The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) is not in the business of rehabilitation. The question is: Can society afford for it not to be?
Those of us who hope to one day reenter society cannot, and do not, expect others to be more invested in our change than we are. Coming into the twenty-fourth year of a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence, I’ve been desperately pursuing my own rehabilitation. I cannot go back to society in the same condition that I entered the system.
In 2002 I stole the life of my girlfriend’s two-year-old son, Maurice. My inability to acknowledge past traumas and understand the sources of my anger created a toxic environment that swallowed Maurice’s innocence. My decisions and my actions have impacted so many people—more than I will ever know about. This is why the process of rehabilitation is so important to me.
I’ve also come to realize that rehabilitation in here is important to many people on the outside, too. The call from community organizations for prison reform has grown exponentially in the past decade. Society is realizing that our successful reentry is intertwined with community progress. For advocacy to continue to grow and be met with success, our efforts must be combined and the work of incarcerated people be made visible to more people on the outside—and impossible to ignore for prison authorities.
Anthony Joseph is incarcerated at Wallkill Correctional Facility. Like me, he is serving a sentence of twenty-five years to life; he has been incarcerated for over twenty years already. During the course of his sentence, he has earned his bachelor’s degree as well as collaborated with several outside organizations to promote rehabilitation and prison reform.
I asked Anthony about his experiences surrounding rehabilitation. “Getting rehabilitative programming in New York State prisons is complicated,” he said. “The need is high, but the availability is low. The Department of Corrections claims to be a rehabilitative force, but the truth is the incarcerated individuals have to create those opportunities for themselves, and most of us do.”
Anthony paused to finger through some documents he was holding in his hands. He removed a thick stapled packet and handed it to me. The cover page, in large bold letters, read Program Proposal by Anthony Joseph. He pointed to the date of submission: January 24, 2020. Under it, “DENIED” is stamped in bold, red letters alongside the superintendent’s signature and the date, June 7, 2022—two and a half years after the proposal was submitted.
“Even when we create programs and file the proper paperwork,” Anthony continued, “the administration takes their time delivering a decision. . . . This lack of urgency dissuades prisoners from wanting to try. I was once told by a deputy superintendent of programs that this is done intentionally to keep commissioners in Albany from thinking that we [i.e., incarcerated individuals] are doing all the work.”
Anthony’s experience speaks to a larger problem: there’s a general disinterest within the prison system itself in the rehabilitation of incarcerated individuals. This is cruel, and it is shortsighted. According to New York Focus, out of the more than 31,000 people incarcerated in New York prisons, just over 10 percent are serving life or virtual life sentences. This means nearly all of us will, at some point, be released. Why, then, does DOCCS insist on sending convicted felons back to society unprepared?
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It appears that it was not always as bad as it is now. I spoke with Ms. Henderson, a senior offender rehabilitation coordinator, who was the head coordinator at the now-shuttered Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg. (Because of prison hierarchy, I to this day do not know her first name.) She has worked for DOCCS for over twenty years and has seen her responsibilities shift away from rehabilitation in that time.
“We used to be counselors,” she said to me as we sat in a classroom with painted cinder block walls. The color motif, tan and grey, seemed to match the tone of her voice. “But ever since the Department of Corrections merged with the Division of Parole, we’re not allowed to assume that role.”
I asked her what’s been lost in this transition. She sighed and glanced over her shoulder as if she was about to reveal some secret. “It was our job to help incarcerated individuals prepare for release and give them the tools to stay out of prison. Now we don’t have the leeway to do what we used to do. We’re not here to counsel anymore. We’re just coordinating.”
These internal restrictions highlight DOCCS’s apathy toward our change.
Even if the system is unwilling to make meaningful investments in rehabilitation, incentivizing the work many of us are doing to change ourselves would help.
Currently the Limited Credit Time Act (LCTA) is one of the only incentives that exists. The current commissioner, Daniel Martuscello III, is proposing to expand the number of existing qualifying programs, but the proposed expansions will have minimal impact if they are implemented as they are currently written. According to this draft, prisoners who qualify will be eligible for one cut of six months from their earliest possible release date. Qualifications range from being an incarcerated program associate for a term of two straight years to completing a college degree. In total, there are twelve different qualifying achievements, all of which require a minimum of two years of participation. But no matter how many you do, you receive the exact same sentence reduction as someone who only does one: six months. Accomplish every single one? Still only six months. For someone serving a five-year sentence, six months is a meaningful portion of their time—but for a prisoner serving a fifteen-, twenty-, or twenty-five-year sentence, it is barely a drop in the bucket.
It stands to reason that the more incentive given to someone to improve themselves, the more likely they will be to achieve that improvement. Granted, as we experience true change, we come to see that the change itself is the reward, but that doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process. If the process is not meaningfully incentivized, people won’t engage for long enough to reap the deeper rewards.
Those of us in here who continue to strive for change want to prevent the creation of new victims. This is our greatest responsibility. The only way to accomplish this goal is to take control of our own rehabilitation.
In the face of the system’s apathy, we need your help. We need your support, and more than ever, we need your voice. The initial steps are being taken. More and more of us who are incarcerated have accepted responsibility for our own change. But society needs to be a partner in this process, too.