COLUMN ONE;
IN PRISON, A DRUG REHAB THAT PAYS OFF;
EVEN SKEPTICS ARE IMPRESSED WITH TREATMENT THAT HAS BRUTALLY HONEST ENCOUNTER
GROUPS AND USES REFORMED PRISONERS AS COUNSELORS. by DAN WEIKEL, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Copyright (c) 1997, Times Mirror Company

Capt. Michael Teischner was thrilled with his promotion at
Donovan State Prison except for one thing. His new duties
included supervising the facility's privately run drug
treatment program. Teischnerknown as "Iceman" around the
prison yarddidn't much believe in rehabilitating
criminals. During his 20year career with the California
Department of Corrections, he had seen plenty of
reformminded dogooders come and go.

When he met over lunch with Elaine Abraham of the
nonprofit Amity Foundation, which runs the rehab center, he
lived up to his moniker.

"Quite frankly," the Iceman said of prison treatment
programs, "I don't think they work."

Four years later, Teischner is a changed manlike many
of the convicts who undergo Amity's yearlong regimen and
now lead productive lives. Today, he says the only problem
with drug and alcohol treatment is that the exploding
prison population can't get enough of it.

Compared to the checkered performance of past substance
abuse programs for convicts, Amity and similar projects
around the country may offer corrections officials a
powerful weapon to reduce crime, addiction and soaring
prison costs.

The latest research shows that by weaning convicts off
illegal drugswhich are widely available in prisonand
overhauling their lifestyles, such programs can
significantly lower reincarceration rates, saving
taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

Consequently, prison officials grappling with
unprecedented overcrowding due to the nation's war on
drugs have started to rethink how they deal with addicted
prisoners. The task before them is daunting:

Nationally, only one in six of an estimated 800,000
inmates involved with illegal drugs receives any treatment,
most of it sporadic education classes or weekly counseling
sessions that don't do much good.

Little in the way of treatment has been provided because
many law enforcement officials and legislators believe that
tough sentences are the best way to deal with the nation's
drug problem. Academic research in the mid1970s also
fostered the longheld, some say mistaken, belief that
nothing works when it comes to reforming criminals.

In California, an estimated 100,000 state prison inmates
have histories of chronic drug and alcohol use. But there
are only 400 slots in the corrections system that offer
treatment considered intensive enough to break the
dangerous cycle of crime and addiction. At Donovan, a
medium security prison in an arid valley east of San Diego,
hundreds of convicts apply for no more than 20 slots that
become available every month. For those who get accepted,
the treatment can rewire their lives.

The Amity program, which opened at Donovan in 1990,
contracts with the Corrections Department for $ 1.5 million
a year. It is a socalled therapeutic community, a style of
intensive residential treatment thought to be most
effective for felons with substantial criminal records.

For nine to 12 months, 220 participants share a
dormitory, dining facilities and recreation areas. Upon
release from prison, graduating parolees can volunteer to
continue taxpayerfunded counseling at Amity's residential
offsite program nestled in a wooded hillside in north San
Diego County.

At both facilities, convicts are required to attend a
steady stream of seminars and encounter groups run by
recovering addicts, exconvicts and some of the most
experienced substance abuse counselors in the field.

The routine is rigorous. No one gets time off their
sentences for participating or reprieves from prison work.
Unlike with rehabilitation efforts at other penitentiaries,
Amity enrollees are not isolated from Donovan's main yard,
where there are temptations to use smuggled drugs every
day. The goal is to teach convicts to deal with personal
problems and to live life without drugs and crime.

But the job is difficult because inmates are among the
hardest substance abusers to treat. Their complicated
pathologies often include poverty, gang membership, mental
illness and child abuse. Relapse is common, and change
happens at a glacial pace over many months.

Much of the transformation, if it occurs, takes place in
encounter groups that attempt to dissectwith brutal
honestywhat caused the convict's substance abuse and
criminal behavior.

The sessions are filled with discussions about trust,
personal accountability, relationships with women, family
problems, substance abuse and the inner rage that leads to
violence. By drawing inmates out, counselors say, they can
help them understand their problems and find solutions.

'Nothing Easy About Facing the Truth'

"There is nothing easy about facing the truth about
yourself," former cocaine addict and crack dealer Terry
Ward says of Amity's group discussions. "The badder you act
the more they dig. It's hard to keep up the facade. They
just pick pieces out of your story and make you humble. The
first few months will tear you apart."

Ward, 40, was a violent hustler and convicted armed
robber, known to the denizens of SouthCentral Los Angeles
as "Voltron." He always carried two pistols, a knife and a
cane that he used as a weapon.

