COLUMN ONE : Prisoners Get With the Drill : ‘Boot camps’ for young offenders are suddenly the rage. While they may save money, critics say they’re better theater than policy.

Camp Sauble is nestled deep in a frosty Michigan forest where chirping birds dart freely from one leafless tree to another. Smells of autumn fill the air: pine and pollen, decaying leaves and dying grasses.

Thomas Russell and John Waters, wearing bright county orange jail jump suits, came to this bucolic place in the back seat of a sheriff’s squad car. Their journey did not end peacefully.

Russell and Waters were yanked from the car by five big, shouting men in dark blue uniforms who slammed them up hard against the back fender.

“Maggots,” one of the uniformed men yelled in an angry, booming voice.

“Scumbag,” screamed another.

“Parasite,” hollered a third in a seemingly uncontrolled rage.

Russell, 18, and Waters, 19, were patted down, forced to keep their legs wide and their trembling fingers curled as the staccato harangue continued.

“Here, you control nothing,” bellowed one of the uniformed men, his face flushed, his mouth an inch from Russell’s ear, his broad-rimmed hat pushing up against the man’s quivering head. “We don’t care what you have to say. We don’t care what you think. You’re a parasite. You feed off society.”

“All I’m going to give you for 90 days is a bunch of hell and hard time,” another shouted into Waters’ left ear.

Welcome to “shock incarceration”--a new concept in prison-based behavior modification rapidly gaining popularity with corrections departments across the country.

These minimum security facilities, known as “boot camps,” are modeled on rugged military basic training. They are used as short-term alternatives to longer stays in overcrowded, undisciplined prisons for young criminals who are sentenced to prison for the first time.

Georgia pioneered the paramilitary concept in 1983. Today, there are at least 15 camps operating in 11 states. Up to 30 more states either have camps on the drawing boards or under construction.

California corrections officials are monitoring shock programs but are not yet convinced the evolving concept is worth adopting. “California is not jumping into this (simply) because it looks like it ought to work or because it seems to fit everyone’s fond remembrances of boot camp,” said Dave Winett, assistant director of the state’s corrections department.

Critics say boot camps are better theater than corrections policy.

“There is no evidence that so-called therapeutic programs based on threat and coercion ever worked,” said Jerome G. Miller, founder of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives and the former director of youth corrections programs in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. “You can coerce people into conformity while you’ve got them, when there’s enough brute force around. But to suggest that that somehow or other changes them is nonsense.”

Proponents say they are at least as effective as prisons and may cost taxpayers less.

New York state, for example, estimates that it saves $1.5 million for each 100 successful shock releases because the prisoners spend fewer days behind bars.

Fans of the programs range from urban mayors like Detroit’s Coleman Young to U.S. drug policy chief William J. Bennett.

New York’s shock program is considered a model. It lasts six months--twice as long as most--provides intensive therapeutic treatment of drug and alcohol addiction and includes a year of post-release monitoring and assistance.

But Michigan’s Camp Sauble, beginning its second year of full operations, is more typical of shock incarceration programs, although here it is called Special Alternative Incarceration and inmates are called “probationers” to help them escape the stigma of being an ex-convict.

Camp Sauble, situated in the west central part of the state near Lake Michigan, is home to 120 men between ages of 17 and 25 who live rigidly disciplined lives under the omnipresent eyes of drill instructor-like guards who greet every infraction with humiliating shouts and punishing exercises.

Unlike prisons, corrections officers are in total control here; so much in control that, once inside, official visitors wander around the entire fenced camp unescorted and without fear.

Virtually every aspect of the prisoners’ lives is monitored. Do they brush their teeth? Do they change their underwear daily? Are they overweight? Do they eat everything they pick up in the chow line?

“Armstrong, who dressed you this morning?” corrections officer John Charette shrieked shortly after he stormed through the dormitory housing new camp admissions, giving them their 5 a.m. wake-up--the crashing together of two trash-can lids. “You got your underwear on backwards? In prison you’d get some help putting on those panties,” Charette mocked in one of the constant and not so subtle reminders of how vulnerable to sexual assault these young offenders would be in a regular prison setting.

“You wear that shirt yesterday?” he shouted at another inmate. “We change clothes every day. We don’t live like pigs. That’s something you did on the streets. We’re not on the streets any more. UNDERSTAND?”

Prisoners silently march from one task to another. Smoking is forbidden. If inmates are not eating--in silence--they are working, exercising, studying or are in counseling.

Most of the work is teamwork. “They have antisocial behavior patterns and don’t want to help anybody and don’t want anybody to help them,” said Bruce L. Curtis, the camp commander. “We teach that to accomplish things (requires) a team effort. They have to work as teams, even to make beds.”

Inmates must keep their heads shaved, a requirement that robs them of their identity and leaves them looking more like benign space creatures than the hardened street punks many of them are.

Commands are answered “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” Nobody dares to speak without permission. Ever.

The silence is important, said Lt. Fred Blaauw. “All they’re going to talk about is what they did on the streets. Prisons are just training centers to be better criminals.”

