The Honor Among Thieves

There’s a small miracle going on at the northern edge of Los Angeles County inside the California State Prison at Lancaster. It’s called the Honor Yard.

Both David DeVoss, writing for the latest Weekly Standard, and Saturday’s Daily News have takes worth reading on the program, but here’s my value-added overview and analysis.

California’s prison system is not just the largest and most overcrowded in America, it is also arguably the nation’s most violent. According to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, our lock-ups have roughly double the number of violent incidents reported in Texas prisons and almost three times that of federal prisons.

Unfortunately, corrections officials seem to know one dance step when it comes to dealing with the problem. It’s called clamp down, then clamp down harder.

This is why it seemed worth paying attention to the fact that, among the 800 inmates participating in the Honor Yard, the violence that characterizes almost every other corner of California’s correctional system, is virtually nonexistent.

Since its inception in 2000, the Lancaster program has seen an 85 percent decline in violence and an 88 percent reduction in weapons-related incidents. There have been no significant incidents of violence at all.

Less violence also turns out to be cost-effective. With fewer injuries to inmates and guards, medical costs go down. The program even saved around $200,000 just on the extra staff time NOT needed to document the violence that didn’t occur.

Since, in any given year, 40 percent of California’s prisoners are released back into the community, finding a way to encourage less-not-more violence among inmates while they’re incarcerated would seem like an exceptionally worthy goal.

(As to how the program actually works—I’ll get to all that in a minute.)

So what did the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation do in reaction to the Honor Yard’s success? Try to clone it or expand it for use elsewhere in the system? Nope.

They tried to kill it.

Up until last month, both the CDCR and the CCPOA, the state’s ultra-powerful prison guards’ union, were doing their level best to shut the program down. It took up too much space, they said, and what with all the prison overcrowding, they really couldn’t afford its existence. (Ah, the joys of politics and bureaucracy.)

In response, the Honor Yard inmates got the word out to friends and relatives about the program’s impending demise. Finally state senator Gloria Romero stepped in with a legislative hearing. Faced with appearing idiotic and obstructive by opposing one of the few bright spots in a staggeringly-broken system, both CDCR head James Tilton and the union suddenly got religion and publicly embraced the program. (Being the more politically agile of the two, the CCPOA embraced Honor Yard first leaving the Department of Corrections to lumber in the union’s wake.)

Okay here are the basics of the Honor Yard strategy:

For an inmate to qualify, he has to be drug free, have a clean disciplinary record for five years, and agree to live peaceably with inmates of races other than his own, and he has to agree not to participate in any gang activity.

That’s it. In return, there’s no time off for good behavior, but there are perks in the form of opportunities to better oneself.. For instance, there are college and GED programs, and classes in music and art. Interestingly, among the more popular programs are those that give inmates the opportunity to do small good deeds, like making toys for needy children and refurbishing eyeglasses for the poor.

So, what visionary corrections genius created the Honor Yard? The inmates themselves. A group of inmates who were sick to death of the racial and gang-related violence running rife through the California system, brought the idea to prison staff at Lancaster and, to the staff’s great credit, they agreed to try it.

Right from the beginning, the program worked—despite the fact that many of the participants were high control inmates serving either lengthy sentences or life.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the California Department of Corrections, the preferred method for reducing violence continues to be primarily punitive. Along with repeated mass lock-downs, one by one, the CDCR has taken privileges away from inmates—radios, hot plates, workout equipment, education—until there is now little else to remove. Had there also been rewards for good behavior, the outcome might have been better. But, with rare exceptions, it’s been all stick, no carrot.

Any Psych 101 student should have been able to predict the results. If you hit and hit a dog, it will become anxious and/or vicious. Most likely both. What the battered creature won’t ever become… is a better dog. The same principle holds true if you batter a child, or a prison inmate.

You don’t build better people through a punishment-only strategy. You create someone with nothing left to lose—the most dangerous creature of all.

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