OPEN, INC: A DOORWAY OF HOPE?

The centra credo in prison is: Kind-ness is weakness. You can’t have friend-ships. Love dies, happiness dies, laughter dies, and ultimately hope dies. When you’re stripped of everything else, all you got left is your badness and you ’re scared to death that it means nothing and you can’t get bad enough. -Ned Rollo



INCARCERATION AS punishment always achieves less and more than its intent. Society demands and gets revenge, atonement, protection; it fails to get deterrence or rehabilitation. Bodies languish, spirits are broken, revenge breeds revenge. The essential by-product is hate and the desire for retribution, which, ironically enough, is why many people are in prison in the first place. It is rare for a person to leave prison a better man.

Ned Rollo did. Part of Rollo’s impressive résumé reads: “Inmate, Louisiana State Penitentiary and a Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, 1966-69 and 1974-77. Four felony convictions, including manslaughter, possession of amphetamines with intent to distribute and two federal firearms violations. Spent a total of five and a half years in captivity; released through federal parole (completed) and two State of Louisiana commutations of sentence.”

During his last two years in prison, Rollo spent most of his waking hours thinking about his life, analyzing the desire to change his ways and never go back, which gripped his consciousness like a leech. “I realized the central difference, what had caused the change, was first my mother, then brother, my Aunt Violet, my Uncle Fred, my Aunt Florence, all my family. There’s a saying in the joint: ’First your money, then your clothes, then your old lady goes.’ It’s true, and it happens in 180 days. But my mother is always there.

“Then I realized that the ex-cons I knew who had strong family support waiting for them on the outside rarely returned to prison. After I got out I found statistical validation to back up my intuitive knowledge.”

According to Rollo, research since 1940 shows that the single most important factor in avoiding recidivism is the stability of the newly released offender and the strength and duration of his or her personal support system. An ex-convict returning to the “free world” only to find all family ties snapped is more likely to break the law again and swell the recidivism rate. In 1979, Rollo founded OPEN, INC-Offenders Preparation & Education Network-in Dallas to develop a plan for the reduction of adult crime, emphasizing the family as a rehabilitative tool. Gradually he won the trust and support of top city leaders like John Stemmons Sr., Alex Bickley and Joe M. Dealey, all of whom still serve on OPEN’s 20-member board. Since then, the nonprofit organization has worked with more than 1,000 families who have loved ones in Texas prisons.

The culmination of Rollo’s work came this fall when, for the first time ever, the Texas Department of Corrections (T.D.C.) and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles entered into an agreement with a private agency (OPEN) to begin a two-year pilot program to track 200 to 300 Dallas-based prisoners and their families through counseling sessions and educational-motivational courses. The objective of the Offender/Family Partnership Program is to prepare both for the inmate’s successful parole and reentry into the free world.

“The prisoner’s number one priority is freedom, and under current law, generally that comes with parole,” Rollo says. “Successfully completing this study should enhance a person’s chances of first-time parole. His second priority is his family. They will be learning along with him. It begins the minute the cell door slams, not three months before parole when the prison has done its dirty work. If I can lessen the brutalization of prison and say to a man at his lowest moment that someone believes in him, and at the same time counsel the family about what’s going on in the inmate’s mind and how to receive him, then I’ll have done my job and perhaps things can change,” says Rollo.



HOW TO PUNISH a criminal, then accomplish his successful transformation into productive citizen has vexed society from the beginning. History records show we have tried mutilation, flogging, burning, banishment and branding. Two hundred years ago it was common on public squares in American towns to see half-naked fellow citizens tied to posts or chained to heavy benches where they were periodically lashed or burned with hot irons.

In 1790 came a new approach, the U.S.’s first penitentiary. Philadelphia’s Quaker-inspired Walnut Street Jail was a well-meaning attempt to substitute the enforced regime of solitary confinement, labor and moral rehabilitation for the pillory and whipping post. Within two years it had become a cesspool: overcrowded, impossible to maintain, wracked by violence, disease and corruption. Through the years, prison officials have tried and abandoned the rock pile, ball and chain, locked-step marching, enforced silence, water torture, sweat boxes and iron yokes.

The “Tucker Telephone” (electric shocks to genitals) no longer is used in Arkansas; the Folsom “Derrick” (a block-and-tackle from which the inmate was raised and suspended with his arms handcuffed behind) has been abandoned at California’s Folsom Prison; and no longer do we have perhaps the most hellish of prison tortures. In the Lime Cell, a prisoner was led into a cell coated with three inches of lime; the guard sprinkled the white powder and the resulting mist of exploding chloride singed the mucous membranes of the choking convict’s nose, mouth and throat while burning off his eyelashes and eyelids. The Lime Cell existed in some American prisons well into this century.

