Department of Corrections (ADC).
We didn’t have anything specific in mind. We just suspected that drugs and alcohol were involved in most crimes committed, and we thought our message of hope and encouragement might do some good.
We knew there was a problem, but we didn’t know how big it was.
In his best selling book, “High Society,” Joseph A. Califano Jr. set us straight.
“Some 80 percent of America’s inmates,” Califano writes, “either were high at the time of their crimes, committed their offenses to get money to buy drugs, violated the alcohol or drug laws, have a history of alcohol or drug abuse and addiction or share some mix of these characteristics.”
Furthermore, we learned from a February 2008 report of the PEW’s Center on the States that the total adult inmate count in the nation’s prisons at the beginning of 2008 stood at 2,319,258 or one in every 99.1 adults in the United States, most of them on drug related charges. That’s more than any other country in the world.
In 2006, the Center, which is funded by the prestigious PEW Charitable Trust, launched the Public Safety Performance Project to help states develop, among other things, strategies to help control corrections costs amounting to nearly $50 billion a year and growing.
“Total state spending — including bonds and federal contributions — topped $49 billion last year, up from $12 billion in 1987,” the report said. By 2011, it said, continued prison growth is expected to cost states an additional $25 billion.
The average prisoner operating cost was $23,876 per year in 2005, the most recent year for which data are available.
In Arkansas, there are approximately 15,000 inmates housed in the state’s 25 prisons (with another 1,000 in county jails awaiting transfer) at an estimated cost that varies from $21,000 to $24,000 per year per inmate. To add to financial woes, the state is short of space and has two proposed projects in the works that would provide another 3,000 beds at a cost of well over $200 million.
A major culprit in overloading the prisons is “recidivism.” Exact numbers vary, but as many as three out of four inmates who are released are likely to be back in within a couple of years, either for new crimes or parole violations. And, again, substance abuse is a major factor.
We began to speculate that One Day at a Time, with its hopeful message and examples of people overcoming, might have a small influence on reducing recidivism. If we could just help 1 percent of Arkansas’s prison population —150 inmates — to stay out of prison there would be an annual savings in excess of $3 million not to mention an immeasurable reduction in heartache.
As the months went by we continued to get positive feedback and began delivering more papers, but recruiting volunteers and enlisting the aid of chaplains to get copies into the hands of inmates at 25 state prisons and several jails was difficult. We badly needed someone to organize and manage a workable system. I found the perfect candidate.
Tom Jones has a long resume of achievements in business and is also a retired pharmacist. Tragically, Tom has a son in Tucker prison serving life without parole and another son who is in recovery from drug addiction. He has a personal stake in our mission.
Tom and I got together in January. By the end of April, we had a plan calling for the delivery every quarter of 10,000 papers to 19 state prisons several county and local prisons and 49 parole offices. Tom estimated that he and his volunteers would travel 3,700 miles every quarter to deliver the papers.
Beginning with this issue of One Day at a Time, we have increased our total press run from 20,000 to 40,000 to accommodate the increase in prison distribution and general distribution in the Little Rock area.
This is just the beginning. There is a second part to this project. With this issue we will conduct a pilot study at Tucker men’s and Wrightsville women’s prisons to test our assumptions about the impact of the paper on inmate beliefs and behaviors and to determine the possibilities of involving inmates in writing, editing and producing at least a portion of the paper.
We have included questionnaires for inmates in 500 papers going to the two prisons to guide us in meeting their need for information and inspiration and to explore the feasibility of producing a special edition of One Day at a Time with the help of inmates.
The questionnaire, which we tested with a few inmates, has 15 statements to which inmates can respond. “I would like to have a mentor or sponsor when I am released” is one statement. Another is “I am encouraged by the One Day at a Time paper.” A third is, “I would like to have a poem or writing contest in this paper for inmates.” For each statement, inmates can indicate on a scale whether they strongly agree, strongly disagree or fall someplace in between.
There are also several open-ended questions, one of which is focused on their concerns about being released. Preliminary investigation suggests they are concerned, for example, about such things as getting a place to stay, getting a job, staying clean and sober, reuniting with their families and staying away from old friends in bad neighborhoods.
Tom McKeithen and Chris Larrison, principals in Healthcare Performance, a Florida firm which includes market research among its many services, has been assisting us in the development of the questionnaire and will help us analyze the results. They are donating these services, and we are most
grateful.
Ultimately we believe this survey and others to follow will help us reduce substance abuse and save lives, families and money. And if we can do it in Arkansas, we can do it in other states.
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