Pubdate: Fri, Jan 29, 1999 Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA) Copyright: 1999 San Francisco Chronicle Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/ Forum: http://www.sfgate.com/conferences/ Contact: A6 Author: Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times `ODD COUPLE` OF LOUISIANA PRISONS MAKING REHABILITATION WORK Robber, Dentist Say Program Cuts Recidivism To 6% Convicted felon Nelson Marks hardly understood anything about crime until he became a victim of it. It was 1982, and his first Christmas in prison at Angola, Louisiana's notorious maximum security lockup. He was writing Christmas cards to his family when he discovered that someone had stolen his cache of postage stamps. He nearly wept. Marks, 44, a bank robber and heroin addict who carried out his first burglary at age 9, had not until that moment thought of what it might be like to be on the receiving end of illegality. Meanwhile, affluent dentist Bob Roberts had spent so many years accelerating his life, recklessly piloting ever faster cars and airplanes, that he wasn't aware he had an addiction to adrenaline until he found himself standing still and afraid. Roberts, 54, had rushed through university, dental school and graduate school only to later discover that his essential education would begin inside prison walls as a teacher. Marks, the black smack addict, and Roberts, a white adrenaline junkie, met in 1989, when Roberts was doing graduate research in prison. They created Project Return, a program that works at ``getting potential crime waves off the street,'' as Roberts says. The two men known throughout Louisiana prisons as the ``odd couple'' have created a rehabilitation program for released convicts that claims a 6 percent recidivism rate in a state whose comparable rate is 49 percent. Nationwide the number is closer to 63 percent. In a national climate that has abandoned correction in favor of punishment, Project Return has become a model of what can go right in prisoner rehabilitation. It is the nation's first prison after-care program to be funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. Former Louisiana Gov. David Treen, who helped to obtain that funding, called Project Return, ``The best-kept secret in the country,'' which should be replicated elsewhere. Ever since sociologist Robert Martinson published his so-called ``Nothing Works'' study of offender rehabilitation in 1975, efforts to develop prisoner after-care programs have been met with skepticism or, worse, marginal funding. Martinson's 1975 survey of 231 rehabilitation studies famously concluded that attempts to rehabilitate criminals were pointless and had no effect on recidivism. Partly in response, the nation embarked on a prison-building spree. Prison and jail populations across the country doubled from 1978 to 1986, and kept growing. Soon lawmakers were passing mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws to make it harder and harder for convicts to leave prison, much less be rehabilitated. Only when economic models shifted and began to indicate that prisoner rehabilitation would eventually save society money did after-care programs begin in earnest, and today, there are signs of a national trend to treat prisoners after they are released. Marks works every day with the program participants and in the prisons, while Roberts runs prison seminars and spends much of his time fund raising and speaking. The men preach self-reliance and personal responsibility. The program begins with two days of soul baring, and through shared shame and pain emerges a tight, focused group. Then comes job training, anger management classes and literacy classes. Project Return has taken more than 800 ex-cons off the street, obtained housing for them, found them jobs and even sent a handful to college. Only about 70 participants are selected for Project Return each term. The waiting list has 400 names. Louisiana State Penitentiary nestles in the state's marshy notch, on the Mississippi border. Outside lies the Mississippi River, considered so perilous at this point that it serves as a kind of prison wall. When Marks arrived at Angola to begin serving his 25-year term for bank robbery, he and other new ``fish'' were given the standard welcome address by the prison colonel. ``Make your time easy,'' he told the men. ``Go into the population and get yourself a husband. Then do as he says.'' Marks' real education about crime was about to begin. He learned it was wise to sleep with an arm across your throat to ward off a strangler or place a book on your chest at night to stop a knife. ``It wasn't until prison that I witnessed people being stabbed, set afire, murdered,'' said Marks, who estimates he committed dozens of burglaries and robberies before being caught robbing a Baton Rouge bank. ``I was in the streets from nine years old until the age of 26, and I never witnessed any of that on the streets. Prison was the most violent place I ever saw.'' In prison, nighttime played its own, violent soundtrack. Gangs, gambling and drug use thrived at a volume he'd never seen on the streets. Leaving your cell was to risk gang rape. Marks, the new fish, took it all in. One day an older inmate, convicted murderer Henry Patterson, confronted him. He waved a thick book of poetry at Marks, challenging him to take a new path. ``Do you want this book that I have or do you want what's down that walk?'' Patterson gestured toward the cell block and its noise. Marks understood that Patterson was to be his mentor. Bob Roberts came to Angola a different way. He had tired of dentistry. ``Drilling, filling and billing,'' he called the work. He went back to school and earned a Ph.D. He raced cars. He pursued another Ph.D. Complaining that cars were too slow, Roberts began to race airplanes. Then stunt planes. Strained by his mental redlining, Roberts' marriage was unraveling. Some new shapes began to form when he and his wife went into therapy. Always an academic, Roberts threw himself into psychological theory. Before he noticed he had taken the first step, Roberts found himself on a spiritual quest. He sought out M. Scott Peck, whose spiritual guidebook, ``The Road Less Traveled,'' has been a perennial best seller. About the time Marks arrived at Angola, Roberts traveled to Connecticut to meet with Peck. One day toward the end of their week together, Peck fell silent then turned to Roberts. ``What do you want?'' he asked. It was a question that Roberts had never slowed down long enough to consider. Now he understood that he must seek a mentor back in New Orleans to lead him on his inward journey. He found one and started a journey that led him to self-help seminars, New Age gurus, tribal drumming retreats, more schooling, and a period of deep introspection, seeking to make of his life more than the sum of his worldly assets. In another time, their paths may have crossed as perpetrator and victim. On this journey, they met in prison, where Roberts was a graduate student studying prisoner rehabilitation and Marks was an influential con who wasn't sure he trusted ``yet another academic with a plan to save us all.'' Project Return's weekly Town Hall is settling down. On the 14th floor of a downtown office building, dozens of ex-convicts assemble for their early-morning meeting. Everyone is tired. A woman, beaming, tells of her prospects for a job. Another woman offers that she's living with her sister until she can get back on her feet and how last night her sister smoked crack in the bathroom and how her baby girl woke crying from the acrid smell and how it made the woman struggle all over again with her own addiction. Scrunched into small chairs, these adults are learning to read and write. Standing to the side with arms folded across his chest is J.C. Greenberry, who began to work full time at Project Return in 1994. Like most other staff members, he's also been through the program: He spent 5 1/2 years in prison after being convicted of abusing his stepdaughter. ``I took responsibility for what happened,'' he said, ``(but) the aim here has been to make me take more responsibility for what I did. This program provided me with the environment to recognize that. That's what's different about this program -- the community building.'' For that reason the Department of Justice has singled out Project Return for special praise. The Bureau of Justice Assistance has backed that with money -- this year a $775,000 grant. ``We consider the program to be a model for prisoner after care,'' said Department of Justice spokesman Doug Johnson. Project Return is being monitored by other cities around the state, which are assessing whether to install programs using a similar formula. The program's model is a synthesis of Marks and Roberts' ideas melded with Peck's idea of community building. - --- MAP posted-by: derek rea