Is Colorado's New Prison Czar Bringing Reform or Business as Usual?

When Governor John Hickenlooper took charge of the state's executive branch he brought in Tom Clements, the innovative former director of Missouri's 21 adult prisons, to shake up the CDOC.

In Missouri Clements oversaw  an award Winning prison program called "Parallel Universe." In the April 2001 edition of the magazine Corrections Today, Clements and colleague Dora Schriro co-wrote an article detailing how the program works. According to the article, "Parallel Universe is a corrections-based reentry program. Offenders in Missouri make choices and assume responsibility for their decisions that all have real-world ramifications. With this system, inmates learn to identify community expectations and then reconcile them with their own attitudes. They practice making decisions that do not contravene prison security but, instead, will enhance public safety.''

Prison rehabilitation programs have been in and out of vogue for decades, with most experts agreeing that the majority of U.S. prisons are nothing more than gladiator camps producing better criminals. Missouri's program is different and it seems to be showing significant results.

Parallel Universe focuses on helping inmates develop cognitive and decision making skills that will help them be crime free when they leave prison. The program not only teaches these skills but it allows the inmates to practice and live the skills everyday while in prison, making them habitual behaviors likely to be continued when not incarcerated. The goal is to allow inmates to make many of the same decisions they will have to make in the real world.

Teaching inmates how to make better decisions and to be better citizens may seem like a no-brainer but most prison systems, CDOC included, manage the population by strictly controlling inmates' actions and reducing inmate decision making to a minimum - it is the prison warehouse approach.

The Parallel Universe approach is to first bring inmates up to a basic educational level. Prison administrators nationwide are finding up to two-thirds of inmates don't have their GED or high school diploma and over half are functionally illiterate. To help overcome this educational deficit, Parallel Universe motivates the inmates the same way most are motivated in the real world - the better educated and more skilled an inmate is, the better his earning potential.

In Missouri prisons, jobs and earnings are tied to the Department of Labor's occupational titles and wages. The more skills an inmate has the more and higher paying, jobs he is eligible to apply for. The old system paid a flat rate offering inmates no incentive for their hard work or job skills. In the new system inmates must interview for jobs and receive regular job performance reviews by their correctional supervisors. Inmate wages are based on skill set and job performance, just like it will be when they get out.

Another aspect of the Parallel Universe program is applied time management. Research shows that crime most often happens during unoccupied time. For this reason, the Missouri prison system teaches inmates how to manage and prioritize time and activities to stay busy and enhance positive outcomes. Inmates plan their day around work, education/treatment programs, exercise, and community service projects. Activities are organized on a flexible schedule to give inmates the greatest opportunity to manage their time in a meaningful way.

The program seems to be working for Missouri and getting a fair amount of national recognition as well. The article boasts a 14 percent drop in recidivism from 1994 to 2000, and no additional funding or legislation was needed to implement the program. In 2002 Schriro was hired to head the Arizona Department of Corrections and started a similar program called Getting Ready. According to Schariro, "Inmates completing Getting Ready have committed 35 percent fewer crimes and had 5 percent fewer parole revocations.'' In 2008 her program received an Innovations in American Government award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The question is will Clements attempt to install a Parallel Universe type program in Colorado as Schriro did in Arizona? If he does, the process may be slow and meet with significant political resistance. Look at the resistance mounted in the last two years when two consecutive governors have attempted to close prisons in the face of debilitating budget deficits and massive cuts to education - neither of the two prisons were closed and a new expensive maximum security prison was opened, despite a decreasing crime rate.

Colorado has an entrenched prison industry, CDOC is the largest employer in the state with a financial and political interest in maintaining the status quo. If Clements is planning reform he has a long to-do list; control ballooning prison costs reduce over-crowding, energize a parole board unwilling to do its job find a way to quietly release nearly 600 inmates kept past their intended sentence who are threatening an expensive class-action law suit, and close a few prisons. Clements has been tight lipped about any plans, no announcements to the media, no changes to business as usual at the states many prisons. Is he just playing politics and waiting for the right moment, or does he realize he is powerless against the political prison juggernaut? Prison reform is much needed in Colorado, let's hope Clements is strong enough to bring it.