Skilled with a razor blade, Ward could sculpt a $ 5
piece of crack so it looked like it was worth $ 15. On the
street, he would not hesitate to beat up someone at the
smallest provocation. He once broke a man's jaw for calling
him by his given name.

Ward was paroled in 1991 after serving two years at
Donovan. He stayed so long in Amity's offsite volunteer
program that he had to be told to leave. Today, he manages
a Wendy's restaurant and lives in Spring Valley, a rural
community east of San Diego. He has finally gotten to know
his 19yearold daughter, whom he abandoned more than 10
years ago.

"Voltron was a bad person. He died in prison," Ward
said. "There are people who go through Amity and use again.
I choose not to. I've been insane long enough." On one
recent morning, 15 convicts, some just like Ward, gather
for group therapy in the Robin Gabriel Room of Amity's
prison compound. Gabriel graduated from an Amity jail
program in Arizona, where the organization got its start in
the 1980s. She devoted her life to the foundation until she
died of cancer in 1990.

Half the people here are doing time for violent
offenses, including murder. All have histories of drug and
alcohol abuse. Though prison is a place where revealing
inner feelings can be interpreted as a sign of weakness,
most are not afraid to talk.

"All my relationships have been built on lies," says one
barrelchested convict with cornrowed hair. "I fall in
love with a woman and then she is with my best friend.
Women just play a man's heart and throw 'em to the curb."

"I've never been around a decent woman," another inmate
volunteers. "I've been in crack houses a lot of my life,
and you don't trust anyone, man or woman."

"On the streets, I was a predator. I preyed on women,"
says counselor Ernie Logan, an exconvict and recovering
addict whose father was an alcoholic. "I had a lot of trust
issues too. My mother and father betrayed me as a child."
Logan's reference to childhood strikes a chord with a
goateed inmate sitting across from him. He is doing eight
years for robbery. Rejection has weighed heavily on his
mind for years.

"I'm very conscious of the pain I feel," he says. "If
Ernie won't say hello to me, I feel like, ' Ernie.'
Something that small makes me think back on when I was a
kid, all the shame and grief of being abandoned by my
parents. That emotion has energy. The power is hard to
control."

"But," counselor Logan responds, "if you are in touch
with what happened to you and the pain it has caused you,
you shouldn't be doing the same things to someone else. You
shouldn't be taking it out on somebody else."

Treatment Is 'Cheap and It Works'

If drug treatment advocates had their way, programs like
Amity's would be available to every convict seeking help.
Incarceration alone, they say, does not necessarily stop
addiction or protect the public in the long run.

State figures show that the average drug offender in
California, whether convicted of sales, distribution or
possession, is returned to the street in 18 to 24 months.
Proponents say effective drug treatment programs can be
provided at a fraction of the billions of dollars being
spent on one of the longest building booms in the history
of the state penal system.

If present trends continue, the California prison
population will rise from 141,000 to more than 200,000 by
2000. Slightly more than 50,000 inmates will be doing time
for drugrelated offenses.

Assuming today's priceswhich do not include the
expense of building more prisonsdrugrelated felons could
cost taxpayers $ 500 million to $ 1 billion a year to
incarcerate by the end of the century.

"We've taken the toughoncrime approach to drugs. Now
we have to figure out what to do with the increasing
numbers of people in prison. Treatment is a good way to go.
It's cheap and it works," said Harry K. Wexler, a
researcher for the National Development and Research
Institute, a New Yorkbased think tank that specializes in
criminal justice issues.

For almost two decades, Wexler has studied prison
substance abuse programs nationwide. His findings show that
the reincarceration rate for Amity, including dropouts, is
about 20% lower than for untreated convicts two years after
release from prison. It is estimated that about 65% of
untreated convicts are rearrested within the same time
period.

The most dramatic reductions occurred among program
graduates who received several months of treatment at
Amity's outside facility. Of that group, 16% were
rearrested.

The California Department of Corrections estimates that
if Amity treats 2,100 inmates over seven years at a cost of
$ 1.5 million a year, taxpayers would recoup the program's
expenses and save $ 4.7 million in prison costs due to
reduced recidivism.

Assuming that Amitystyle programs were established in
all 32 state prisons, taxpayers' potential savings could be
as high as $ 150 million over seven years if the current
level of success were maintained.

And that does not reveal the total savings. Convicts who
go straight no longer tax the police, court and social
welfare system. The analysis also does not include other
benefits to the corrections system, such as less violence
and fewer violations of prison rules.

Amity "is doing better than I ever anticipated," said
Donovan Warden John Ratelle. "If we had only a 10%
reduction in recidivism, that would be a success. It is
worth the money to do what we are doing."

