Murderer Released After Therapy at Unique Prison : Parolee Believes ‘Monster’ in Him Is Subdued

Raymond Grace says he knows that there is still a “monster” inside him. But, for the first time in his adult life, he believes that he is not dangerous.

Grace, a convicted murderer, spent more than six years at Maryland’s Patuxent Institution discovering the roots of the violence within him, and he and Patuxent officials believe that he has learned how to contain it. In fact, Patuxent officials say Grace is typical of inmates who have been successfully rehabilitated.

Grace, sentenced to 25 years in prison for the shooting death of a neighborhood acquaintance with whom he had feuded, was paroled in September. Since then, he has married, moved with his wife into a rented trailer in Elkridge, Md., and returned to his old welding job.

No one, not even Patuxent officials who sanctioned his release, is willing to bet that Grace will stay out of prison for good. The institution’s recidivism rate, although lower than the rates at other state prisons, is still too high to make any guarantees. Since 1977, 214 inmates have been paroled from Patuxent, and 40 have been imprisoned again.

‘Track Record Is Not Perfect’

“I have a lot of confidence in Ray, but at the same time I’m aware that our track record is not perfect,” said John Farrell, the Patuxent psychologist who was Grace’s primary therapist there.

Patuxent, an institution unique in the nation for treating violent criminals with a combination of psychotherapy and phased re-entry into the community, is under intense scrutiny. A public outcry over recent decisions by the prison’s autonomous inmate review board to parole or furlough a notorious murderer and a rapist has placed its future in doubt. The Maryland General Assembly is expected to consider changes in Patuxent’s policies when legislators convene for a 90-day session on Jan. 11.

Grace agreed to be interviewed and gave Patuxent officials permission to talk about his case. He strongly believes in the institution, he said, and wants to let the public know the good it can do.

Patuxent’s regimen of group therapy twice a week helped him channel his rage, he said. “The main thing is, I can endure more pain--humiliation, embarrassment, slander. That’s what makes me a better person; that’s what makes me not dangerous.”

Grace, 43, grew up in poverty in a tough South Baltimore neighborhood where some young men aspire to little more than brawn, machismo and a good fight. By his own account, he was beaten by a violent mother and abandoned by his father. Early on, he began fighting the boys who taunted him about his Good Will clothing and a speech impediment so bad he could scarcely be understood.

John Yates, the no-nonsense ex-Marine who runs Patuxent’s halfway house in downtown Baltimore, said Patuxent helped Grace find positive outlets for his emotional intensity--through psychological counseling, religion, Alcoholics Anonymous and speech therapy.

“I liked being noticed as this rough, tough guy . . . . They called me the smiling hit man . . . ‘cause I told ‘em I could smile while I shoot someone and watch ‘em twitch,” Grace said. “A lot of kids idolized me. They used to call me Charles Manson, Mad Dog, Crazy Ray . . . . I wanted to be respected.”

Travis Lupton, the man he killed, “knocked me down off that pedestal. My masculinity, my image was threatened,” Grace said.

Whiskey, Beer, Hallucinogens

Grace said he was drunk around the clock for much of his adult life--as well as at the time of the killing--often consuming a quart of whiskey and more than a case of beer a day. He also used drugs, particularly the hallucinogens PCP and LSD.

He said his violent urges led him to beat repeatedly and rape his first wife, beat his daughter and once shoot a black man who came into his neighborhood during a period of racial tension in the late 1970s.

When he was behind the wheel of his prized van, Grace said, he frequently pointed a gun at other drivers who annoyed him and sometimes shot at them.

Grace said he found self-control at Patuxent. He and Yates mentioned a recent dispute that Grace got into with another driver. “Before, I would have run him off the road and beat him up--and dared him to call the police,” Grace said. But, this time, Grace drove away rather than get into a fight.

His struggle for self-control began with sobriety. “I know if I get drunk or high, I’m going back to jail. I know I’ve got that monster in me and that drugs or alcohol brings that out,” Grace said. “There’s a possible chance I could kill somebody else in a rage of anger.”

