A REAL REPRIEVE FROM THE GOV

It didn't have the nail-biting quality of the last-minute Death Row
reprieve so familiar in movies - the scene where the camera moves from the
huge clock's second hand to the gnarled fingers of the executioner wrapped
tightly on the lever set to send a zillion volts into the sorry soul
strapped in the electric chair until ... Oh, my God, it's the phone! It's
ringing! The governor is calling to say, "Stop."

Still, the reprieve I'm talking about here arguably is more important, and
it really did involve the governor saying "Stop" near the last minute.

Gov. Pataki did a good thing the other day. He reversed himself.

Quietly and without fanfare, a Pataki aide let it be known that the state
will continue funding drug-treatment facilities for prisoners run by
outside organizations like Phoenix House.

This is a big deal. The state budget for next year had axed the
appropriations. All funding was set to expire on July 31.

Given the independent studies affirming Phoenix House's success, how did
its programs ever get so close to death's door?

Politics.

After surging for decades, the state prison population has declined in
recent years, and experts say the Correctional Services Department is
overstaffed. Eager to avoid cutbacks, the union representing correction
officers, and the department itself, made this argument:

"The decline in prisoners and the experience we've gained over the years in
treating jailed addicts have meant that we're presently constituted to
deliver the same level of care at a lower cost than places like Phoenix
House," says department spokesman Jim Flateau.

Outside treatment groups like Phoenix House dispute the state's cost and
effectiveness claims, and each side has data supporting its view.

So how did Pataki and the Legislature's leaders determine which side to
support?

More politics.

"This is an election year," says an aide to one of the state Assembly's
leaders. "We frankly didn't want an effective advocate like [Phoenix House
President] Mitch Rosenthal beating us up for killing the programs so many
people believe are effective in curbing addiction."

But it wasn't all politics. Merit played a large part, too.

"Ultimately," says a Pataki adviser, "we decided it was more important to
support community-based treatment centers than to save a few bucks.
Releasing prisoners to the halfway-house environments run by places like
Phoenix House, putting them back in the real world - or close to it - makes
more sense than treating them in prison. Rosenthal's operation works."

Squeaky Clean

Visiting the Phoenix House facility for addicted female probationers on
Prospect Place in Brooklyn helps explain why "Rosenthal's operation works."

Seventy-five women live in a squeaky-clean brownstone at a state-funded
cost of $1.7 million a year. The women get individual counseling and group
therapy, are tutored in how to dress and how to behave at work and leave
each day for real rather than make-work jobs. No one graduates without
being clean of drugs, without having a permanent job and without a nest egg
of $2,500 in the bank.

"I'm beyond lucky," says Shirley Vailes, a 45-year-old mother of five who
will graduate in several weeks. She'll continue her maintenance job at a
Manhattan Burger King and try to get on with her life, free of the drug
addiction that landed her in jail seven times.

"The last time they got me [for selling crack] it was after I'd hooked up
with a guy at an earlier program run by the jail. Nobody cared there. I
went weeks before seeing a counselor even when I asked to. They just wanted
to move us through so they could say they had. Here, the staff really
cares, they're always available and they watch us all the time. The strict
rules, and the chance to talk about my problems with the staff and the
other women, has gotten my head straight. And the Burger King job makes me
feel like I can get by without dealing. I've been doing the junk since I
was 13. Now, for the first time, I know I ain't never coming back."

They might not work miracles at Prospect Place, but because so few of their
graduates ever return to a life of drugs and crime - as compared with those
who move through other, less serious programs - "miracle" might be the
right word. And whether politics or merit controlled his decision, Pataki
has done right by a program that works.