Getting Ready: Transcript of Dora Schriro Discussing Remaking Prison Life to Prepare Inmates for Reentry

Part 4 of 4: The Getting Ready Program: Real Stories, Real Impact

Dora Schriro: We've been partnering with an Arizona-based business for some years, and the lion's share of their workforce are inmates in the department. This organization had been pretty quiet about who most of their workforce was, and at some point with quite a bit of courage, they decided that they were going to — I teased them, I called it "coming out of the closet." And they did that, in part, by seeking a business innovation award, which they won handily and deservedly.

And I said to the CEO — he was saying that "I wish the women could have been there." And I said, "Well, what about if you bring the award out to the prison?" We assembled some 300 inmates from various housing units, brought them to this common yard. The sound coming from the yard that day, that there was this light conversation, that there was laughter, even surprised me. The women who were employed there — many of them came up to talk with me, to talk with the other staff. They were very generous with their praise of all of the officers who had helped them when they needed to do an out count or some other thing to make it all work. They were very generous and very specific and insightful about the ways that officers had helped to make this happen. And that was phenomenal.

For the inmate workers, the stories were how they had a new sense of themselves as a result of the accumulation of everything that they had accomplished, that they knew that they didn't get to that work assignment by accident, that they had to be violation-free, that they had to have had their GED, that they had to have done everything else in their plan. It was more than staying out of trouble that got them to this place. And that now, because they had done all those things and they were in a premium pay job, that when their adult child was having some difficulty out on the street, even in their limited circumstances, they could help them financially. That they could get closer to being a whole person. That they could be a parent even behind bars. That they could be a contributing member of the community by making donations to the various charities.

Again, this is not about being familiar. This is about being professional. I think staff were really surprised to learn how much the population valued their opinion and how empowering it is for staff when inmates come up to you and they've picked you out in particular because they know that you're a tough case and they want you to know that they got their GED or that they got to phase three.

I'm going to tell you a story real fast. There's a corrections officer out at Lewis Prison, men's prison. She was oldschool. She was by the book. She always had her radio turned on because she never knew when she was going to have to call for help. She was ever-vigilant, always on alert. Over time, she couldn't help but observe that she'd be supervising at a GED graduation and here were black and white inmates congratulating each other, shaking each other's hand. Groups that never interacted were together.

But there was one inmate who was holding out and hadn't gone for his GED, and she watched peer pressure of the positive kind working its way where an inmate was going to go do the right thing because his peers told him to do it. She was walking down the yard one day, and she says she'll never forget where she was because he came up to her, sought her out of all things and told her that he had gotten to phase three. And her first reaction was to say, "No, you're not. You've been a screw-up your whole life." And he said, "No, no, no. I'm telling you the truth. I made phase three." The, the whole of it just hit her. He didn't want just an easy "Atta boy" — he wanted her to know that he had come this distance. Well, she's just crossed over.

Nancy Ritter: Do you think that made it, makes her a better professional also?

Schriro: She's a far more satisfied individual. That the work is satisfying. It's rewarding beyond the salary.

And, this is another way to take the temperature of the organizational climate. Inmate art is ordinarily pretty unique and it's pretty violent. Now, again, we've created an environment where we've invited them, again at no cost, to help us with decorating, particularly if you start with visiting rooms, places where the public comes. And they, with no prompting, have all sorts of pictures.

So at Perryville, for example, they have the main administration building as the head of the fleet, and then each of the housing units is its own named boat. And on board each of these boats are staff and inmates. They saw themselves as a part of this team and painted pictures in that way. They have painted pictures about every facet of Getting Ready.

Here's another very cool story. They were at one of the housing units just getting to do their murals. A number of remarkable things. First, that the head of the paint crew, this older inmate, picked his team based on their ability to paint and their ability to work well with each other. And it was totally diverse. It was Noah's ark. There was one and two of everybody, age and race and ethnicity. And this is not the way that things are done in conventional systems. And they had laid out what they wanted to do as a design, and they were about it. What they were trying to do was to depict the metamorphosis of an inmate coming into prison and then going through Getting Ready and then walking out, this grownup with a suit and an attaché and a family waiting for him.

So the deputy warden said, you know, "What do you think about putting some boulders, you know, big rocks in the middle of this road, you know, all these challenges that you face? And we'll call this one relapse and we'll call this one revocation." A couple of days later, the deputy warden came back and no boulders. He said, "But I'm curious. Why didn't you do that?" And they said, "This is where our families come, and this is such a positive experience for us. There are struggles, of course, but we don't want any negativity in this room."