Odd Couple the Pros of Ex-Cons

Convicted felon Nelson Marks hardly understood anything about crime until he became a victim of it. It was 1982, and his first Christmas in prison at Angola, Louisiana’s notorious maximum security lockup. He was writing Christmas cards to his family when he discovered that someone had stolen his cache of postage stamps. He nearly wept.

Marks, 44, a bank robber and heroin addict who carried out his first burglary at age 9, had not until that moment thought of what it might be like to be on the receiving end of illegality.

Meanwhile, affluent dentist Bob Roberts had spent so many years accelerating his life, recklessly piloting ever faster cars and airplanes, that he wasn’t aware he had an addiction to adrenaline until he found himself standing still and afraid.

Roberts, 54, had rushed through university, dental school and graduate school only to later discover that his essential education would begin inside prison walls, as a teacher.

Marks, a black smack addict, and Roberts, a white adrenaline junkie, met in 1989, when Roberts was doing graduate research in prison. They created Project Return, a program that works at “getting potential crime waves off the street,” as Roberts says.

The two men, known throughout Louisiana prisons as the “Odd Couple,” have created a rehabilitation program for released convicts that claims a 6% recidivism rate in a state that has a comparable rate of 49%. Nationwide, the number is closer to 63%.

In a national climate that has abandoned correction in favor of punishment, Project Return has become a model of what can go right in prisoner rehabilitation. It is the nation’s first prison after-care program to be funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Former Louisiana Gov. David Treen, who helped obtain that funding, called Project Return “the best-kept secret in the country,” which should be replicated elsewhere.

Ever since 1975, when sociologist Robert Martinson published his so-called “Nothing Works” study of offender rehabilitation, efforts to develop prisoner after-care programs have been met with skepticism or, worse, marginal funding. Martinson’s survey of 231 rehabilitation studies famously concluded that attempts to rehabilitate criminals were pointless and had no effect on recidivism.

Partly in response, the nation embarked on a prison-building spree. Prison and jail populations across the country doubled from 1978 to 1986, and kept growing. Soon, lawmakers were passing mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws to make it harder and harder for convicts to leave prison, much less be rehabilitated.

Only when economic models shifted and began to indicate that prisoner rehabilitation would eventually save society money did after-care programs begin in earnest, and today, there are signs of a national trend to treat prisoners after they are released.

Project Return caught a late wave of this reform. The organization began in 1993 and has helped hundreds of released prisoners learn skills and find jobs, kick drugs and alcohol and, most significantly, refrain from committing more crimes.

Small Stipend Makes a Difference

Unlike some programs, Project Return does not refuse violent offenders. The 90-day program deals with precisely those who are most likely to commit crimes again. Many of the program’s participants sign “contracts,” agreeing to attend Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Everyone is required to punch a time clock.

Operating with government grants and private donations, the program pays each participant $2.50 an hour while attending the all-day classes. Many of them say the $20 a day, small as it is, is the buffer that keeps them from crime.

Staff members are trained not to give advice, but to allow the ex-cons to solve their personal and group problems among themselves. The staff is familiar with the pitfalls: Seven of the 10 staff members are convicted felons.

Marks works every day with the program participants and in the prisons, while Roberts runs prison seminars and spends much of his time fund-raising and speaking.

The men preach self-reliance and personal responsibility. The program begins with two days of soul baring, and through shared shame and pain emerges a tight, focused group. Then comes job training, anger management classes and literacy classes.

Project Return has taken more than 800 ex-cons off the street, obtained housing for them, found them jobs and even sent a handful to college. Only about 70 participants are selected for Project Return each term. There is a waiting list of about 400 people.

Criminologists caution that other programs may have similar structures, but success often hinges on the unique personalities of a few key individuals. “It’s not the structure of Project Return that’s driving it,” said Peter Scharf, co-director of the University of New Orleans Center for Society, Law and Justice. “The tradition of vocational placement, peer counseling and empowerment is an old one.” Several such programs exist in California, with varying success, he noted.

