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

Part 3: The Getting Ready Program: Creating a "Parallel Universe"

Dora Schriro: If you're a probationer or a parolee and you commit a new crime out on the street, what do they call it? They call it by its real name. It's this particular felony or that particular felony. In a prison system, all too often we've got "rule violations" and we've got "major violations" and "minor violations." But all for some reason that I don't understand, we don't call felonies "felonies." Well, isn't that silly if prison is supposed to be preparation for being back out on the street? So we revamped our disciplinary policy to look less like a rulebook and more like the criminal code and to respond to it in that way.

The best thing about Parallel Universe is it's fundamentally one question. So the question is, whatever the problem is, how would we tackle this problem if we were in the real world?

I'll give you another example about how asking that one great question gets you really good answers. The inmate health care is of great concern. Our state, like many others, has a provision for charging inmates a copay. We've got runaway health care costs. How do we control them? So the Parallel Universe question, well, how do we do this in the real world? I'll give you another example about how asking that one great question gets you really good answers. The inmate health care is of great concern. Our state, like many others, has a provision for charging inmates a copay. We've got runaway health care costs. How do we control them? So the Parallel Universe question, well, how do we do this in the real world?

So part of what we did is we looked at the copay, and what we ultimately did — and this was in consultation with both staff and the population — is we said, much like the way many health care plans are in the community, if I am adhering to healthy habits — that is, I am not a smoker and I'm working out and if I'm under a doctor's care, that I'm compliant with whatever the medical directions are — then I'm going to have a lower copay because I'm doing everything I can for myself. If I am a smoker or otherwise not following healthy habits, I'm at higher risk, well, how is it done in the real world? You have a higher copay or you have a higher insurance premium. So you got a higher copay there. We created an incentive system like the real world where healthy habits derive personal benefit, but they also derive fiscal benefit for both the prisoner and the system. And we have much better processes as a result.

One of the other anomalies about how traditional prisons are not like your world and mine, there are some jobs in prison that are really menial in terms of the level of skills and the kind of work. But it's important to the system, and so they tend to pay higher wages for those jobs. And so what we did is we went to the Department of Labor where they have what's called the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, where certain jobs fall into categories and certain classes of work have different levels of skill and command different salaries. So again, within the existing appropriation for inmate pay, just reallocated the value of work so that it would reflect what they could expect to receive proportionately when they went out to the street.

Some of the other things that we did, again very much like the real world, we've never mandated any inmate to go to school or get a GED. But what we did was we said, well, how do you allocate job training and how do you decide who gets jobs in prison? Well, in conventional systems, you know whoever the officer or other employee is who controls that work crew, it has nothing to do with what your institutional conduct is like or if you ever got a GED or any other darn thing.

So we've got these very basic rules again. No, you don't have to get a GED, but until you get a GED — and that's assuming you're academically able, which is virtually everyone in the population — you can only be employed in entrylevel jobs and you can only earn entrylevel wages. But when you earn a GED, and only then, this whole larger group of other employment opportunities open up to you. And only after you earn the GED can you go into job training.

In many ways, I think it creates cost savings. When an individual in prison or out on the street, when you get a high school diploma, it's one of those transforming moments in your life. This is a credential that is valued by everybody. Today it's threequarters of the inmate population now have a GED certificate. It not only creates a sense of selfesteem, which makes it a much easier population to interact with and to manage day to day, but it enables them to be more insightoriented, less actionoriented. And it contributes — and, you know, again, the research literature — it really contributes to reductions in violence in the prison, which is that early conversation about how this, as I believe to be the best reentry initiative out there, is also the best daytoday prison management strategy.

That we have had such appreciable reductions in institutional violence is the accumulation of the Seven-by-Three-by-Three, that what we do and what we expect is not just being good in the classroom, but being good every minute of every day, that we focus on skill building in the workday and leisure time, and that we recognize your efforts for the threetiered series of incentives.

So everything builds on itself. Staff are safer as a result of these sustained improvements over time. It's also quite clear that prisoners are so much better at problem solving. What we have seen is that there's a substantial reduction in inmate grievances because they're so much better to express themselves and we can do more things in terms of informal problem solving.

There has been an appreciable reduction in prisoner litigation about conditions of confinement. So at a time when our system, like all others, is overcrowded, but you have this now uptick in the federal courts getting more involved with a number of systems, and here we are, down 75 percent. So that's an appreciable savings as well.