“Here you do what we say. We don’t want to hear what you say. You had your say on the streets,” Inspector William Ray, the deputy director of Camp Sauble, said.

Inmates have but one hour a day to themselves, and they must spend it silently reading or writing or just sitting. Beds and footlockers are kept military neat. Visitors are forbidden and inmates are permitted only one 10-minute phone call a week and only after they have served the first six weeks of their 13-week stay.

Life in the camps is so tough that, in some states, more than half of those who begin shock incarceration drop out, choosing instead to spend up to three years in less rigid mainstream prisons. In New York, 56% have dropped out. Here in Michigan, about a third either quit or are kicked out.

But even quitting a shock camp is not easy. In Michigan, would-be quitters are subjected to ridicule and threats, they are reasoned with, they are given time for reflection and they are given a hearing during which their decision is questioned and reviewed.

For example, on his first morning back at Camp Sauble after a medical leave, Jerry Campbell woke up crying and announced, “I quit.” For much of the remainder of the day, corrections officers attempted to change his mind.

“Look where your thinking got you, on the doorstep of prison. You will not survive in prison. You’re going to stay in this program for 90 days,” said Officer John Hawkins.

“You will NOT quit this program,” Lt. Blaauw said as Campbell lay on the floor, handcuffed to prevent an attack on the guards.

“People are going to beat you up. They’re going to rape you. They’re going to take your money,” Inspector Ray warned.

Campbell insisted.

Late in the day, again in tears, he pleaded to be allowed to stay. Curtis refused. He left the next morning the way he came, in the back seat of a sheriff’s squad car.

“If we can hold them here for three weeks, our chances for success are good,” said Lt. Jerry Howell. “But it bewilders me. I’ve seen 500 quit. It seems like their history is so bleak that they don’t see a future.”

Once a inmate does quit, he must spend a day or more dressed in yellow on a yellow cot in the camp’s main hall, where everybody can see him. Quitters eat last and are served their meals on yellow trays by kitchen workers--other inmates--who turn their backs.

Camp corrections officers are screened and go through four weeks of special training. “We tell them the first thing that can destroy this program is a staff member abusing his authority,” said Curtis, a former U.S. Marine and Army Ranger. “What we look for (in staff) is a real good, stable mind. I don’t care if they have military experience.”

“There is no reward to working in a prison,” said Howell, a veteran corrections officer. “You’re just there and (inmates) hate you automatically. Here, you actually see change. In 90 days it’s astounding. Here, we believe what we’re doing counts, that we’re not just putting in eight hours watching convicted felons.”

“It’s a cheap way to go, a quick fix without much investment of funds,” said critic Miller. “It really looks good to have people yelling and screaming and have what are presented as hard-core delinquents and criminals running around double time.”

The National Institute of Justice, an arm of the Justice Department, is currently studying boot camps throughout the country to determine just how effective they really are and which formats work best.

Although much of that research will not be completed for at least a year, Doris L. Mackenzie, director of the shock incarceration study, and consultant Dale Parent said that preliminary findings show that:

--Recidivism is about the same for graduates of boot camps and felons who go through other prison programs. Because the stays in the camps are shorter than prison stays, the camps are cheaper for states to run.

--Post-release programs, sometimes called “aftershock,” are important, but most states do not provide sufficient follow-up once an inmate is released.

--States where the department of corrections selects shock inmates from the general prison population are probably achieving more savings than states where judges select candidates for the camps.

“I think there is fairly strong evidence, non-conclusive but certainly convincing evidence, that many people enter these programs that otherwise would have gotten (a non-prison sentence, like probation),” said Parent, a corrections expert with ABT Associates in Cambridge, Mass.

“That means that (judges) are adding to the prison population rather than subtracting from it. States which are clearly achieving their population reduction objectives are those states where the department of corrections selects (shock inmates) from among those people who come to prison.”

This is a feature of the program in New York, where the department of corrections gives some inmates the chance for six months in boot camp or their full sentence in a prison.

Here in Michigan, candidates for boot camp are selected by judges.

Curtis said that, if he were to change anything, he’d increase the camp time from 90 days to 120 days and provide for better post-release supervision and programs.

“We need a finishing school or after care of maybe another 120 days for marginal people who graduate the program,” Curtis said.

Camp Sauble probationers at various stages of their stays said, in interviews, that they thought the program was effective.

“When you’re in prison you are like trash that’s been thrown away,” said Chris Kidd, 22, who was convicted of robbery and who had a drug habit. “Here, they think they can rehabilitate you back into society.”

Kidd, who was once in the Army, said military boot camp “was a little harder than this.”

“That first day is really the shocker,” said James Przybycki 21, who was convicted of car theft. “They try to get our tempers going . . . . Then they push you and push you and you can’t tell them you can’t do it.”

“I look at this as a fitness program,” said Robert Bennett, 19, a thief. “It’s better than doing prison for five years.”

Researchers Tracy Shryer in Chicago, Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Anna Virtue in Miami and Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this story.