“Studies clearly show that success of these programs depends on the personal charisma of those running them,” Scharf added. “Bureaucrats make terrible rehabilitative agents. The problem becomes apparent when you try and replicate it: If you try to replicate this program without Roberts or Marks, you have a program without a soul.”

Indeed, of all the ex-cons the program has reached, Project Return’s two most redeemed souls are Roberts and Marks.

Street Crime Paled to Prison’s Violence

Louisiana State Penitentiary is nestled in the state’s marshy notch, on the Mississippi border. Outside lies the Mississippi River, considered so perilous at this point that it serves as a kind of prison wall.

When Marks arrived at Angola to begin serving his 25-year term for bank robbery, he and other new “fish” were given the standard welcome address by the prison colonel.

“Make your time easy,” he told the men. “Go into the population and get yourself a husband. Then do as he says.”

Marks’ real education about crime was about to begin. He learned it was wise to sleep with an arm across your throat to ward off a strangler or place a book on your chest at night to stop a knife.

“It wasn’t until prison that I witnessed people being stabbed, set afire, murdered,” said Marks, who estimates he committed dozens of burglaries and robberies before being caught robbing a Baton Rouge bank. “I was in the streets from 9 years old until the age of 26, and I never witnessed any of that on the streets. Prison was the most violent place I ever saw.”

In prison, nighttime played its own, violent soundtrack. Gangs, gambling and drug use thrived at a volume he’d never seen on the streets. Leaving your cell was to risk gang rape.

Marks, the new fish, took it all in. One day an older inmate, convicted murderer Henry Patterson, confronted him. He waved a thick book of poetry at Marks, challenging him to take a new path.

“Do you want this book that I have or do you want what’s down that walk?” Patterson gestured toward the cellblock, and its Niagra of noise.

Marks understood that Patterson was to be his mentor. He set out to learn the prison’s rules. He discovered who had power and why. He knew that if he proved worthy, the old man’s lessons just might provide the ballast for him to make it out of Angola with something more than a hollowed-out soul.

Bob Roberts came to Angola a different way.

He had tired of dentistry. “Drilling, filling and billing,” he called the work.

He went back to school and earned a doctorate. He raced cars. He pursued another doctorate. Complaining that cars were too slow, Roberts began to race airplanes. Then stunt planes.

Strained by his mental redlining, Roberts’ marriage was unraveling. Some new shapes began to form when he and his wife went into therapy. Always an academic, Roberts threw himself into psychological theory. Before he noticed he had taken the first step, Roberts found himself on a spiritual quest.

He sought out M. Scott Peck, whose spiritual guidebook, “The Road Less Traveled,” has been a perennial bestseller. About the time Marks arrived at Angola, Roberts traveled to Connecticut to meet with Peck.

One day toward the end of their week together, Peck fell silent, then turned to Roberts.

“What do you want?” he asked.

It was a question that Roberts had never slowed down long enough to consider. Now he understood that he must seek a mentor back in New Orleans to lead him on his inward journey. He found one and started a journey that led him to self-help seminars, New Age gurus, tribal drumming retreats, more schooling, and a period of deep introspection, seeking to make of his life more than the sum of his worldly assets.

In another time, their paths may have crossed as perpetrator and victim. On this journey, they met in prison, where Roberts was a graduate student studying prisoner rehabilitation and Marks was an influential con who wasn’t sure he trusted “yet another academic with a plan to save us all.”

Marks is tall, sinewy and adorned with tattoos he acquired in prison; L-O-V-E is spelled out above the knuckles on his right hand. He is a wary man. Roberts is solid and gray and smiles out from behind wire-rimmed glasses. Friendly, his hand is extended in greeting several paces before he arrives.

