COMMENTARY
Fresh Start fills need for humane rehabilitation

By Mike Coleman

There are few options in responding to crime and addiction: We can lock up every offender, spending trillions on a continuum; or we can moderate incarceration to a minimum necessary for public safety, with a humane response that seeks to rehabilitate offenders while we understand and respond to the forces that shape anti-social behavior.

A protective device made of burlap helped an escapee scale the fence at O'ahu Community Corrections Center. Prisons are built to protect us from predators, but rehabilitation would serve to reduce recidivism. Advertiser library photo • July 26, 1998

In our struggle to move in a sensible direction we have seen some progress since the first prison was built in Connecticut in 1773, but it is a history rife with witch-hunts and horse thieves who were hanged at high noon and I'm sparing you the gory stuff.

Today it is widely agreed that without good treatment for offenders they are highly likely to re-offend and the statistics for recidivism teach us that their offenses escalate: Prisons merely produce more of the hyper-violent predators they were built to protect us from.

If you read the newspaper, this is no surprise to you. Without more prevention and treatment we will forever doom human beings to these economy-crippling black holes because we didn't do the kind thing and help them when many were little more than children following in their parents' footsteps. Consider that 70 percent of the children of prisoners will become prisoners themselves and that Hawai'i's 5,000 inmates have, on average, two kids each: That's 7,000 future cons in the pipe right now.

We're not just treating addiction today; we're treating generations of addiction — and every time we build one more prison or shut down one more treatment facility, it is a Promethean leap in the wrong direction. If you want to see how society perpetuates this problem in a simpler light, try to picture a man who beats on his infected arm with a hammer.

There are too few programs as it is and one of those on O'ahu, Fresh Start, is under scrutiny for practices most, if not all, programs employ: sliding their fees to a scale that the user can bear. Various investigators will decide whether Fresh Start was employing this technique properly, but there are very sound reasons for doing business in this way.

Typically, 90 percent of the residents in some treatment facilities have no resources and rely solely on the good will of the program to let them enter with only a welfare subsidy. When a problem resident fails the program a second or a third time and his family offers them large sums of money for one more chance, of course they will take it because it is one way to help the many who have no money at all.

Some former residents have charged that this is unfair. Others have complained that they were forced to carry signs for a political candidate. These complaints came largely from those who did not complete the program.

Give us a break here. Many of those Frank Fasi shakas in the '80s were from Habilitat, where Vinny Marino simply wanted to show support for the candidate who supported him. I was one of those showing support, and it was fun to get out and wave at folks and take a break from our jobs and therapy.

Then we ate a plate lunch. Marino had to force people to stay home.

I never met Fresh Start director Ron Barker prior to the other day, but if it were not for programs like his I would still be using drugs instead of paying taxes and running an agency to rescue children from making my mistakes. I went to Fresh Start and met men and women grateful for a real chance to rejoin society. It's a chance they would not have otherwise and for you and them, that is a good thing — far better than the alternative.

Do not forget less fortunate folks like these, their children and their dreams for a life free from the addictions that nearly destroyed them when you weigh the worth of programs like Fresh Start. Do not judge them too harshly in a less than perfect world.

In "The House of the Dead," his overpowering analysis of Siberian prison life, Feodor Dostoyevsky writes: "Humane treatment may raise up one in whom the divine image has long been obscured. It is with the unfortunate, above all, that humane conduct is necessary."

His timeless advice, written 150 years ago, might serve us well today.

Mike Coleman is president of Like A Child.