Getting Ready: Dora Schriro Discusses Remaking Prison Life to Prepare Inmates for Reentry

The Getting Ready Program: Working With Inmates, Staff and the Community

Dora Schriro: Both staff and population are empowered to do new things and in new ways. Officers and other employees are not only disciplinarians. Inmates have an opportunity to be recognized for doing the right things for the right reasons and to improve the conditions of their confinement. So whether you're minimum security or maximum security, whether you're male or you're female, wherever you are in the system, you are empowered to be in charge of your life, commensurate with your custody, of course, and that everyone has the opportunity through sustained good behavior and sustained program involvement, both during leisure time as well as the workday, to move through the phases.

So in traditional systems, you only go one way, and that's down. It is as good as you're going to get when you walk in the front door. Here are your three uniforms. Here are your pair of sneakers and your shower shoes, and here's your two towels and your one pillowcase. Make the most of it 'cause it's not going to get any better.

Well, in our system there's that initial issue, but then there are these additional opportunities that you can earn.

And the other thing that's very neat about this, first of all, the family, as worn out and weary as they might be about the inmates — they do want them to succeed by and large. And so they have a mechanism as well to continue to motivate or encourage their loved one who's inside. And some of these earned incentives, again, are not unique to corrections, but that they are bundled in a lowcost, nocost way that are meaningful for families.

So we went to the population. We went to them through a series of inmate forums, which again is a part of this sea change difference in how we communicate with one another. But we turned to the population and we said, "If you could, what things do you miss the most? What things would you want to have back in your life?"

Nancy Ritter: So did you do this, Dora, when you originally started designing this program, or — ?

Schriro: We had done that almost from the beginning. So from the beginning, it's really been about accountability and responsibility, what it is that a correctional system is responsible for. What is our accountability to our authorizing environment, to the taxpayers who fund us? And for the population who are doing time, how are they doing that time and for whom are they doing the time? And they darn well better be doing it to fix what was broken, to make amends and to get ready to go back to the street and conduct themselves substantially better than they had before.

Our view is that crime victims are a very special segment of the public. They are the segment of the Arizona community or any state's community that have been most directly and clearly negatively impacted by the conduct of the prisoner population. They're a key constituency, and we have always collaborated with them.

And the thing that I find most touching, one of the things that I take away, the many lessons that they have shared with me, is as confused as they are about why their family was picked for this crime — why me, why my daughter or why my husband — that they are all singularly selfless in the desire that nobody else experience the heartbreak that they have been through. And so the victims community, by and large, is very, very supportive of our endeavors.

We create an environment with a high set of expectations for ourselves as corrections professionals and for the population as imperfect folks getting ready to go back to the street. But you're not mandated, per se, to do anything.

Ritter: Just like life.

Schriro: Just like life. You can opt out, but man, there's a price to be paid when you do.

The Parallel Universe informs everything we do, because it's not just evidencebased programming during the day. But it's what you do in your leisure time, and it's how you go about it, and it's what happens when you do it. In most systems, they rely, if not exclusively, then predominantly, on the time to motivate the population to not do bad things, which is very different from aggressively seeking out and doing good things.

Ritter: Good things, right.

Schriro: One of the things that I think is so useful, so powerful about Getting Ready and the way in which Parallel Universe fuels it is that there isn't anything that we expect of the population that their mom or dad hasn't asked of them or their spouse or their children. We are merely saying to them, "You're a grownup. Grow up."

Ritter: You're mirroring what society and their family members hopefully have said.

Schriro: Exactly. I've learned so much by looking at community corrections, parole in particular, and all the reasons why there are so many technical revocations. If we're always telling people where to go and when to go there in prison, 'cause that's all that a conventional system does, and then you go out to the street and all of a sudden you expect them to show up on this date, this time to their parole officer — now, I'm not making excuses for them, but why did anybody think that they were going to do that when they haven't been doing it for the last one, two, five, 20, whatever it is, years?

So imposing on them realworld expectations throughout their incarceration, they may not like it, but I've never heard any of them say it's not fair. Its fundamental legitimacy is, I think, what has enabled us to have it accepted on such a widespread basis. We're not asking anything of them that we don't do ourselves or others haven't expected of them in the past.

Ritter: So when you say, Dora, that they may not like it, so, have you seen in the — what has it been, four years that you've been — ?

Schriro: It's, it's five now.

Ritter: Five. Is the resistance less as time goes on? Are you — ? You're obviously getting smarter.

Schriro: There is substantially less resistance. I would say minimal. And that would apply both to the population and to the staff. It's because they told us that these are the things that they wanted, and we had this conversation with them.

So one thing that they wanted is not at all unique to corrections, and those are family food visits, except most correctional systems have tended to move away from them, concerned about the opportunity to introduce contraband, that they're extra staffintensive. But you had to work so hard to get that particular event, and it was so meaningful to the family that the family became our best policing authority. And so we've had a number of food visits at a number of facilities. Again, not all custody levels get the food visit, for example. And we've not had an untoward incident.

Now, the population also had something which was a little bit more unusual, but not extraordinary. By asking what do you miss most from the street, at one forum they said, "We'd like to have dinner and a movie." Well, what does that mean exactly? Well, it could be just the regular chow line, but if we could just eat it in a less regimented setting and be able to then stay there and watch a show.

So the, the things that they were asking for were not very difficult to do. And they were very normal. And for me, I thought it was a great indication about that they wanted to not get comfortable being in prison, but they want to try to normalize their lives.