Even though prisons have become “correctional facilities” just as wardens are now “institutional superintendents” and solitary confinement cells are termed “adjustment centers” or, in Virginia, “meditation” rooms, prisons remain truly terrible places. They do not deter crime. They do not rehabilitate. While they do one good thing- temporarily protect the public from a small percentage of dangerous people, at great expense-they also hold and brutalize a huge number of non-dangerous offenders. At a recent subcommittee meeting of the Mayor’s Criminal Justice Task Force, John Byrd, executive director of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, stated that 50 percent of those in state prisons need not and should not be there.

Regardless of punishment or rehabilitative effort, of parole “shock probation,” halfway houses, work detention centers or pre-re-lease programs, the crime rate rises, and an estimated 61 percent of those admitted to prison have been there before. History suggests Ned Rollo’s approach is a long shot. But nothing else seems to work. And in the end there is always the prisoner, his family and “the real world.”

Prisons do not deter crime. They do not rehabilitate. They protect the public from a small percentage of dangerous people, but they also brutalize a huge number of non-dangerous offenders.

THE PRISONER



Richard Ostrander was born in Southern California 28 years ago. He moved to Dallas when he was five. His father was a part-time carpenter and full-time alcoholic. His parents divorced when he was very young, so Ostrander grew up in a series of foster homes. At 13, he dropped out of school and began sniffing inhalants and getting picked up by police; at 18, he was arrested for burglarizing a home and sentenced to five years at a state prison unit of the T. D.C..

With 50 to 60 other Dallas inmates, Ostrander rode to Huntsville handcuffed and shackled to one of three steel slab benches running the length of the “chain,” the T.D.C. bus. There is no restroom stop. Prison rules allow inmates to enter with a watch, one inexpensive ring, one cigarette lighter (not butane), prescription glasses (no sunglasses), one Bible, one religious medal, one pair of tennis shoes, personal pictures, no more than $200 cash and very little else.

The intimidation, harassment, abuse and disrespect begin immediately, from the bus to the back door of the diagnostic unit, where arriving prisoners like Ostrander will spend about 10 days for physical and mental examinations before being assigned to one of the 27 units. Everyone is scared, dazed and vulnerable; in prison slang, “your wig’s flapping.”

Ostrander quickly learned some cold facts: If he had arrived in civilian clothes, he would have had to pay to have them mailed home; for the next six months, only the 10 persons he chose for his official visiting list could come for the usual twice-a-month, two-hour visit; in the dining room he would be expected to eat everything on his plate, and if he was not finished when his table was called, he would be punished. Ostrander, like 99 percent of new inmates, knew nothing of these and other written and unwritten rules of prison.

Their lawyers aren’t much better informed, says Bill Habern, one of the first 111 staff attorneys for inmates hired by T.D.C. in 1972 and, today, perhaps the only attorney in Texas who is a full-time prison lawyer. “Not one inmate attorney in 10 knows parole rules and how they work,” Habern says. “Unintentionally, they give rise to false expectations. Telling a man who’s just been given a 15-year sentence that he’ll be out in a couple of years is a lie.”

As an 18-year-old first offender with no special skills, Ostrander was assigned agricultural work at the prison’s most volatile unit in 1975, the Ferguson unit. “The hardest thing for me was surviving among the inmates,” Ostrander says. “I was small for my age and had to fight, so I had a bad record.”

In prison, it quickly comes down to this: The usual symbols of status-money, possessions, job, a title-are in short supply. Status must be gained at someone else’s expense-putting him down physically, sexually, verbally. No one bluffs; always there is an exaggerated emphasis on toughness, which is the ability to victimize others or withstand victimization.

The “gorillas,” the strong-arm bullies, first threatened Ostrander for protection money; then the “hogs” wanted his commissary items-candy, cookies, sodas, etc. Challenges are endless: an inmate demands a cigarette, takes a dinner dessert without asking, switches the TV channel. And like most young cons, Ostrander worried about “getting piped,” raped by the “tush hogs” or “wardaddys,” the aggressive homosexuals. You fight, become a “gorilla eater” or you don’t survive. Worst, you become a “punk,” a homosexual not by choice but by force.