Grace was born into violence, he said, describing his father as a drunkard and a wife-beater who abandoned the family early. His mother, now in her 60s, remarried and terrorized his stepfather with beatings and threats, Grace said.

That is the kind of painful insight he said he gained in prison therapy sessions. “I would rather go through 10 years’ hard labor than what I went through at Patuxent,” he said.

When he arrived at Patuxent in 1982, Grace, like all inmates who enter there, was placed on Tier 1, the most uncomfortable and untamed section of the maximum-security prison. Inmates there bunk two to a cell, and the nights crackle with the constant blare of radios.

In those days, Grace “did a lot of strutting” to cover his pain, said Farrell, Grace’s psychologist, and lost control of his explosive temper when people disagreed with him.

“I think his motivation in coming here was mixed,” Farrell said. “He wanted to get some help, but he wanted to get out early.”

Patuxent’s allure for Maryland convicts is its autonomy in determining when a prisoner is “reasonably safe” and therefore ready for parole. Patuxent inmates serving life terms spend about half the time in prison as inmates in other Maryland detention facilities, state prison statistics show.

One of the first things that happened to Grace at Patuxent appeared to have a profound effect, officials there said: Speech therapy improved his speaking ability dramatically.

“Very quickly, people felt he was making an effort,” said Dr. Frank Eisenberg, director of treatment at Patuxent.

Like all inmates, Grace was required to attend a minimum of two hours of group therapy each week--one session with seven or eight other inmates and one session, known as tier counseling, with the 30 to 35 inmates who lived alongside him.

But, more important, Grace said, was a religious awakening that began even before his arrival at Patuxent, while he was in the Baltimore jail awaiting trial. He’s not just a “jailhouse believer,” he said; he considers himself “saved,” and Patuxent officials said they believe that his religious convictions are genuine.

Yates described Grace as “a little bit fanatical” in his opposition to profanity, cigarettes and other vices, making him unpopular with other inmates. In his early days at Patuxent, Grace became deeply involved with the Alcoholics Anonymous group he was required to attend. Drugs and “jailhouse wine” are readily available at Patuxent, he said, but he steered clear of them.

During the next few years, Grace progressed rapidly up the tier ladder, the hierarchical system used to motivate and reward inmates. At Tier 2, he was given a cell to himself.

By Tier 3, his therapy sessions were devoted less to resolving squabbles with other inmates and more to exploring relationships and motivations.

“I saw Ray shed a lot of tears at treatment sessions,” Farrell said. He said Grace talked about his shame at his family’s poverty, his father’s abandonment, about being taunted by other children and about the violence in his family’s home.

As he progressed in therapy, Grace said, he realized that he “had a bad temper from having to suppress my feelings when I was younger . . . . I was a very lonely person. I used to cry at night.”

During therapy, he realized that he felt some degree of remorse for killing Lupton, he said, “but I have a lot of remorse for (the effect it has had on) his family.”

Grace graduated to Tier 4, where inmates govern themselves and their cell doors are not locked at night.

Nevertheless, he said: “It’s rough . . . . The stress and strain on you can get tremendous.”

If an inmate is close to parole, he said, other inmates try to sabotage his chances by provoking fights. He said that “guys all the time are trying to get up in your face” and that he believes that the restraint he demonstrated during one such incident was a key reason he was ultimately allowed to leave the institution.

He had applied for work-release status several times before it was granted, and the denials were “heartbreaking,” he said. The first time, Grace said, board members said he needed to show more consistency in controlling his behavior. The next year, he said, they told him he had become too rigid.

Grace won work-release status last spring and lived at the Baltimore halfway house for five months before he was paroled in September.

Yates said Grace, like other newly paroled Patuxent inmates, is very closely supervised. He was required to have a stable job, health insurance and some money in the bank before his parole. Now, he must check in weekly with Yates and must submit up to three times a month to random urine testing for traces of drugs or alcohol. If either is found, Yates said, he will be sent back to Patuxent.