IN ILLINOIS, KICKING DRUGS AND THE PRISON HABIT

Andre Willis started selling cocaine and heroin when he was 14, and
by 25 had been sent to prison four times. Each time he got out he
vowed to look for an honest job. But employers did not want to hire
an ex-convict, so he would give up after two months and go back to
selling drugs and smoking marijuana.

The fourth time the state offered a different kind of sentence: a
year at a new state prison dedicated solely to drug treatment, where
Mr. Willis was given job training and addiction counseling that has
continued into his parole.

When he got out of prison in late 2004, his parole officer and
treatment counselor helped him find a halfway house to live in, away
from the patterns of his old neighborhood. And they watched as he
went door-to-door for three months until he found a job at a food
market. "It's not the job I want," says Mr. Willis, who turns 27 next
month, "but it's a job."

Faced with a record 40,000 inmates coming out of prison this year, as
well as record rates of recidivism, Illinois has put the new prison
- -- the Sheridan Correctional Center -- at the center of a plan,
closely watched by other states, to prevent repeat offenders from returning.

Opened 18 months ago in a previously shuttered prison in Sheridan,
Ill., 70 miles southwest of here, the facility will soon be the
nation's largest prison dedicated to drug treatment, a recognition by
the state that drug addiction is a major reason inmates are ending up
back behind bars. Sixty-nine percent of all inmates are in prison on
drug-related crimes.

Across the country, more than 600,000 prisoners are released each
year, and about two-thirds return to prison within three years,
according to the Justice Department. About 70 percent have drug or
alcohol problems, and about 40 percent return to prison because of
drug violations.

With prison costs rising and budgets tightening, even states that had
embraced tough law-and-order approaches are now trying to smooth
re-entry to break the cycle of repeat offenses. Illinois officials
say even small declines in the recidivism rate would save them money
in the long term because right now, statewide, 55 percent of all
prisoners return within three years, and 80 percent are rearrested.

The Sheridan program, a project of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, who
campaigned in 2002 on a promise to reduce recidivism, costs about $35
million a year to run. With new construction, it is expected to grow
to 1,300 beds, serving about 1,700 prisoners each year.

Promising early results at Sheridan have made it something of a
model. Corrections officials from Kentucky and Louisiana have
visited. And here in the Midwest, where a surge in methamphetamine
use has officials desperate for any possible remedy, Nebraska and
Iowa are studying whether to dedicate facilities to drug treatment.

About a dozen drug treatment prisons exist across the country, but
most focus on first-time offenders. Sheridan is rare because it is a
medium-security prison where most of the inmates are repeat offenders
convicted of serious crimes. It is also unusual for the services it
offers after release.

The state has added 100 parole agents, for a total of 440, to allow
agents to work more closely with former felons, and has also assigned
drug treatment counselors to all Sheridan parolees, to help them find
jobs and housing, and to obtain ID like a driver's license --
services often not available to former felons.

Illinois has opened seven re-entry centers across the state where
some parolees check in daily for drug testing and others come for job
and treatment support.

And for the first time, state officials have formally worked with
local groups in Chicago that have set up drug addiction support
groups and bought buildings that are being rehabilitated to provide
housing for former offenders. One group even took two busloads of
local residents to visit Sheridan to remind them that its inmates
were their once and future neighbors.

"These people are coming home; they're going to be behind you in line
at the Wal-Mart," said the warden at Sheridan, Michael Rothwell. "Not
to help them is folly."

The state screens inmates to determine whom to send to Sheridan;
prisoners must be serving terms of 6 to 24 months and have to
volunteer for the program. Murderers, sex offenders and those with
severe mental illness are not allowed.

The average inmate at Sheridan has been arrested 16 times, convicted
5 times and sent to prison 3 times. The prisoners divide about evenly
between users of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol, and 52
percent said they had taken more than one drug daily. About half had
not been employed before prison, and more than half had no high school diploma.

Prison officials say Sheridan inmates begin preparing to leave the
day they arrive at the prison, set on 270 acres surrounded by
cornfields. Inmates spend their time in group therapy, drug
counseling, and classes or job training, which is mandatory.

Mr. Rothwell, the warden, arranged for the National Association of
Home Builders to teach construction trades. The Illinois
Manufacturers' Association, facing a wave of retirement among workers
who make spring wires, asked to set up a program as well and has
hired hundreds of graduates, said John Bitowt, who trains the prisoners.

Ordinarily, Mr. Bitowt said, the metal instruments the men work with
might be seen as potential weapons. "I feel I can trust them," he
said. "They've earned it." The men are searched and tested for drugs,
and sent back to a regular prison if found to be involved in gang
recruitment or violence; 800 have completed Sheridan, and about 250
have been expelled.

The prison tries to build trust, responsibility and some measure of
independence. The inmates move in small groups without guards to
escort them, although cameras track their movements. As a result,
Sheridan looks more like the boys' reform school it once was than a prison.

Most prisons release inmates with a small amount of money and
sometimes clean clothes; at Sheridan, inmates meet with parole
officers 30 days before they leave and are assigned a drug counselor
to work with them after release.

Among the first 150 graduates of Sheridan, said David E. Olson, a
professor at Loyola University Chicago who has tracked the program,
27 percent were arrested within nine months of release, compared with
46 percent of a group of inmates of other institutions with similar
backgrounds and drug use. Ten percent of the Sheridan graduates
returned to prison within that time, compared with 27 percent of the
other sample.

Officials in more rural Midwestern states say that as methamphetamine
continues to devastate families and small towns, public support is
shifting toward treatment.

"I cannot go to a restaurant or a department store without running
into someone whose niece or daughter or friend is on meth," said
Marvin Van Haaften, the drug policy adviser to Gov. Tom Vilsack of
Iowa. "Suddenly people are a little more open. They realize these
aren't child molesters, they are sons and daughters who have gotten
hooked on meth." Mr. Van Haaften is considering proposals to turn a
state jail into a treatment center.

Some Sheridan parolees have resented the follow-up, but success
depends largely on motivation. Reginald Banks, 38, had been through
drug treatment in his previous prison stays when he arrived at
Sheridan in January 2004.

"When I got out I'd just get myself a bag," Mr. Banks said. "I knew
it wasn't going to work." That changed after his last arrest for
dealing drugs, when his 5-year-old son told him, "That's all you do,
is stay in trouble."

At Sheridan, Mr. Banks said, he learned "there are more important
things than being on the corner."

"What's important to me," he said, "is being home with my son, rather
than just having him accept my phone calls."