When Oregon prisons closed to all visitors in an attempt to keep COVID-19 out last spring, one woman in custody at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility was in a state of panic. She turned to the Oregon Justice Resource Center for help.
“I am writing this letter in hopes of saving my life,” she wrote to the nonprofit in April 2020. She had been one of 48 participants in a program called Healing Opportunities Promoting Empowerment, or HOPE, a gender- and trauma-responsive treatment program designed to address the underlying trauma that leads to addiction and criminal behavior. The letter’s author was in the midst of ripping off the layers of her trauma when the prison restricted visitors, including service providers, in March 2020, throwing the HOPE program into flux.
She never did finish the program, which the Oregon Department of Corrections officially terminated in July after declining to make remote accommodations for contractors. (We are not using the woman’s name, as she has not responded to Street Roots’ request for comment and has not been in contact with the Oregon Justice Resource Center staff recently.)
Now, 10 months later, an Oregon Senate bill, spearheaded by the Oregon Justice Resource Center, aims to bring more oversight to how the corrections department runs alternative incarceration programs, or AIPs, such as HOPE. Senate Bill 836, passed by the Senate and headed to the House, would require the department to consider all other alternatives before suspending or terminating AIPs for more than five consecutive days.
“Being able to really address the root of what leads women to prison was our goal. … Seeing what this women-focused, trauma-informed program could do to help people blew the water out of what I thought was helping people.”
AIPs were established by the Oregon Legislature in 1993 to address criminal risk factors among adults in custody. And 10 years later, in 2003, the Legislature directed the Department of Corrections to make the programs specifically emphasize drug and alcohol treatment, in addition to behavioral programs. AIPs are one of several tools the department uses to treat substance use disorder among incarcerated populations.
Prisoners who are deemed eligible for AIPs — largely lower-level offenders — participate in the programs for the last six months of their sentence and the three months following their release. This entails a minimum of 14 hours a day of highly structured routine, seven days a week. Participating in these programs move up prisoners’ release dates anywhere from a couple of weeks to more than a year, and participants are known to have lower recidivism rates than the general population.
Of the 547 AIP participants released in the latter half of 2016, 35% reoffended within 42 months of returning to the community, slightly below conviction rates for the general prison population upon release, which hovered around 40%, said Department of Corrections communications manager Jennifer Black. However, the corrections department indicated most AIP participants have a medium to high risk of reoffending because many of them have substance use disorders, so this reduction in recidivism rate does not accurately illustrate the reduction rate for their particular group, which is likely a larger improvement than just 5%. While the Oregon Department of Corrections doesn’t track this specific data point, Devarshi Bajpai, chief of research at the department, referred to a Washington State Institute for Public Policy study, which found similar substance abuse treatment programs, specifically for people convicted of drug offenses, reduced recidivism rates by 27%.
Today, there are 182 prisoners enrolled in AIPs, since all programs except the HOPE program resumed in-person operations in May. The number of AIP participants in 2021 is the lowest it’s been since the beginning of 2016, largely because hundreds of individuals were granted early release due to the pandemic, according to the Department of Corrections. In 2019, there was an average of about 282 prisoners participating in AIPs each month, with nearly 600 participants throughout the year.
Street Roots requested records from the Department of Corrections showing how much money was allocated for AIPs over the past 10 years. The agency estimated that approximately $40 million has been allocated to all prison programming between 2011 and 2023, but it said Street Roots would have to pay $684 for the department to gather data on how much has been spent on AIPs specifically, as the department doesn’t track what percentage of programming dollars goes toward AIPs.
Sen. Michael Dembrow (D-Portland), who is sponsoring S.B. 836, told Senate lawmakers on May 4 that the bill would bring more clarity to the decisions the Department of Corrections is making about programming. He said the need for the bill became apparent during the pandemic, arguing the Department of Corrections failed to communicate to AIP participants and provide adequate alternatives for programming. If the bill passes, the department will need to report any AIP termination or suspension to the Legislature within 14 days.
Sen. Michael Dembrow
“These treatment programs that provide structure and valuable resources to adults in custody must not be pushed to the side as we continue to navigate uncertain times,” Dembrow said on the Senate floor.
The bill comes after substantial conversations between the bill’s supporters and the Department of Corrections, which has argued it is already meeting many of the requirements in the bill. The department’s staff also said that AIP requirements are already rigid, and the bill could result in further limitations. They advocated for more flexibility within the AIP statute, which could allow AIPs to be offered earlier in prisoners’ sentences or allow them to operate on a less strict timetable.
The Department of Corrections also originally reported it would need to hire a full-time employee to fulfill the bill’s requirements, but Dembrow pushed back, and now, no fiscal impact is expected. Five Corrections staff members currently have some responsibility for coordinating AIPs, which are all run by contracted providers, such as the Pathfinder Network, which ran the HOPE program.
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The Pathfinder Network previously ran an AIP at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility called the Living in Freedom Today, or LIFT, program, which relied on a “therapeutic community,” a common approach for treating substance use disorders, used in most Oregon AIPs, where participants help each other identify the causes of their problems and hold one another accountable.
But Teresa Melville, a former case manager with the Pathfinder Network, said the LIFT program was not specifically written for women to address the trauma they experience. So, in 2016, the Department of Corrections helped the organization redesign the program to meet these criteria, forming the HOPE program.
