At Bayview, Stay’N Out of trouble, going deep

Bayview inmates and Stay’N Out participants Darlene Martinez and Doris Romeo talked about their experiences in the program last Friday.

Darlene Martinez, all of 5-feet, 5-inches tall, sat calmly as she faced her prison counselor, Paula Martin. “This is my sixth state bid [separate incarceration] in nine years.”

Martin’s breath caught when she heard that, she says now. She’d seen women who had been paroled, re-arrested, convicted, and repeated the cycle twice, three times. Even four times. But “your sixth state bid? I am going to give you the business!” Martin told the younger woman, in the scolding tone of a big sister. “We are really going to give you a hard time.”

By “we,” Martin meant the members and clinical team of Stay’N Out, a therapeutic community designed specifically for prisoners, run by the private agency New York Therapeutic Communities (NYTC) since the late 1970s. Stay’N Out’s 24-hour residential drug treatment and behavior modification program demands a lot of inmates as they kick their addictions, focusing squarely on breaking old patterns that have kept those addictions in place, including unresolved traumas from old wounds. And it gets results: A 2005 study of Stay’N Out graduates gave the program a 77 percent success rate, meaning that 77 percent of its graduates were “successfully paroled” (that is, found employment and housing), with few of them “returning to custody.”

Women currently in and recently graduated from the program, interviewed last week by Chelsea Now, said they found Stay’N Out different from other kinds of drug treatment programs, and that they now feel better equipped to take on the rest of what they need to do. They also pointed out, as did the program’s directors and founders, that the commitment on both sides is lifelong: Members pledge to stay off drugs and out of prison, and a network of residential centers and community-based counseling is available to help graduates stay clean. While the program’s confrontational approach is not for everyone, and such 24-hour programs are not cheap, advocates point out that compared to the human and financial costs of re-incarceration, those results make Stay’N Out a good investment.

A community that confronts

At Bayview, a nearly 30-year-old medium-security women’s prison housing up to 344 inmates, there are no “lifers” (persons sentenced to remain in prison for life). From the day they arrive, every inmate is plugged into myriad programs to prepare them for life on the outside. And given that more than 65 percent of New York State prison inmates report struggling with substance abuse, treatment for those addictions is often an essential first step—and for some of them, that means Stay’N Out.

Stay’N Out is run by New York Therapeutic Communities (NYTC), a Hell’s Kitchen–based agency founded by Ronald Williams, who had helped found the 1970s drug-treatment center Phoenix House. In 1977, the New York State Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) awarded Williams a contract to run a therapeutic community based on the Phoenix House model, which emphasizes personal responsibility, immediate consequences for actions, and intensive therapy work to get at the root of problems. NYTC began at a men’s correctional facility in Arthur Kills, Staten Island, and came to Bayview a few years later. Last week, Chelsea Now visited Stay’N Out for the second time at Bayview and sat down with its director, Paula Martin, and three of the program’s members.

When asked about her life before she entered the prison system, Darlene Martinez answered with one word: “Heroin.” Every time she was released, she said, heroin was there—and so were her old patterns, her tendency toward irrational anger and passivity in the face of what others wanted. During those years, Martinez completed numerous drug treatment programs, including the well-known Substance Abuse Technologies course (ASAT) at Albion Correctional Facility upstate, but nothing had really changed, she said.

“In those programs, I could just sit and be quiet,” said Martinez. “I didn’t have to say anything. At the end, they give you a certificate, and nothing’s changed.” That ended at Bayview, she said.

Over time and with much prodding, Stay’N Out taught her how to be more honest with herself and others—and to ask for what she wanted. She learned to observe, inside herself, “the fine line where things stop being rational and start being irrational,” she said. She also finds comfort in the fact that NYTC runs transition programs, like its Serendipity women’s residence in Brooklyn, and support groups beyond that, so that even after parole, “my recovery has to continue, and will.”

On the first day of the program, Martinez and the others told Chelsea Now, everyone is given a blank page and told to write down their answer to the question: Who am I?

“No one had ever asked me to think about that before,” said Martinez.

That central question, said Stay’N Out director Paula Martin, is essential to her “ladies” acquiring the emotional tools they need.

