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At the beginning of class, Mary Ryan goes around the
room and shakes hands with her students, calling each man by name, making
eye contact, offering a smile: “Hello, Frank. How are you, Dave? What’s
up, James?”
It’s a casual ritual, but it’s her way of
reminding the men in their prison uniforms that she sees them as human
beings. “These guys are known by number,” she
says. “When they come into [the first] class, they always want to
give me their number. I don’t want to know their number, and I
don’t want to know what they did.”
Ryan and her teaching partner, Ed Scott, are probably the only people
at the Jacksonville Correctional Center who aren’t interested in
inmates’ register numbers or crimes. Ryan and Scott, both
private-practice psychotherapists, each go to the prison once a week to
teach a class in “positive parenting” for inmates. I’ll admit that I was skeptical about the
notion of a parenting class for locked-up men. But here’s a number
that should interest anybody: A few years ago, an independent researcher
analyzed the program and found that the recidivism rate for men who
completed the eight-week course was 5.9 percent, compared with 46 percent
for the general prison population. Scott, the director of a Jacksonville-based
child-welfare agency called Hobby Horse House, founded the program at the
request of the prison chaplain about two decades ago. In the beginning,
half of the classes were led by a schoolteacher with a focus on more
traditional parenting education. Ryan stepped in when the teacher retired
about five years ago. With two therapists leading the class, the emphasis
shifted to what Scott describes as simply “helping [the inmates] be
more whole.”
The inmates get nothing — not even “good
time” — for attending the parenting class. In fact, just being
seen in the classroom, its desks arranged in a circle instead of straight
rows, makes the men targets for the derision of the more hardcore
prisoners. On the day I visited, I could feel a slight chill ripple through
the room every time another inmate or guard sauntered past the long row of
windows that look out onto the corridor. The men in the class would glance
nervously at each other, then shrug off the chill for a chance to talk
about their kids, their own childhoods, their own growth. “I’m guessing we get the cream of the
crop. They’re doing this because they want to,” Ryan says.
“There’s some stinkers sometimes, but generally even those guys
come around, because the rest of the class is just so heartfelt.”
During the two-month course, Scott and Ryan
distribute handouts full of suggestions to help the men connect with their
kids, find ways to communicate from behind bars, and answer —
honestly — the inevitable questions about why Daddy can’t come
home. But the most practical parenting advice they offer
has to do with staying out of prison. “It’s all couched in the
foundation of ‘Let’s just be better people and then figure out
the parenting stuff,’ ” Ryan says.
Scott, who leads the class on Wednesdays, always
begins the first of 16 sessions by prying the men open with three seemingly
simple questions.
“How many of you have ever taken a parenting
class?” he asks. Rarely does anyone raise a hand. Next question:
“So where’d your education on being a parent come from?”
The inmates, of course, answer that they got it from their own parents.
“OK, what did your father teach you about being a father?” That
question gets the inmates talking about their relationships with their
dads. In an average class of 17 inmates, only one or two
tell Scott that they had a positive relationship with their fathers.
Instead, they talk about fathers who were incarcerated, plagued by
addictions, or otherwise missing. By this point, the men are engaging in
what therapists call self-disclosure, which is where the healing can begin.
Ryan, who teaches the class on Fridays, starts with
the story of a Cherokee elder who tells his grandson that inside every
person are two wolves:
“One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy,
fear, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority,
lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy,
peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy,
generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”
The grandson asks, “Which wolf wins?”
The grandfather responds, “The one you
feed.”
Ryan translates the two wolves into modern terms
— the “higher self” and the “lower self”
— and the inmates have no trouble catching on. They list their own
higher-self and lower-self behaviors on a chalkboard. They talk about the
forces that pull them toward one or the other.
Over and over, throughout the course, Ryan reminds
them: “The higher self is a magnet for the higher self.”
It’s a concept they can use when interacting with other inmates,
prison guards, their friends and family on the outside, and their children.
It works even for Ryan and Scott, whose Illinois Division
of Children and Family Services grant funding the parenting course expired
years ago. They now teach the inmates for free — because the men they
meet in class bring out their own higher selves.
“They have a lot of wisdom that most people
don’t have at that age,” Scott says. “Mary and I both
joke that we should pay for going there, because what they have to say
applies to all of us.”
“It surprises me how much incredible heart and
soul is in that room,” Ryan says. “Every single class just
blows me away.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in May 1-7, 2008.