Roberts and his unorthodox, touchy-feely ideas were not immediately welcomed into the population at Angola. Inmates looked to Marks to give them the sign to cooperate with Roberts’ program. Marks watched and listened carefully.

“OK,” he finally told his fellow convicts. “I think this guy is for real.”

Sense of Community Sets Program Apart

Project Return’s weekly Town Hall is settling down. On the 14th floor of a downtown office building, dozens of ex-convicts assemble for their early-morning meeting. Everyone is tired. Some program participants live in their cars and wear their one best set of clothes to attend the daily sessions. Those who work or go to school, do so at night, after a full day here.

The large and sterile room is being transformed. Long tables are pushed to corners. Folding chairs are dragged into a suggestion of a circle.

A woman, beaming, tells of her prospects for a job. Another woman offers that she’s living with her sister until she can get back on her feet, and how last night, her sister smoked crack in the bathroom and how her baby girl woke crying from the acrid smell and how it made the woman struggle all over again with her own addiction.

Around the room, heads nod. There are readings from inspirational, nonreligious books. Community notices are read. Grievances are aired, and either solved or shelved. After about an hour the meeting breaks up and chairs and tables are rearranged so that the meeting room becomes a classroom.

Scrunched into small chairs, these adults are learning to read and write. Standing to the side with arms folded across his chest is J.C. Greenberry, who began to work full-time at Project Return in 1994. Like most other staff members, he’s also been through the program: He spent 5 1/2 years in prison after being convicted of abusing his stepdaughter.

“I took responsibility for what happened,” he said, “[but] the aim here has been to make me take more responsibility for what I did. This program provided me with the environment to recognize that. That’s what’s different about this program--the community building.”

For that reason, the Department of Justice has singled out Project Return for special praise. The Bureau of Justice Assistance has backed that with money--this year a $775,000 grant. “We consider the program to be a model for prisoner after care,” Justice spokesman Doug Johnson said.

The nonprofit program also has enthusiastic support from the business and political leaders of New Orleans, a city struggling to curb a pervasive climate of crime.

David Hunt, of the New Orleans Business Council, said Project Return is attractive on many levels, not the least of which is that it saves the city money.

“It’s a very practical thing,” said Hunt, who is on Project Return’s board of directors. “It’s going to affect our economy, our tourism, our quality of life. If Project Return keeps ex-cons from going back to a life of crime, it’s providing a tremendous service to the city.”

Project Return is being monitored by other cities around the state, which are assessing whether to install programs using a similar formula.

The program’s model is a synthesis of Marks and Roberts’ ideas, melded with Peck’s idea of community building: Foster intense and open group interaction, allow “chaos” to occur, work through conflict and come out the other side with a cohesive, caring group.

The prison seminars often produce such strong community building that inmates no longer are able to turn away when another inmate is mistreated. Because of this, the seminars have been banned from some state facilities.

The inclusion of African drumming sessions brings about powerful results, too. The hours-long percussive workshops can evoke primal reactions: sobbing, confessions and a profound sense of community.

Althea Jackson, a recent program graduate, went to prison for shoplifting and cocaine possession.

“This was the first program I had ever been in that I could be free and open,” she said. “Here, you have someone to talk to about personal things that you won’t be judged for.

“I feel normal again. I can open up and trust people. It’s not like I have this burden, this thing that says you can’t get back into society.” Jackson is volunteering to answer phones at the project’s office while waiting to hear about jobs she has applied for.

Looking for Ways to Build on Program

Mainstreaming begins with the project’s co-directors. Marks has gone back to the bank he robbed and apologized to the teller who faced his handgun. He now enters banks as a depositor. Roberts has become deeply interested in the positive effect tribal drumming has on prisoners. He’s devising ways to incorporate the mentoring practices of Native Americans and African tribesman into the program.

“It seems strange to some people, our partnership,” Roberts said of his alliance with Marks. “We complement each other. The main thing is, we care about the people in this program and people in prisons. We want to make a difference.”