`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.