“They always talk about rehabilitating—how about ha-bilitating?” said Martin, a short, vivid woman whose long nails and perfectly toned clothes echo her years as a model and flight attendant, which she left behind long ago for clinical work. “A lot of our ladies raised their siblings, because their parents were drug addicts, or absent or… So, they didn’t get it [the skills they needed] then. You can’t redo someone who didn’t get it the first time.”

Stay’N Out treats substance abuse as both a chemical dependency and a symptom of deeper problems, problems that if left unresolved will arise again in equally bad ways. And it treats the solution as a process of intensive work coupled with personal responsibility for even the smallest choices, and helps inmates learn to make different choices than before.

A contract for new decisions

Thus, the program Martin runs on the eighth floor of Bayview is extremely structured, leaving inmates with few initial choices at first. The first week Chelsea Now visited, the weekly Encounter group was going on in the small common room; outside, on a bulletin board bearing DOCS notices and holiday cards, the day’s schedule blared, starting with: “5:00–6:00 a.m.: Service Crew, Learning Experiences or Contract Wake Up.”

“Contract” means the resident has violated one of the program’s or prison’s rules, and has been prescribed “learning experiences” as a consequence. “Learning experiences” can be a writing assignment, an extra hour of kitchen duty or some other form of restitution.

Every hour after 6:00 was similarly filled, from morning meetings to individual counseling to groups, some practical (everything from resumé writing to cooking), some therapeutic (such as incest or domestic violence issues, or anger management). Aware that the latter counseling groups can trigger deep responses in their population, 80 percent of whom have survived violence or abuse prior to incarceration, the staff, all of whom are certified as qualified health professionals by the state Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services, keep on the watch to support and catch anyone who may fall. “It doesn’t happen that often,” said Martin, “but we are clinicians and we are prepared.”

Last Friday, approximately 10 women were singing and dancing in the common room, in a group called on the schedule “Tension Release,” which helps inmates learn to blow off steam without using drugs. “You missed the dancing!” one resident told Martin when she arrived with Chelsea Now in tow. “We had the merengue on!”

Martin says that theraputic communities like Stay’N Out, with their mix of gentle confrontation, deep therapy and personal accountability, are not appropriate for all inmates. “Not everybody can do this,” she said. “Other programs, like ASAT and the others—they’re good for people who aren’t ready for this kind of intense engagement.”

Martin herself came to corrections in 1996, after 12 years as director of prevention for the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), the city’s child welfare/foster care agency. After running a few workshops at Bayview for incarcerated mothers, Martin said, “I knew this was where I belonged.” Hearing the stories inmates tell, she said, was both humbling and a challenge to her long-honed counseling skills.

“I’ve always liked a challenge, and this—this is a real challenge,” she said. “When you help somebody here, you have really done something.”

She does it, she said, by being honest about what she’s doing there—and what she requires of the inmates. “They have this concept of, ‘You rolling with blue or you rolling with green?’” said Martin, explaining that “blue” means guards and “green” is for the uniforms all inmates wear.

“I tell them, ‘I’m rolling with me!’ ” Martin said, adding, “But I also remind them, ‘This is DOCS house. You have to respect that.’”

Martin said that she commends DOCS for working with Stay’N Out, whose “touchy-feely” style, with its encounter groups and dancing in the halls, is different from the department’s more buttoned-down approach. “To me, each of these ladies is an expression of beautiful life,” she said. “To DOCS, these are inmates.”

Live or Memorex?

That contrast with DOCS has occasionally led to friction, including efforts to pull NYTC’s contract and award it to a different agency, according to Peter Fry, a vocational counselor in the NYTC national office in Hell’s Kitchen. In early 2002, said Fry, only a vigorous pressure campaign, with the participation of numerous elected officials including the Black and Hispanic Caucus of the New York State Assembly, prevented the in-prison program’s demise.

“But our support is pretty broad,” said Fry. “People know that what we do works.”

A 1996 DOCS study of Stay’N Out participants found substantially lower rates of “return to custody” for those who had been in the program at least six months, and a 2005 study saw that 77 percent had been successfully paroled. Participants are now successfully completing work release and “community crew” programs, going outside the prison to work. One even became part of the tiny freshman class of the prison’s Bard College program, although she was transferred back to Albion before she could complete it.

Stay’N Out’s program is designed to last six to 12 months, but some women stay longer. Sholonda Tolbert, a 32-year-old college-educated mother of three, stayed in for 13 months before graduating this past April. She told Chelsea Now that when she came to Stay’N Out in early 2006, she firmly believed that she was not addicted to drugs and didn’t need therapy.

