OUT FOR GOOD, MOST SAY

But Statistics Show Many Will Return To Prison

Another time, another place, the men would be frightening, unnerving at the
very least.

Muscled, square-jawed, with heads shaved and skin scarred and tattooed,
they are convicted drug users and drug sellers, drunks, thieves, robbers,
rapists, murderers.

But on the day they are to be released from prison, they are as bright-eyed
and optimistic as honor students.

On this day, nearly every man believes tomorrow will be better than
yesterday and there is no turning back.

"I'm not trying to go back to my old ways," says David Hurd, a lanky, cocky
25-year-old from Houston. "I've seen guys go home and then come back. The
guys who come back to the system let themselves come back to the system."

Hurd insists he will be different. He will work, not sell marijuana. He
will stay out of trouble for the sake of his kids, his mother, his teenage
brother.

"The Lord has got a calling on me," he says.

He sounds sincere, but research has shown good intentions are not enough.

The Texas prison system incarcerates 140,000 people, second only to
California, and is so big that prisoners are released every weekday. On any
given day, 100 men will trade saggy white cotton prison scrubs for
ill-fitting, secondhand street clothes and walk shoulder to shoulder from
the Huntsville Unit prison.

The question no one asks is: Who's coming back? But if someone did, the
prisoners would answer just like David Hurd: Not me.

National studies show otherwise: Roughly half the men will be proved wrong
within three years.

Texas will spend $74.4 million this year on programs to rehabilitate
convicted criminals. The money pays for counseling for a variety of
problems: drugs, alcohol, anger, pedophilia, even classes to teach them how
to think better.

The Texas Education Agency will chip in an additional $75.8 million on
remedial education and job training. College courses are available, too.
The spirit is not neglected either. The system welcomes 25,000 volunteers,
most of them Christian, but some Muslims and Jews, to help lost souls find
a moral foundation.

The state has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into programs to
rehabilitate prisoners in the past decade. Annual spending has climbed from
just $5.4 million in 1992. The Windham School District, which educates the
state's inmates, nearly doubled its spending during roughly the same time
period. Its budget in 1993 was just $42.8 million.

Despite all these efforts, ex-convicts continue to commit crimes soon after
they are released from prison. The three-year rates of recidivism have
improved in the last decade, down to 30.7 percent for prisoners released in
1997 from 42.9 percent in 1988, but repeat offenders remain a problem.

Recently released convicts commit 5 percent of serious crimes, according to
a study by the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. A
system that can keep convicted criminals from re-offending would save money
and better protect the public.

So why don't we have a system like that?

"That's the million-dollar question," said Debbie Roberts, director of
programs for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. "Can you
(rehabilitate)?"

Roberts quickly answers: "I think you can."

Efforts to rehabilitate begin as soon as a criminal enters the system. The
first stop for everyone is the James Byrd Diagnostic Center in Huntsville.

There, an inmate is tested on intelligence, education, emotional and mental
stability and job skills. From the test results, prison officials create an
individualized rehabilitation plan.

An inmate who cannot read at a seventh-grade level is enrolled in school.
Those already educated can further their studies in college or vocational
classes.

Everyone who is able is put to work in cafeterias, on farms and in
factories making license plates, clothing, wood furniture. There are 41
prison factories. For many, it is the first steady employment of their lives.

For drug addicts, there are six-to nine-month counseling programs, and the
counseling continues after release.

For the most part, inmates adhere to their rehabilitation plans because
refusing affects parole chances. An inmate who gets an education, completes
his rehabilitation plan and stays out of trouble stands a pretty good
chance of earning parole. An inmate who does not serves more, if not all,
of his sentence.

It is difficult to rank the rehabilitative programs, Roberts said. But
inmates who complete all aspects of their rehabilitative plans are less
likely to re-offend than those who complete only a portion, she said.

"If you have an offender who is illiterate and has a substance-abuse
addiction, if all he does is learn to read, when he gets out you're going
to have an addict who is literate," she said. "By the same token, if all he
gets is treatment for his addiction -- then you have a former addict who is
illiterate."

The Windham School District is a bona fide school district governed by the
Texas Education Agency. It operates like any school district in the state,
except its students are adults who are about as competent as fifth-graders.

Of the 140,000 Texas prisoners, Windham educates between 75,000 and 80,000
in any given year at 89 schools in prisons and state jails.

At the Wynne Unit in Huntsville, the school district offers vocational
training in computer maintenance, diesel mechanics, small engine repair,
computer-aided drafting and welding as well as remedial education courses.
Associate college degrees are available in electronics, welding and truck
driving.

Inside a computer classroom, station after station of white computers sit
on long brown tables in a Spartan room with a concrete floor and bare
walls. In the back, right corner of the room, Eduardo Leiva, 47, of Fort
Worth sits, searching an in-house network of computers for software for his
machine. It is a simulated Internet search because prisoners do not have
access to the real one.

Leiva, a thick man with salt-and-pepper hair, is there because a court
found he was drunk when he crashed his car, causing his good friend to die.

The accident, Leiva says, was not his fault, and he denies he was drunk.
Still, he recognizes hislifestyle needed changing.

He used to manage strip clubs. He knows he cannot go back to that world.
"That's a good way to get back in prison," he said. "Whether you do
something or not, just the environment (is trouble)."