Ostrander’s scrappiness saved him and eventually he learned how to do time: Never become too friendly with any T.D.C. official or “boss.” Stay away from the hated “building tenders,” inmates with supervisory authority over other inmates. Hide your emotions; don’t be sullen, no ups or downs, don’t offer company but don’t be too quiet. Look the same. Get a monotony in you. Blend in. Above all, never let your guard down-and know you are capable of murder if it means your survival.



THE LOVED ONES



Those with loved ones in prison carry an almost unbearable weight. They face three major problems. Right away the financial burden becomes severe; a paycheck source is lost. The bank account hemorrhages as money pours out for bond, lawyer fees, court costs, perhaps appeal efforts. There is the embarrassment and social stigma which leads to isolation, withdrawing from friends, often a crippling sense of inferiority. The higher the income level, the more acutely felt the shame. Ned Rollo knows a Richardson banker who told friends his son would be touring with a band for three years.

Last and worst is the never-ending grieving process, the personal guilt, the anger, loneliness, the passionate attachment to the the unattainable, the waiting, the longing for another place, time, another condition. As long as there are prisons, time pays for crime.

The seven to 10 wives and girlfriends of prisoners who meet each Thursday evening with OPEN family counselor Charleen Houle at the offices in Stemmons Tower North have lived through the above and more. So have the parents who meet with Houle on Tuesday nights. After small talk about the past week, the discussion usually turns to T.D.C. grievances: That no one ever explained the visiting or dress code rules, that the new guards are rude and don’t know the rules, that personal medicines were confiscated, paroles promised and denied. And there is the long drive, the waiting for hours, the car search going in, the depression driving home.

Jean, 51, the oldest, is the only one of the group allowed “contact visits,” but she doesn’t feel privileged. She waits until her name is called, watching for her husband John. They sit in two facing chairs. They are allowed one kiss on arrival and one when they part. They can hold hands if they want. About eight other visitors are in the room at the same time.

Jean pauses for a moment and then blurts out, “John told me he was full of hate. I said ’look at me; do you hate me?’ and I grabbed his face. He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said it would take a long time to get this prison stench off him.” Jean begins crying. “I’m not young anymore. I got maybe 25 years left. What if he hasn’t changed and goes back? Then I’m left. I’ve worked for 31 years, and I’m tired. I’m counting on his security,” she continues, brushing her tears away with a handkerchief.

The other women have their own litany of grief:

“The worst fear is that they haven’t changed.”

“We’ve taken on the male role, become independent, and they’ve done the opposite.”

“I feel guilty because I can’t take his pain away.”

“No, the worst fear is not knowing about their safety with all this prison killing. I fell apart last week when his letter came and the envelope was addressed in someone else’s handwriting.”

“I live for the letters. I couldn’t make it without them.”

“I know they have bad days, but why do they have them on visiting day?”

Houle interrupts and asks why they do it, why they persist. “Is it an abusive relationship you really want? Is it drilled into us that we can’t make it without a man?”

“We’re all strong. We’ve been alone all this time and still are surviving.”

“We’re all they have. We have to keep going.”

“I love him, but I wonder sometimes if I’m better off without him.”

“But to give them self-respect it’s up to us.”

“He’s punished for his crime and we’re punished for our love.”

What the others dream of has happened to Elena. Her husband, Arturo, was released on parole the previous Friday after serving 12 years. She is an attractive Hispanic woman who has worked hard during Arturo’s imprisonment to support herself and her daughter.

“It’s very hard so far,” Elena says. “We have no time to adjust. First he wanted to see his mom, then we had to deal with his driver’s license, counseling, parole officer, getting a job, buying clothes. My new job is hard and I have to deal with that. He is so dependent-should we get $5 or $8 worth of gas? He doesn’t know how to be a father, yet he thinks he does. He thought he would be Mr. Superstud and is disappointed in his sexual performance. I don’t know. I thought when he came home it would take some of the burden off me, but it hasn’t. It’ll be a long time before it will.”

The others try hard to show sympathy but all would gladly change places. Jean, who has lived it the longest, says, “I live my life hoping for next year to come. We have made a commitment, and I try not to worry about it not working out after all this. John is doing time. All of us are doing hard time.”

If the ex-offender and his family can survive this terrible ordeal together, then anything is possible. We’re trying to plant seeds. If you don’t plant seeds, nothing grows.”

