In Philly,we have 200,000 people who are no longer on probation or parole.What about them? How can they be included in reentry?

Iowa has numerous State, nonprofit, community college and religious entities helping ex-offenders in reentry: improve their soft and hard skills; find jobs, housing, transportation, etc. Some are partner agencies with Iowa Workforce Development (IWD).

My graduate internship in vocational rehabilitation counseling at Drake University was spent at IWD during the 2008 Fall and 2009 Spring semesters. I was an Employment Specialist working with offenders and ex-offenders. Elaine Bales, MS/OWDS, Community Treatment Coordinator, Department of Correctional Services, was my supervisor.

• Compiled a Reentry Resource List for the Des Moines area that I still maintain and email to numerous central Iowa agencies – the Department of Corrections submitted it to the United Way 211 Service
• Made client folders with relevant reentry brochures and handouts rather than waste time gathering the information during the interview – inappropriate items were recycled to new folders
• IWD staff brought people with a criminal history to me for help finding employment when the client’s needs did not meet the criteria of Partner Agency mandates
o Completed assessments and career case planning
o Referred clients to other resources to meet their needs
• Networking with professionals, religious organizations and advocacy programs in the Iowa reentry: member of Friends of Iowa Female Prisoners, mentor to The Winner’s Circle and Circle of Support (female peer-led reentry groups), volunteer at The Roundtable Reentry Group (group that helped get the certificate of employability passed)
• I am volunteering two hours a day, five days a week, at IWD to continue to help this population. I also co-facilitate POETS (Providing Opportunities for Ex-offenders To Succeed) classes on Tuesday afternoons.

It takes a community to make reentry a success. Iowa has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the nation.

Mr. Rosen is correct about using ex-offenders who are doing well to mentor those in reentry:

Association of Women Executives in Corrections
March 2009, Volume 2, Number 4
Honoring the Past and Present

The enclosed tribute to Laurel Rans from Bonnie Kern arrived via the network of women in corrections who meet at WWICJJ and AWEC where we continue to pass on “our stories” of meaning and success. Laurel Rans was a pioneer in corrections in a number of ways. Certainly she was vital to the success of NIC’s leadership development program for women held at “The Castle.”

AWEC’s scholarship honors Laurel and her legacy of providing opportunities for women to develop skills, competencies, and the confidence to lead productive lives and pursue successful careers. Laurel was a true leader in corrections, blazing a trail to make it easier for the next generation of women leaders to succeed. (p1)

My name is Bonnie L. Kern. I am sixty three years old and completing my graduate rehabilitation counseling internship with the Iowa 5th Judicial District Department of Correctional Services.

I grew up trying to keep me and my little sister away from my pedophile grandfather. I told my mother what he had been doing when I was nine so he wouldn’t hurt my little sister. Her denial culminated in cycles of deafening silence that warned of impending physical, emotional and mental outrage toward me. She told me that she would kill me if I ever told anyone what was happening to me so I ran away a lot, drank as much beer as I could find, and prayed that she would die. Nine months and one day after my daughter was born, they were killed in a car accident on December 15, 1962. I wrote checks on my account after the money was gone and received a seven year sentence “at hard labor” on March 18, 1963. I was eighteen.

In writing my novel, Proclivity, which shadows my life, I realized that Laurel Rans, warden of the Iowa Women’s Reformatory in the late 1960s, was my second mentor.
My first mentor was a “lifer” who taught me to do my own time, stay out of other people’s business and not put my business on “the street”. She showed me how to do the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and then she died. I did two years on a one year parole and realized that I was safer in prison. I wrote a check on my father’s account, which revoked my parole and I was sent back to prison to complete my sentence.

I refused paroles after that because I watched women leaving and coming back, including myself. Parole was, to me, like taking a little kid to the candy store and saying, “Isn’t it pretty? But you can’t have any!” The only kindness I had ever experienced from another person was when “tricks” were nice or the genuine compassion from the dead “lifer”. To complete my parole I would have to stay away from everything that had helped when every cell in my body screamed for relief: beer, drugs & men. I couldn’t do that.