He grew even more convinced that the program was making
progress when he ordered surprise urine tests at the
treatment unit in 1991. The random testing was conducted on
a Monday because prison drug use is often heaviest on
weekends. Authorities expected that 25% of inmates would
test positive, but only one didfor marijuana.

Even the Unwilling Get Drawn Into the Process

In many ways, prisons are perfect settings for drug
treatment. There is a large captive audience. Inmates are
often motivated by many factors from sheer boredom to
measures that have increased sentences for repeat
offenders, such as California's threestrikes law.

Even the unwilling get drawn into the process despite
themselves, such as Rocky R. Reeder, a heroin addict and
habitual criminal who applied to Amity just to stop his
transfer to a prison in Northern California.

Reeder, 41, of San Diego, had been a oneman crime wave.
By his own estimate, he stole more than 70 vehicles, and
each week burglarized two or three houses for much of his
career. If someone was sleeping on the sofa or taking a
shower when he entered, the bigger the thrill.

He went to juvenile hall and the California Youth
Authority more than a dozen times. He has been sent to
prison seven times, the last to Donovan in 1992 for
possession of stolen property.

"At first, I didn't care about treatment," he said. "But
I started listening to the leaders in group therapy. They
were just like me. It made a difference. The person had
been there, and I could relate."

Reeder, who has been off drugs since May 1992, works
with his son as a technician for a water purification
business. He realizes he can never apologize to his
victims, so he occasionally visits Amity's parolee program
and counsels those in treatment.

"Many convicts are amenable to changing their behavior,"
said Lewis Yablonsky, an expert on residential treatment
programs and professor emeritus of sociology and
criminology at Cal State Northridge. "Amity is a small
program even in Donovan, but it is a significant
demonstration of what can be done."

He predicts that wellrun treatment projects in every
state prison could significantly reduce the inmate
population. Substance abuse treatment has been added to two
other prisons since Amity arrived at Donovan. The
Correctional Institute for Women in Frontera opened the
Forever Free program for 120 inmates several years ago. An
80bed facility called Walden House has begun at the
California Rehabilitation Center in Norco.

This fall, the first 1,056 beds of a 1,456bed facility
will open at Corcoran. The Corcoran program will more than
triple the statewide capacity of treatment for convictsa
crucial test to see if drug rehabilitation can work on a
large scale.

"I don't think we have seen a serious effort at prison
treatment until the last few years," said John Erickson,
director of substance abuse programs for the Department of
Corrections. "There is now an allout effort to refine
treatment strategies."

He said adding large numbers of treatment beds to the
prison system has gone slowly because reliable research has
not been available in California until the last few years.

Whether drug treatment will be expanded on a massive
scale is hard to predict, even with more positive research.
Legislators, government officials and correctional officers
worry that a broad expansion might compromise the quality
of smaller, successful programs like Amity.

"People need to be convinced that this is more than an
aberration," said Rod Mullen, president of the Amity
Foundation. "They need to see this as something as normal
as a prison industry program, or a religious program or a
high school education program. But that kind of shift in
attitude does not happen overnight."

Indeed, it hasn't. The first drug and alcohol programs
for convicts were established in the 1930s at two federal
prisons in Lexington, Ky., and Fort Worth, Texas. Because
such efforts were poorly administered and ineffective,
criminal justice experts came to believe that little could
be done to rehabilitate convicts.

That attitude did not begin to change until the early
1980s, when a substance abuse treatment program called Stay
'N' Out reported some substantial success at the Arthur
Kill State Prison on Staten Island, N.Y.

As more positive results emerged from a program in
Oregon, the federal government began to fund pilot projects
across the country. Since then, encouraging findings have
been reported in California, Delaware and Texas. Still,
many public officials approach the issue with caution.
Craig L. Brown, California finance director, said many
legislators and bureaucrats would be more encouraged about
prison drug treatment if the improvements could be
demonstrated at five years after release, instead of the
two years now used for research purposes.

"There are some people who think drug treatment has
marginal impact and is not longlasting enough," Brown
said. "On the other hand the existing projects have been
wellresearched with good scientific methods. Everything
looks very promising, but you can't say its a slamdunk
winner right now."

Among those who are now believers is state Senate
Democratic Leader Bill Lockyer of Hayward. He introduced
legislation in March that would add 4,000 treatment slots
to the corrections system by 2002. The proposal has some
bipartisan support.

The state legislative analyst's office estimates that
the expansion might save taxpayers $ 36 million a year in
addition to a onetime savings of $ 85 million by avoiding
the construction of facilities for 2,000 inmates.

"The current policy of building more prisons wastes
money and doesn't rehabilitate those in situations where it
might work," Lockyer said. "I don't consider myself a
dogooder or a liberal on the issue. If this can help a
convict, improve public safety and save money, that sounds
like a winner to me."