“Being able to really address the root of what leads women to prison was our goal,” Melville told Street Roots. “Seeing what this women-focused, trauma-informed program could do to help people blew the water out of what I thought was helping people.”
From 2017 to 2020, more than 250 women participated in the HOPE program, nearly 90% of whom successfully completed it. According to program assessments, 88% of participants reported an increase in positive and healthy coping strategies, 83% reported a reduction in unhealthy and harmful thinking, and 77% reported a reduction in post-traumatic stress symptoms.
Kristy Reyes, who graduated from the HOPE program in 2019, told Street Roots she was reluctant about the program at first and was just doing it for an early release but ended up learning a lot about herself and why she acted the way she did.
“The program saved my butt because if I hadn’t done it and I hadn’t opened up and been receptive, I wouldn’t have my kids right now,” Reyes said.
When the pandemic hit and all service providers were locked out of Oregon prisons, Melville, the case manager, sat in front of her computer for at least 10 hours a day rewriting the curriculum to be delivered remotely. Four of the six HOPE program staff members, including Melville, had underlying conditions making them vulnerable to the severe effects of COVID-19, and they came to the consensus that the program would need to be remote.
“I was being contacted by my doctor because he knew I had worked in the prison,” Melville said. “And he was very adamant that I was not to go.”
When AIP providers were allowed to return to the prisons mid-May, the Pathfinder Network informed the Corrections Department that the HOPE program staff would be unable to return to the institution and provided suggestions on how to offer remote services, such as holding the program virtually or providing paper packets. The department determined it would be unable to accommodate these options.
Black, the Department of Corrections communications manager, said the agency didn’t have the extra employees needed to supervise and facilitate virtual or packet learning. She also said the department hadn’t identified any evidence-based research showing distanced or packet work to be effective to treat substance use disorder with incarcerated populations. Instead, the department decided to terminate the program effective July 17, and participants were given the option to continue programming with Department of Corrections staff, start an AIP with a different provider or become a candidate for short-term transitional leave.
Melville was shocked by the decision, especially since the department had helped redesign the program in the first place, and argued there had to be other alternatives to canceling the program. She described the termination as “heartbreaking” because of the work Pathfinder staff had put into building the program — and converting it to a remote model.
“I got to see real change happen because of that program,” said Melville, who argued program participants were left feeling abandoned and retraumatized.
Jackie Whitt, a founding member of the Oregon Justice Resource Center’s Women’s Justice Project, said she was in contact with many of the former HOPE participants, who were left “emotionally eviscerated” when the program abruptly ended.
“I’ve seen the damage, and the exponential hurt and trauma” that the termination of the HOPE program caused participants, said Whitt, who was formerly incarcerated and participated in another AIP, Turning Point, run by Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare.
More than two-thirds of former HOPE participants chose to either finish their program with Department of Corrections staff or enter the Turning Point program, also at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. About a third continued programming as short-term transitional leave candidates, and a small percentage opted out of treatment altogether. Many of the participants’ early release dates were pushed back amid the chaos.
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As opposed to the Pathfinder Network, when the state corrections department invited the other AIP providers back after the six-week pause, they chose to return in person. Laura Cohen, senior director of community support services at Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, said the department did its best to act quickly.
Still, when AIPs resumed, participants were disappointed, confused and angry about the pause in programming, Cohen said. No providers had any direct contact with participants during the downtime, as they were also unable to provide remote services due to limited staff capacity within the prisons.
Tovah Potter, clinical supervisor of New Directions Northwest’s AIP at Powder River Correctional Facility in Baker City, said that even though her organization was able to resume its program, the six-week pause was traumatic for participants. Potter said the Department of Corrections was doing what it could, but she is supportive of Senate Bill 836 because it “alleviates a lot of anxiety” knowing the department will work to prevent future pauses in programming.
“Hopefully, we won’t ever even get in a situation where we need to have something in place that says that,” she said, also explaining that only 75 of the program’s 128 treatment beds are full because of pandemic-related transportation issues and the need for extra beds for quarantine.
Black said the pandemic has shown the Department of Corrections the benefits of bringing some AIP services in-house, rather than hiring contractors, because it allows for quick changes in programming. This follows a trend of the department increasingly seeking to bring programming in-house.
On Oct. 16, the department attempted to bring community college-led prison programs in-house by ending its contracts with six community colleges in Oregon. This move was an attempt to address the department’s budget shortfall and provide consistent programming across all institutions.
In response, the community colleges used the power of the Oregon Education Association, a statewide union, and several state lawmakers, including Dembrow, to fight to renew their contracts. They argued their teachers had the needed expertise to educate in prisons and bringing these programs in-house could result in lower success rates. The Department of Corrections finally agreed to come back to the negotiating table on Nov. 12, but new contracts weren’t drawn up until this past February.
Advocates say bills such as S.B. 836 will bring more accountability to the Department of Corrections and encourage more collaboration with program providers. Zach Winston, policy director at the Oregon Justice Resource Center, said the pandemic highlighted problems within the criminal justice systems and AIPs, specifically, but it’s not just a “pandemic problem.”
“We’re seeing that, when stressed, the system has some weaknesses, and those have to be addressed, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s wildfires, whether it’s a tsunami,” he said. “It just can’t happen again because we saw that trauma during the pandemic.”
S.B. 836 now awaits action in the House.