-Ned Rollo

THE PRISONER



After serving 39 claustral months, Richard Ostrander walked out of the T.D.C. gates with the usual $200, wearing the usual ill-fitting state-issued suit. Like most newly released inmates, Ostrander first bought new clothes, then his bus ticket to Dallas. He would be staying with his mother, who had stuck by him, and would have to report to his parole officer the next day.

Like most other ex-cons, Ostrander knew prison had changed him profoundly, perhaps permanently. In the world of criminals, there are squares and characters. Characters know a world squares could never know. Characters reject the social restrictions that burden squares. Anything goes. There is no right or wrong and only one rule: don’t get caught. Characters aren’t irrational but arational; not immoral but amoral.

Not only did prison make you a sociopath, it made you a loner’s loner, a man unto yourself, no longer able to trust anyone even if he seems honest and sincere; it was a condition known to ex-cons like Ostrander as “single O.” Single O in the free world is baffling. So many decisions. So much freedom! Attorney Bill Habern often picks up a newly released client at the Huntsville prison gate and treats him to his first meal in the outside world. “Many times they can’t handle it,” Habern says. “Their hands shake. They can’t choose from the menu. They are paranoid about everything and everybody. Finally, they excuse themselves and just go sit in the car.”

Parole supervisor Fred Gunder knows that condition well. “I advise a man just out to do nothing for a few days,” Gunder says in his Oak Cliff office north of the Texas Theatre. “The guy has been under terrific pressure for years. Lay around the house and think about the rest of your life is what I suggest.

During my first interview with a man I always hear, ’Man, I’m never going back to T.D.C.’ Well, the ones who do usually screw up in the first six months. So my advice is always change your lifestyle. No more bad friends. Don’t stay out late. No drugs or booze. Get work.”

Ostrander’s pre-release program did nothing to prepare him for parole or for adjusting to “the free world.” Nor had T.D.C. taught him a trade. “T.D.C. has problems here,” admits Gunder. “They give out the wrong information about what the Texas Employment Commission or the Texas Rehabilitation offers the ex-offender. Not long ago I placed a parolee who said he had learned bricklaying in T.D.C. on two construction jobs. Both sent him back. He literally had learned to lay brick but another prisoner had spread the mortar. He didn’t know how.”

Gunder talks about the adjustment parents have to make as well. “I make the same speech to wives or mothers or girlfriends. The man who comes back is not the same man who left. Give him time. Be patient. Help get him a job.” OPEN’s Ned Rollo and Charleen Houle spend many hours counseling parents like Mrs. Ostrander on how to cope with the return of a loved one after years in prison. Will curfews work? What percentage of income, if any, should he contribute for household expenses? When do you let go when all else fails?

Houle explains to a gathered group of parents about “tough love,” which she defines as “doing what you know is in his or her interest even though it’s painful, extreme, necessary for sanity and their well-being; even though it may mean closing your door to them.” Most sigh and nod agreement.

Irene: “We are not going to borrow on our insurance again for an expensive lawyer. He will have to accept the appointed one or pay for another himself.”

Nancy: “If he starts with drugs again, that’s it. I have a 10-year-old who I cannot allow to be exposed to that. I’ve been down in the gutter with Don again and again, but not any more.”

Jane: “I married again two years ago while John was in prison. Now he’s getting out and my husband has these ideas about strict rules. I know John will break them. I want to have a good marriage, but I want to help my son. I am glad he’s coming home but scared.”

It is a familiar theme from parents: wanting their sons home, afraid of having them back. “It is a normal feeling, and Ned and I both spend a lot of time letting parents know this so they won’t feel guilty about it,” says Houle. “Most of our work, however, is putting out fires, the day-to-day crises like no job yet, back on drugs, family conflicts, sons reverting back to old ways.”

Back in Dallas, Ostrander worked a series of warehouse jobs for minimum wage but didn’t change his old ways. “Prison just made me angry,” Ostrander says. “It made me meaner, made me want to commit crime just to show to myself they didn’t break me. I burglarized a house three days after I got out and would have sooner if I had had a car.” He moved to a North Dallas apartment house. The apartment managers were methamphetamine dealers and he began shooting speed. To get the $200 to $300 necessary for his three-gram-a-day habit, he began breaking into houses in University Park and Oak Lawn. He stole cash, credit cards, gold and silver items. It was $46 worth of illegally charged goods on a stolen credit card that brought about his arrest. Five years after getting out, Richard Ostrander received a six-year term and went back to prison. He was assigned to the Ellis II unit as a bookkeeper.



