Reaching Out From Walpole

"I come up here and listened to some dudes talk. They say: `This ain't no play thing--you getting older and sooner or later you gonna pay.' Before, I was just trying to impress people that I was some kind of big crook. I'd say, hey, I can't do anything without my boys. I gotta hustle. Now, I know that ain't nothing. I was just making my life shorter and shorter."--Norm, a 16-year-old participant in the Reach-Out Juvenile Counseling Program at Walpole.

The van has already stopped in Roxbury to pick up the kids. Now it's rolling through Dedham and into the suburb of Walpole, a placid, ordinary community except for the enormous white structure looming in the dusk: a state prison that shares the town's name--a name that signifies everything wrong with prisons in this part of the country.

Walpole--and the image it conjures--mean a lot to the kids in the van and others like them. Some have relatives out there, most know ex-cons, all are familiar with the often romanticized lore that comes out of such places. Few, however, actually visited the prison before some inmates got together in 1975 and formed, independent of the prison administration and outside groups, a counseling program designed to reach youthful offenders through those who knew about prison life--the prisoners themselves.

Reach-Out, as the program is called, is an attempt to do for juvenile crime what Alcoholics Anonymous does for heavy drinking. The inmates' advice lacks the moralistic admonitions of the parents, judges and probation officers ignored by the kids. It is, indeed, an implicit message of the consequences of crime, brought home by those who alone in society are capable of commanding the respect of others who may be headed in the same direction.

The van is owned by Phillips Brooks House and driven by Christopher Finn '80, who is helping ease the serious shortage of volunteers willing to transport kids to Walpole for the program. The kids hop out in the prison parking lot and run into the anteroom where other youths--both black and white--stand peering into the glass windows of the prison's central command, waiting for the uncooperative guards to find the list that will let them in tonight.

Anxiously, they sign entrance forms, empty what's in their pockets into lockers and check to make sure no one is wearing blue jeans. Blue jeans are prohibited; once inside, the only way to distinguish prisoners from visitors is that inmates alone are allowed to wear jeans. Again, the warning: bring in nothing on your person. Only a few weeks before, someone entering the prison to tutor inmates--a Harvard student, in fact--accidentally left a joint in his coat. The authorities banned him from ever re-visiting Walpole.

The kids move through the countless metal doors. Past the place where visitors have the insides of their shoes checked for contraband, past the detectors, the armed guard in the tower, the massive barbed-wire topped wall. To the right is the maximum end, where brutal conditions recently precipitated yet another hunger strike by inmates. Reach-Out participants head to the left, to what, in a maximum security prison, is euphemistically known as the "minimum" end because prisoners are not locked in their cells all day and prevented from taking part in programs. (Euphemism has taken hold in the prison bureaucracy--inmates are officially called "residents," the warden a "superintendent,")

The kids are in the counseling area now, a series of small rooms filled with wooden desks and chairs. They are greeted warmly by the inmate counselors who offer coffee and cigarettes. (Inmates must buy their own coffee and cigarettes but usually insist on sharing their meager supplies.) Small groups form, or, if the youth has visited before, he may move off into a cubicle with an inmate who has befriended him--often because they are from the same neighborhood--and in the course of a few weekly visits a confidence often develops between them. The inmate then becomes the youth's official counselor and files monthly reports to probation officers. There are, of course, some kids unable to establish a friendship with any inmate, but by and large even a casual observer is struck by the uncanny rapport at work in the counseling area.

That rapport stems from no pat formula. The inmates, with help from Cathy Lowe, a clinical supervisor on the prison staff, learn to use what Lowe calls their "natural counseling talent" in an approach more flexible than traditional counseling.

"Sometimes we have to give them a jolt," says Dennis DeJoinville, who recently left his position of vice chairman of the program when he was transferred to another prison. "One of them will say 'how much time you doing?' I'll ask, 'how old are you?' The kid will say he's 14. I'll say 'I been here since you were nine.' That has an impact." So do the occasional tours each youth takes through the filthy cell blocks.

Appeals to common sense are also frequent, but they come across in a way the kids can understand. Jim Blaikie, DeJoinville's successor, says he tells those with long records that they remind him of the carpenter who constantly cuts off his finger. Both, he contends, are in the wrong business. "When a guy in here tells them it's a dead end, that's got to have an effect," says Blaikie, who served as treasurer of the Massachusetts McGovern campaign before his conviction and now spends a good deal of his time--when he doesn't have to make license plates--trying to secure grants for the program.