While incarcerated, Leiva has learned to assemble a computer from parts,
load an operating system, and then its software. He is eligible for parole
next year and if it is granted, he will be a certified computer maintenance
technician.

He has a sister in California who works for a bank. He is hoping she can
arrange an interview with the systems department and maybe he can start
life anew.

He knows there are no guarantees.

"Even though you get your foot in the door, it's up to you to get the rest
of you in," he said.

Not far from the building where computer classes are held is a brick
building where school is taught.

Sometimes it is a lost cause. Windham Superintendent Mike Morrow said that
is to be expected.

Morrow remembers the advice he received when he joined the district eight
years ago, even if he can no longer recall who gave it: "Roughly one-third
who are released will never come back. Another third will come back no
matter what you do. You can make a difference in the lives of about one-third."

There are a lot of people spending a lot of time studying how prisoners
behave after release.

The Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council prepares annual reports on
recidivism to help policy-makers determine which rehabilitation programs
are the most effective.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics also monitors freed prisoners on a much
broader scale.

The bureau recently tracked nearly 300,000 prisoners from 15 states,
including Texas, who had been released from prison in 1994. The bureau
found that by 1997, nearly 52 percent of the convicts were back in prison
either for committing new crimes or for violating the rules of parole.

The Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council said Texas prisoners performed
better than the bureau study reported. The council found the recidivism
rate was 40.8 percent.

The numbers do not necessarily mean Texas is much better at rehabilitating
prisoners than other states, conceded Tony Fabelo, council executive director.

Some of the difference can be attributed to the lengths Texas will go to
rehabilitate and the state's tough approach to crime, Fabelo said. Some can
be attributed to what amounts to a difference in accounting.

Most states send parolees back to prison if they fail a drug test, stop
reporting to their parole officers or violate the rules of their parole
some other way. Texas' system is a little more forgiving. Parole violators
are sent to halfway houses first and given a chance to straighten out their
lives.

The people in halfway houses are not counted as returns. If they were,
Fabelo says, Texas' rate of recidivism "would be closer to the national
rate or higher probably."

The way the Texas criminal justice system treats convicted criminals also
contributes to the lower rate of recidivism, Fabelo said.

Texas incarcerates more of its population than any other state but
Louisiana and it keeps its inmates locked up longer than just about
anywhere else.

"They're older when they get out and they're less likely to re-offend,"
said Don Jones, a member of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, which
oversees the prison system.

In the end, the answers to the question "Which ex-cons are coming back?"
will be as varied as the individuals.

"Our mission is to rehabilitate if at all possible, (but) it is very much a
two-way street," said Bryan Collier, director of the prison system's parole
division. "You can offer the programming, but the offender has to apply it,
and that part we cannot control."

Many times ex-cons set themselves up for failure, Collier said. They leave
prison with high expectations, eager to make up for lost time and use their
new knowledge.

It is disappointing when they encounter employers unwilling to hire ex-cons
or old girlfriends who have moved on with their lives, and they can be
tempted to give up and go back to old ways, Collier said.

The system tries to anticipate some of these problems and address them.

A partnership with the Texas Workforce Commission, called Project Rio,
eases the stress of the job hunt by giving ex-convicts leads to potential
employers.

There is not much the system can do about one of the biggest contributors
to recidivism: old friends.

That is a lesson Reginald Tarpley, 42, of Dallas knows well.

Tarpley is a stocky, soft-spoken man with gold caps on his front teeth. He
is serving his third prison sentence, this one for drug trafficking because
he got caught selling crack cocaine.

Tarpley said he came back to prison after his first two sentences because
he did not take advantage of prison programs.

"There's a lot of opportunities, (but) you can sit in your cell and do
nothing," he said.

This time, Tarpley has earned his GED and is studying welding. If he finds
a job as a welder when he is released, it would be the first steady
employment of his life.

Tarpley does not intend to return to his old neighborhood.

"If I go stay with relatives, I'll be back into it," he said.

The key to reducing recidivism, said Marc Mauer, deputy director of a
prison reform group, The Sentencing Project, is to stop locking up so many
people.

"I think a main issue is we've come to rely too heavily on prison. Half the
people are there for non-violent offenses, more than four-fifths are there
for drug offenses," Mauer said. "There needs to be consequences for
violating the law, but we need to distinguish between offenses. Prison
should be used as a last resort."

The best way to ease the transition back into society is to eliminate it
altogether, Mauer said.

The criminal justice system would be more effective if it allowed
non-violent criminals to maintain their connections to the community and
their families. Let them keep their jobs and help them overcome the
addictions that inspired their crimes, Mauer said.

"Ultimately, 95 percent of the people are coming back to the community
anyway," he said.

If roughly half the prisoners who go through the system come back, that
also means half will not.

Half will walk from the Huntsville Unit and not look back over their shoulder.

Bill Simmons did it.

But it took the 38-year-old from Trinity a couple of tries before he got it
right.

Simmons went to prison the first time for burglary and the second and third
times for drugs. He was released last year after serving 10 years for
possession of cocaine.

While in prison, Simmons earned a GED and learned carpentry, cabinet
making, plumbing and how to cook.

Today, he works as a short-order cook at Joe's, a diner in Trinity that
serves breakfast until midnight. He has a car, a steady girlfriend and a
quick smile.

"If you've got a sincere heart, you can do it," he said. "You can stay out."