Tolbert, a polished young woman with well-oiled curls and a professional demeanor, said that as an only child, “I’ve always been someone who can manipulate and get what I wanted…. I came in [to the program,] and thought, With my vocabulary, my level of articulation, I can breeze right through this, and say nothing…. Overall, I was not willing to work on anything.” But demands by counselors and peers that she be honest, she said, eventually got her to engage. “They did not deal with me as an inmate, but as an individual.”

Sharing one of the group’s running jokes, Tolbert said that “Ms. Martin has these expressions, things she always says.” Tolbert began to smile, “Like, live –“

“Or Memorex?” three other women in the room finished the sentence.

“Live, or Memorex,” an image borrowed from a 1970s cassette tape commercial, is now code on the eighth floor, they said, for keeping it real—for saying what you actually feel.

Tolbert said that the tools she learned at Stay’N Out have helped her strengthen her relationship with her 14-year-old son. “I’ve gone down to the visiting room with them, brought the ‘Who Am I?’ sheet and had my son fill it out,” she said. “I’ve used other exercises to get to know how he feels about having a mom in prison.” Parenting skills and classes, a staple throughout Bayview, are particularly central in Stay’N Out, 95 percent of whose members have at least one child.

“I didn’t speak on it”
Another mother in Stay’N Out is Doris Romio, whose children are adults, since she has been in prison for nearly 27 years. She told Chelsea Now that when her 33-year-old son learned she had applied to Stay’N Out, “he was like, ‘Ma, you been in prison so many years. Why do you still need a drug treatment program?’” The answer, she said, was that she wasn’t finished.
“Before—some of the things that happened in my life, I didn’t speak on it,” said Romio. “It was easier to get high.”
When she began to talk to Chelsea Now, Romio’s voice was so soft that it was hard to hear her. During her first 20 years in lockup, at Bedford Hills, “I thought I did a lot of work,” she said. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and had begun a master’s degree before that program was shut down after the end of federal Pell grants for prisoners. She helped found the prison’s AIDS prevention unit and co-wrote a book about it, “Breaking the Walls of Silence” (Overlook Press, 1998). And she completed more than one drug treatment program. But none of it, she said, addressed the hollow space inside her, the space that only drug use seemed to fill.
“When we had that paper ‘Who am I?’ I was stuck. I didn’t know what to write,” said Romio, also a longtime mentor for younger inmates. It took Stay’N Out’s active, persistent program of confrontation, counseling and reflection, she said, to get her to recognize what was blocking her, including her feelings of being overwhelmed by her family commitments. “I’m a caretaker,” she said. “It was a lot of pressure on me.”
Romio’s voice grew louder and more confident as she told how two counselors had urged her to look at her own responses to pressure. “Now I had two different people—Mr. Gonzales, Ms. Martin—who don’t know me, and both were telling me, ‘This is something you have to work on.’ ”
Like Tolbert, Romio said she now talks more easily to her children, especially the daughter she left behind when the girl was only seven months old: “What she remembered of me was my smell,” said Romio.
Now Romio and her daughter talk about the future, about when Romio will finally be paroled in a few years. She told Chelsea Now that she hopes to complete her master’s degree, that she wants to go to work “in a social services field,” and that John Jay College’s Prisoner Reentry Program, where her former fellow inmate Cheryl Wilkins (who was profiled in Part 2 of this series, in our April 20 issue) works, has promised to help.
Questions are sometimes raised about the actual benefits of therapeutic communities like Stay’N Out, with some scientists saying that self-referred programs don’t address the most hardcore addicts, while one study questioned the appropriateness of its more confrontational aspects for female inmates (a fact that surprised Bayview participants we spoke to). Nonetheless, the program has now been widely replicated: In the past 10 years, in-prison therapeutic communities have been established in 32 states and at least 12 other countries, including Malaysia, Thailand and the Netherlands.
For Doris Romio, whose path through addiction has been the longest, the work that she has done at Stay’N Out has brought her to more solid ground, making her less dependent on the invincible armor drugs can briefly provide.
“Before, when I was using cocaine, I felt very powerful, and when I wasn’t I felt low,” she said, not so quietly. “I had no self-esteem, no sense of me, so I would take more…. But now,” she said, “I know who I am. And I don’t need that false courage.”