So far he's been unsuccessful. Because the program is run entirely within the prison, spreading word of its existence proves difficult. Numerous neighborhood organizations, a few detention centers and one juvenile court judge from Attleboro refer kids to Walpole, but the overall public response is not particularly enthusiastic--either here or in other parts of the country where similar programs are underway. Parents generally don't think too highly of their kids going to prison, even if just for a few hours, and the criminal justice system has yet to accept the idea that prisoners can serve as constructive role models for youthful offenders. The prison bureaucracy in Massachusetts tolerates the program at Walpole but isn't particularly eager to spread the idea to other institutions. Neither is the Department of Youth Services.

Reach-Out, keenly aware of the image problem attached to any activity of its kind, takes pains to strees the trustworthiness of the counselors, all 30 of whom have been through a screening process and 16-week training period. Officers of the program, who have a lot at stake in making sure no counselors abuse their position (parole boards look favorably on participation in the program), occasionally listen in on their fellow inmates' conversations with kids. Reach-Out Chairman Leonard Lacy claims that of the 40 or 50 counselors let out of prison in the past few years, only two have returned--in view of Walpole's recidivism rate of better than 75 per cent.

The crimes the prisoners did commit--the "war stories," as they're called--are supposed to be played down when they talk to the kids. There are, however, few conversations that don't contain personal details. "I'm just trying to understand them for what they are--namely grown men trapped in boys' bodies," Jerry Funderberg says. "They get away with it 99 per cent of the time and think they're slick. I was the same and I can tell them about me," he adds, and proceeds to do so--complete with descriptions of armed robberies and an imaginary slash down the chest of a visitor to represent the attempted murder that explains what brought him to Walpole.

Why the kids are at Walpole--and continue to come back week after week--needs explaining too. Norm, a 16-year-old black from a Roxbury housing project, is willing to do it. He leans back in the swivel chair, crossing his high-top sneakers on the prison guard's desk. The guard--Kevin Glynn--doesn't care. A rare exception among the guards, he's as much a part of Reach-Out as the inmates and kids.

"I used to have trouble in school," Norm says. "I'd hook classes, run around, smoke herb and all that. I didn't known how to approach people with, you know, a big background. Every time I talked to them I came out with a loud-speaking voice." Now Norm says, "I know how to deal with it because people who know--they talk to me."

"At first, when someone said I should come up here, I said: 'Going up to Walpole Prison? You think I'm crazy?' The older dudes I know--if they're not out there dead (in the streets) they're ending up out here. Eight of ten end up here. 'What do I want to go up there before I have to for?' I said."

"I got busted about three weeks before I first visited here--a '75 Continental. Every day was the same, if I ain't in a '71 Ford, I'm in a '76 Cadillac."

Norm has been going out to Walpole every week for over a year now. In October, after being kept back in school for three years, he moved into the 10th grade. His record has been clean for a number of months.

Such stories notwithstanding, Reach-Out has no conclusive statistics to show whether it prevents juvenile crime. The program at present lacks the resources to keep tabs on all those who receive counseling and most who do participate hardly end their waywardness immediately. Still, the relationship with an inmate can have an enormous influence on a juvenile. As one youth put it to his counselor in a recent letter:

You see all the things that were building up inside of me finally let go and I flipped out. I broke into my father's house and stole $400 cash and about $50-100 worth of liquor and I tore the house up....

I really do miss talking with you. You really helped me out a real lot but you do understand what I did to my father. I wanted to do it so don't think anyone fucked me up....

I'm going to make it, Arthur.... You make me think about a lot of things and you have taught me an awful lot and I hope when you're back out on the streets we can be good friends. You one smart motherfucker and some day I'm going to be just as smart. Just you wait and see. I read your letter over and over and you really make me believe in you and I just wish you never made it to where you are now....

Take care of yourself and stay in touch. Your friend always, Billy

Many of the youths come from neighborhoods with racial tensions, which the program helps to ease. "I used to say 'white boy this, white boy that'--but that's the past." Norm says, after he and an inmate break up a fight between two kids before any punches are thrown. Mark, a white 15-year-old from Dorchester, is blunt in his attitude: "I don't like colored people," he declares, munching a Big Mac after the visit had ended. He admits, though, that "some of them out there are really nice." They were, he conceded, the first blacks he ever really talked to.

"We're to a point where we're too old to be playing with crayons," says Dave Spears, a black inmate enormously popular with the kids. He has been talking and listening to a youth who has come in from the Worcester Detention Center, a lock-up for juveniles who have committed violent crimes.

Spears will soon be transferred to a lower security prison. It won't have a Reach-Out program. He describes what the program means to him personally, waxing almost rhapsodically about his "metamorphosis from the beast to the butterfly," his new attitude.

"One day I come out here and found myself dealing with human lives--I realized the wealth I get from dealing with these kids." That, he says, is "when the transition took place."