MIKE FLETCHER, Kokomo Tribune staff writer
Being a prisoner at the Miami Correctional Facility is more than getting a cot and three meals a day. They do more than sleep and watch TV.
The inmates receive job training, counseling and an education and they help the local community as they pay their debt to society.
“Knowing someday a lot of these guys will be released from prison, the Miami Correctional Facility does its best to offer meaningful programs that better their lives individually and hopefully make them a better citizen,” said Ann Hubbard, the prison’s public information officer.
From religious services to educational opportunities through Grace College, Ball State and Oakland City College, to substance abuse programs, the inmates at Miami keep busy, she said.
The programs provide inmates with employment skills and vocations, addiction treatment, the chance to right the wrong with their victims’ families and communities, and basic life skills.
The Miami Braille Project
Offenders at the Miami Correctional Facility give something back to the community by helping out the blind, and in turn, helping themselves.
Offenders have already transcribed 15,000 textbooks pages into Braille and are currently working on transcribing 3,500 graphic pages as part of the Miami Braille Project, which began at Miami Correctional Facility in 2008.
“It’s growing by leaps and bounds,” Robert Eutz, project program director, said of the program.
The project teaches offenders how to transcribe school textbooks into low-cost, quality Braille textbooks, which will be used by Indiana’s school-age children in grades K-12. The books are provided in a timely and efficient manner while teaching a valuable skill to the participants of the correctional facility that will increase their opportunity for post-release employment.
Braille transcription services cost schools thousands of dollars for one textbook. The project, which is a collaborative effort between the Indiana Department of Correction, Industries Division PEN Products, the Indiana Department of Education, Center for Exceptional Learners and the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, officially began in May 2008 with 20 men.
With the costs to produce Braille pages between 50 cents and $5, Eutz believes the program has already saved the state thousands of dollars this year alone with the work the offenders have completed.
Along with helping the blind, the project is turning offenders into tax-paying citizens upon their release.
CLIFF
Orientation, education, treatment and re-entry into the community are the keys to the IDOC’s Clean Living Is Freedom Forever program.
The program instituted in Miami Correctional Facility as well as prisons around state, was praised recently by Gov. Mitch Daniels.
Last year, Daniels presented the American Correctional Association’s Exemplary Offender Program Award recognizing the innovation and success of the CLIFF program, which has been implemented at Rockville, Miami and Wabash prisons along with the Logansport Juvenile Facility.
The program was developed in 2005 in response to Daniels’ challenge to the prison system to aggressively address the state’s methamphetamine problem.
In 2006, 89 offenders at the Miami prison earned certificates for completing the program, which is a six- to nine-month intensive therapeutic program for offenders with significant impairment as a result of methamphetamine use.
It includes individual and group counseling, relapse prevention, community meetings and life-skills training. Those chosen must have a desire to change their behavior, have a history of good conduct and no history of violence in the past 12 months.
Edwin Buss, commissioner for the Indiana Department of Correction, said of the 188 men, women and juveniles who have completed the CLIFF program, only 1 percent have returned to prison.
Buss said one of the goals of the program is to reduce the number of people who return to prison. Right now, four of every 10 inmates released are back in prison within three years.
PLUS
Offenders also help in food drives like the Helping Hands Food Pantry and the Salvation Army in Peru.
“Being in here, I know what it is to need and want,” said Vincent Angotti, a prisoner from Chicago. “I miss just the little things. I didn’t know how much until I was incarcerated.”
Angotti and other inmates help raise money for the Indiana Purposeful Living Units Serve, or PLUS, program — a faith- and character-based re-entry initiative.
Angotti was no foreigner to giving — he used to donate to charities on the street.
Offenders purchase food, clothing and hygiene products from the prison’s commissary. Now, many offenders are buying more so they can donate to the food drive.
“It’s one more way for MCF and other correctional facilities to give back to the communities in which they exist,” Hubbard said.
“Despite their circumstances, the offenders at MCF understand these are hard times for everyone,” she said. “Their families and friends on the outside are struggling to get by. This is one small way they can show their support and attempt to right some of the wrongs they have committed.”
So far, the pilot program at the Miami prison, which began in January 2006, has been successful, said Hubbard.