Penitentiary’s Paramilitary Program Helps Wayward Youths : Inmates Marching to Different Drummer

Reveille sounds at 4:30 a.m. for the “soldiers” in boot camp at Mississippi State Penitentiary, once a sprawling Delta farm where hundreds of prisoners picked cotton by hand under the watchful eyes of “shooter trustees,” or armed inmates.

Today, instead of marching off to the cotton fields, about 130 “draftees” in a paramilitary program spend two hours before breakfast in a rigorous regimen of calisthenics. Inspection follows, with a drill instructor evaluating such things as the starched neatness of an inmate’s simple green jump suit and red cap uniform, and the tidiness of his bunk area.

Then the cadences sound sharp and deep as the platoons maneuver about the prison yard. The marching tunes range from the violence-tinged silliness of a tale about a yellow bird who squashed his head to a stiffer verse written for a visit by several state judges.

“Judges, judges can’t you see, what the RID has done for me,” yell the soldiers in the program formally called Regimented Inmate Discipline.

Group Therapy

The ranks stop marching about 10 a.m., when they break for group therapy sessions. “Psycho-correctional” classes throughout the rest of the day are broken up with periods of marching and calisthenics led by “platoon leaders” promoted from the rank and file because of their leadership skills.

The aim of the program is to get armies of wayward young offenders to march in step with society rather than back into a life of crime.

Psychologist Nanolla Yazdani has run this “boot camp” at the Mississippi State Penitentiary for 1 1/2 years, and he says a dozen state correctional systems have instituted or are investigating paramilitary programs.

Part of Sweeping Reforms

Monthly, visitors come to observe his skinheaded troops march and drill to the barks of a camouflage-uniformed officer.

The program is only one of the changes that have come to Parchman since a federal court ruling in the early 1970s led to sweeping prison reforms. The crowded, old wooden barracks have been closed or renovated. Some of the 4,080 inmates still work cotton by hand, but only several hundred of the prison’s 16,000 acres are now devoted to row crops.

A vocational-technical division provides training in 16 different areas, such as television repair, masonry and small motor repairs.

Corrections officials in several other states agree that paramilitary programs like Yazdani’s are coming into vogue--a trend they say reflects a growing acceptance of the military in America.

‘A Lot of Sex Appeal’

“It seems to be a bandwagon that people are jumping on nationwide,” says William Kime, deputy director of research and planning for the Michigan Department of Corrections. “These programs have a lot of sex appeal, if I can use that term. The problem of young offenders is increasing and no one really has an answer, and here is something that is relatively cheap and short-term.”

Michigan officials are among those who have contacted Yazdani about his 90-day paramilitary program for nonviolent, first-time offenders. The Michigan Legislature has appropriated money specifically for a paramilitary program, but Michigan corrections officials have yet to determine the exact scope or nature of the program, Kime says.

Hardy Rauch, director of the correctional standards program for the American Correctional Assn. in College Park, Md., says no studies have tabulated the number of states joining the paramilitary corps. Rauch’s office accredits prisons and jails, often setting standards at the request of judges and legislators.

Regaining Popularity

“The paramilitary approach ebbs and flows. In the 1950s, when I first began my career, about 20% of the prisons in the country were using the paramilitary,” he says. “I think in the late ‘40s the paramilitary was even more common as a lot of veterans were returning, and administrators and wardens returning from the war used that to teach discipline and control.”

The veterans of the Vietnam War had no such impact. During the 1960s and ‘70s, he says, much of society shunned the military and prison rehabilitation programs rarely assumed a paramilitary format. But he says the paramilitary appears to be regaining popularity.

“I am sure there have been no studies on this trend. But in our congresses of correction, it’s being discussed again,” he says. “Ten years ago, it just simply was not discussed.”

In addition to Mississippi, Oklahoma and Georgia have established prison boot camps in the last three years. Yazdani says officials considering paramilitary programs that have contacted him hail from Michigan, Louisiana, California, Florida, Oregon, Delaware, Texas, Wyoming, New York City and the federal prison system in Washington.

High Success Rate

Yazdani says Americans aren’t the only ones interested in his program, which involves group therapy sessions and positive thinking tapes with auditory subliminal messages, in addition to the several hours of marching and calisthenics each day. He says he has been contacted by corrections officers from Canada, Australia, Holland, Belgium, England and France.

He says people are interested because only 2.8% of the program’s about 500 “graduates” to date have returned to prison. Currently 115 men and 15 women are participating in the program, supervised by three therapeutic staff members, including Yazdani, and 16 security guards.

Yazdani admits his program hasn’t been operating long enough to fully evaluate its impact, but 2.8% is considerably below the national average return rate of about 50% for all offenders.

There are no national figures on the return rate for first-time, nonviolent offenders like those in Yazdani’s program, says Lawrence Greenfield, director of the correctional statistics program for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.