N.Y. Prison Puts Drug-Afflicted Inmates on Road to Recovery : Corrections: It will soon be the nation’s first large-scale treatment facility devoted solely to inmates whose crimes were prompted by alcohol or substance abuse.

Long before it was a prison, Mt. McGregor had a reputation as a place of healing.

Mt. McGregor, nestled on a wooded hilltop between the Adirondack Mountains and the Lake Champlain Valley, will soon be the nation’s first large-scale treatment facility devoted solely to inmates whose crimes were prompted by an addiction to drugs or alcohol.

There are now 192 inmates in the alcohol and substance abuse treatment program at McGregor, where barbed wire fences wind around log cabins and stylish buildings reflect their role early this century as a tuberculosis sanitarium for Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. employees.

It is a testament to the success of the voluntary program and to the vision of its founder, prison chaplain Peter Young, that this month Gregor expects to have 826 inmates.

“My name is Monroe--I’m a dope fiend,” Monroe Parrot said to a recent gathering of some 50 inmates.

Parrot was among the first of 37 inmates to take part in Young’s program when it began experimentally in 1981. He has since graduated to become a counselor, one of six paid staff members.

“I was a shooter,” began Parrot, telling his story of heroin addiction to men listening as intently as if the story was their own.

Father Young sat in the back of the room, his priest’s collar partially hidden by an old gray sweater.

“In all the other programs I was in, you b-s for two hours telling war stories,” said inmate James Hyde, a longtime heroin and cocaine abuser. “But my whole family has turned their backs on me. I got kids, and it hurts.”

Young, 59, has been working with alcoholics for 30 years, and for more than a decade with prisoners.

Visitors say the program works largely because of Young’s presence. But the minister credits the inmates who are given major administrative duties in managing the program, as well as its focus on the Alcoholics Anonymous philosophy of abstinence, self-examination, a dependence on a higher power and group support.

“I came up here to rap on alcohol and drugs. It was not a very in-depth program. I was it,” Young said.

But Young said he was soon approached by James Mitchell, an inmate who told him, “I’ve been here a long time. It’s my seventh bid in the system and I’m tired of this.”

Together Young and Mitchell, who died of cancer several months ago, developed a makeshift program. “I told him I only had one condition. I’m not going to come in and talk to guys who are disrespectful and want to get high,” Young said.

What they ultimately worked out was a highly structured six-month program that has been partly emulated since by other prisons in the state.

Those admitted are generally within two years of eligibility for parole. If they complete their program, they are sent to a pre-release facility for another six months before returning to society.

To ease that transition, Young has been working to find jobs and low-cost housing for the inmates. Many graduates of the program have been sent to any of 10 halfway houses set up in the Albany area, some 40 miles south of the prison.

Mt. McGregor Supt. Joseph Kennedy said while the idea may have seemed revolutionary 10 years ago, it was sound.

“It was easy because it was cheap. We were able to go practically with what we had,” Kennedy said.

State Corrections officials estimate the program costs an added $250 annually per man but lowers recidivism by about 25% over facilities without such programs. There are no statistics available for Mt. McGregor, but Young said his men do better.

David Winett, assistant director for the California Department of Corrections, visited the program in January and was impressed.

“There’s nothing comparable. It is a model we also want to consider. The prison’s management of inmates who were part of the treatment was considerably better than those not taking part in the program,” Winett said.

“Corrections officers felt the treatment unit was a cleaner, better, safer place to work,” he said. “(In California) we are moving in a direction that is very similar. Not as exclusively on the AA 12-step model. And we also don’t have a Peter Young.”

Winett said he was most impressed by the halfway houses.

“Mt. McGregor graduates all recognized the need to continue,” he said.

Raymond Diaz runs a similar 45-day program on a barge moored near Manhattan’s South Street Seaport for detainees awaiting trial.

But Diaz, who is executive director of the New York City Department of Corrections Substance Abuse Intervention Division, warns that even Young’s program has its perils.

“Can you imagine the disappointment of someone at McGregor who leaves the prison and then can’t find a home or a job? Nobody is waiting out there with open arms. They re-enter a society with the same host of problems they entered prison with,” said Diaz.

But others are more optimistic.

Parrot has a formidable way of describing how the program healed him.

“I’m still a con man,” he said. “But now I’m a con man for the positive.”