FOR SOME FORTUNATE ex-cons on the second time around, a turning point comes: They realize they had better drastically change or they’ll be in a cell 25 years later watching their fingernails grow. For Ned Rollo it was a young prisoner who told him he hadn’t seen Rollo smile in almost a year. Rollo realized the depth of his bitterness and hate and how it was destroying him.

“The first time you blame the D.A. or your lawyer or your skin color or your poverty or your lack of education. But the second time you can only blame yourself,” Rollo says. For Ostrander it was looking at the old cons he worked and lived with, the old cardboard-gray cons with slumped shoulders and the prison shuffle, the posture of the near-dead. They have descended into a torpor, a putrescent nothingness. They no longer pace their cells or exercise, no longer masturbate or even conjure up erotic dreams. They breathe, but that’s about all they do.

For the ex-con who is determined not to go back, there must be an attitudinal change. “All the time you’re in T.D.C. they never let up about what a scumbag you are, how no one wants you, that society hates you so much they spend more than $7,000 a year per inmate just to keep you in a cage,” says Ostrander, who served 16 months before his release last June. “You have to surrender your hate toward society, your rage toward the criminal justice system. The system is only interested in getting even, and all it did was make me a better criminal.”

His mother sent him an article on OPEN. She talked several times with Ned Rollo. When he arrived in Dallas, Ostrander met with OPEN staffers and found there were people who wanted to make sure he made it. Now, Ostrander works loading flagstone and brick at a stone company. This month he began classes and instruction at truck driving school with the help of a grant from the Texas Rehabilitation Commission. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings four days a week. This fall he will start counseling meetings with other ex-inmates, a new class led by OPEN’s Bill McCaslin, who spent 17 years behind bars and has almost finished work on a Ph.D. in clinical sociology.



THE PLAN



Once again, the usual dismal crime statistics: For the first six months of 1985, crime in Texas is up 10 percent over the same period last year; in Dallas, it’s up 16 percent. Last August, a record number of prisoners were in the county jail system (2,600); in T.D.C. (38,000); and in America (490,041 by June 30). According to a U.S. Department of Justice report, more than 41 million Americans were victims of crime in ’84 and six million were victims of criminal violence; roughly one in four American households was victimized by criminals; a Texan had a one in 17 chance of being a crime victim in ’84, up two percent. Ned Rollo and his staff will not lack for clients. Dallas, with its 5,592 former inmates under the supervision of 67 parole officers, had the highest average parole caseload-83.5-in Texas. The estimated number of families in Dallas with members in prison or on parole is about 16,000. The current rate of recidivism in the Texas prison system is 40 percent.

Here is how OPEN’s Offender/Family Partnership Program will work beginning this fall. From the sheriff department’s list of Dallas County males going to T.D.C. for five years or less, 200 to 300 literate prisoners who will be returning to Dallas and their families will be chosen to participate at no cost in the 180-day, 11-lesson correspondence course. The lessons emphasize future problems and decisions: employment, education, housing, finances, family relationships. At the same time, the prisoner’s family members will undergo counseling with OPEN staffers. The prisoner’s lesson is reviewed, returned with supportive comments and another is provided. The final product is a model parole plan.

As the parole date approaches, many prisoners experience “short pains.” They grow extremely anxious, paranoid, withdrawn, afraid that something will spoil the release. There is a common nightmare during this time that the front gate opens, then shuts on you halfway out. It is not a good time to prepare to reenter the world.

To combat “short pains,” OPEN will send the prisoner “99 Days and a Wake-Up,” a publication discussing his last prison days and the first months of outside readjustment. Once released, the ex-inmate and family will remain in counseling sessions for a year. In 1987, researchers from Southern Methodist University, Sam Houston State University and T.D.C. will review the inmate’s progress.

OPEN’s approach has its share of skeptics. “I’ve seen a lot of people make their own support system,” says Gunder. “We send a lot of men back to bad family life that often was the cause of trouble in the first place. I think the most important factor to positive adjustment is good steady work. A tired person doesn’t break into buildings.”

Rollo realizes that OPEN is a far fromfoolproof scheme. “There is such a thing asa ’bad seed,’ someone who never can beturned away from crime. But I think changeis the one thing that links us all. We’re working on the premise that change for the betteris possible, that if the ex-offender and hisfamily can survive this terrible ordeal together, then anything, anything is possible.We’re trying to plant seeds in the minds ofscared and uneducated 19-year-olds. Theymay not come to fruition. But if you don’tplant seeds, nothing grows.”