Sometimes it takes a combination of education, counseling, learning self-discipline and responsibility — and getting a little of what passes for love — to pull a young person away from a life of crime and drugs.
In July 1, an option to get that will be removed, when the Kansas Department of Corrections closes the Labette Correctional Conservation Camp for men at Oswego. The camp for women, which opened in 2000, closed last year.
Labette for men, which opened in the spring of 1991, has been an alternative sentence for offenders 16 to 30 years of age who cannot be left in society without some type of correction or punishment, but who are not appropriate candidates for prison.
“No one has ever implied that what we do here is quote-unquote ‘the answer’ in Corrections,” Labette Administrator M.T. (Tom) Bringle said. “It is simply an answer for a select target group of individuals.
“It gives them an opportunity to learn some new skills, one of which is discipline. Many of these people have not had adequate training in terms of work, let alone hard work or cooperation in the workplace, so we do that.”
Former inmates have written back to camp employees to say thank you for the changes in their lives.
“I think more than most programs, the most opportunities available for inmates is that this has literally retooled people and made them productive citizens more than traditional prison,” Bringle said. “It’s effective. It works.
“We’ve got letters from people that have left here and written us back to tell us how well they’re doing, and thank us for the things that we did. I had one guy that actually moved in across the street from me” several years later, after he became successful in the career he’d undertaken after release.
Bringle said that the Labette program places a high priority on education, with attention paid to whether clients are dealing with learning disabilities and working with them on that aspect, too, if applicable.
“Generally speaking, everybody gets their GED while they’re here,” Bringle explained.
Counseling, substance-abuse treatment, life-skill programming and other needed services are provided as needed. The counseling, he said, is intended to deal with issues the young men have not dealt with before.
“We kind of look at this as a whole body sort of experience,” Bringle said. “We kind of use the old axiom if you hit the pause button in their lives and give them an opportunity to take the things that they have not examined in the past and give them new tools to adapt themselves to dealing with what makes them a better human.”
That often can be achieved by rooting out the causes of the problem, learning why they think as they do, and helping “find the disconnects or the errors in those processes,” Bringle said.
“All that’s centered toward producing, if you will, a better product — that is, a reasonable tax-paying citizen.”
Bringle said that about 60 percent of offenders who apply to Labette are accepted.
Terry Morgan, Lyon County’s Chief Court Services Officer, said that offenders must meet criteria to be considered for the camp:
F No more than five adult felony offenses
F Aged 16 to 30
F Mentally and physically able to participate in the program, which is a boot camp with rigorous physical activities
F No record of violent history or convictions for adult felony person crimes
F No prior incarceration in an adult penal institution
“They did grant waivers for some of those things, but that was just the general criteria,” Morgan said. “Most of the time, the refusals were because they had a physical problem, or a mental (problem). They couldn’t be on any kind of psychotrophic drugs.”
If they had taken psychotrophic drugs, they had to be off the medications for at least six months.
“Just about any felony that wasn’t a violent offense, they could refer them to Labette as long as they met that criteria,” Morgan said.
Court Services’ role was to make recommendations about the defendants’ suitability for Labette as part of Court Services’ pre-sentence investigations.
“We could recommend that as an alternative,” Morgan said. “But oftentimes at the time that the plea was entered, or at the time they were convicted, the judge would order us to do a Labette referral.”
County attorneys and defense attorneys also could request consideration of the Labette boot camp as an alternative to prison.
Though Labette has a spartan regimen and its inmates are not free to come and go at will, its routine more resembles military boot camp than a prison.
Days at the camp begin at 5 o’clock in the morning and end about 10 o’clock at night, Bringle said.
Once they have completed the initial training, inmates progress to the outside work area, still within the camp environs. Along they way, they are expected to learn about trust, teamwork and work ethic.
“Then the final piece of that training is going out in the community with work crew supervisors and doing community services projects,” Bringle said. “This is a graduated program. They actually have to reach certain marks before they can go from one level to the next.”
Labette inmates sometimes are taken to help out at the scenes of natural disasters, such as severe flooding last year in Cherokee County. They went out with some residents in that area to retrieve what was left of their belongings.
“The comment was made, ‘I got to feel what it was like to lose something.’ And this was from a guy who had been a burglar,” Bringle said. “He got to be around the people and feel what loss was. It gives pause for some reflection when that happens.”
Bringle has stopped being surprised that inmates being released say that the “platoon sergeants” who held them to standards of discipline have had the most effect on their lives.
“I kind of did a doubletake,” Bringle said of his reaction when he first heard the response. Then he realized what that meant.
“Adolescent psychology says that ‘If you love me, stop me,’” he said.
The platoon sergeants are the people who impose consequences when someone steps over the line in the sand.
“And the consequence means you cared enough to stop me,” Bringle said. “There’s no substitute for parental love. Period. But the accountability piece still runs true to that ‘If you love me, stop me.’ In this element, it is, yeah.”
• In Wednesday’s Gazette, an Emporia judge talks about the program at Labette and a former inmate describes his experience there.
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Posted by madpoet (anonymous) on February 25, 2009 at noon (Suggest removal)
It figures that the state would close down a program that actually works. I don't think most prisons do much to improve the inmates. If they keep closing prisons, where are they going to put the offenders? I've been told they are talking about closing the prison near Winfield. As if the state didn't kick Winfield in the shorts when they closed the state hospital years ago. A know a guard there and she doesn't know what she'll do if they shut it down. She's been there for ages and is getting old enough that employers might hesitate on hiring her. What a mess!
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