I don’t remember the names of the first two wardens at Rockwell City. We called the first one “ol three hairs” and the man, who decided that I should be the first woman in Iowa to participate in the work release program, is a distant blip in my memory. I suppose because I didn’t have that many encounters with them.

By the time that Laurel Rans arrived as the warden, I was already riding to and from the business college in Fort Dodge during the week with a young woman from Rockwell City. I also was drinking my lunches at a local bar. While I was on work release that time, I went to business college, worked as a hat check girl at a hotel during the holidays, and my father bought my convertible while I was working at the Carriage House in Fort Dodge.

Prisoners didn’t pay for their room and board, do community service, or pay restitution and fines before they were released in the 1960s. We didn’t know that much about Alcoholics Anonymous back then. There were no half-way houses or treatment centers. AA people coming in from the outside had been discontinued because the men had been caught “servicing” the inmates while I was out on parole. None of us understood the psychic change that I went through when I ingested alcohol and I didn’t know how not to.

It wasn’t so much what Laurel said, but how she said it. She told me that I mattered, was “bright” and I didn’t need to live the way I had been living. At first I was just glad to ride in her Volkswagen bug. I had never been in a car where the motor was in the trunk. She took me to restaurants and shared about how she handled difficult situations in her life when we were riding in that car. She talked to me and used humor to help me deal with my frustrations. She planted the seeds of hope in a person who had never known much hope.

The time frame has long since been replaced with other information, but I was pulled from the work release program twice. Once because Laurel got tired of taking me to her house, feeding me coffee and sobering me up before she took me back. I realize today how frustrated she must have been when she kept telling me, “You’re going to ruin my program!”
I learned to make custom drapes after I was pulled from work release and eventually I was allowed to participate again by attending community college. Looking back, I probably seemed so normal when I couldn’t get beer. What actually happened is that I skipped a lot of classes and went to motels with male students. When I realized that I was going to get pulled again, I set up several rides away from Fort Dodge and took a week vacation. I turned myself in at the Dallas County Sheriff’s office, it was called escape, and I was given five extra months.

I remember a lot of people yelling at me from time to time, “You just don’t get it! You just don’t get it!” And they were right, I didn’t get it. But they wouldn’t tell me what “it” was or where “it” was so I could get some and they were always mad at me for not having any. I was afraid to ask because I didn’t want to look stupid.

What none of us realized is that I was coping with my life and the people around me in the only way that had helped me survive a lot of trauma. My worldview was skewed. I was always on guard for the next person who wanted to hurt me. Alcohol and drugs had saved my sanity by allowing me to find short segments of relief in a dangerous world. I knew I was right. And I was right if all I wanted was to drink, drug, prostitute myself and go in and out of prison. That’s what I knew how to do. I didn’t know I wanted more until Laurel painted a picture of what my life could be.

I was released from prison on May 22, 1969. Laurel told me, “You’ll be back in a year.”

I looked deep into her eyes, “Over my dead body!”

After I got out and joined AA six years later, I finally realized that “it” was all of the stuff Laurel and others thought I knew. Like what to do with the rage and self-hatred that I ignored, how to get along with people, how not to drink/drug when every cell in my body screamed for relief. They thought I had learned social skills when I was growing up and all those things that help other people succeed in life. I didn’t. I didn’t have time to learn those nice things. I learned how to duck and weave, be on guard for the next person that was going to rape or beat me.

My childhood, as bad as it was, was a walk in the park compared to many girls and women I have met in mental hospitals, jails and prison. Laurel’s legacy lives through me to the many people I have mentored for almost three decades in AA and the offenders I am trying to help in my internship now. I watch them find hope when there was none, learn to believe they can have a better life as long as they are accountable for their choices and do the next right thing, and pass that hope on to others.
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I didn’t necessarily believe Laurel when she told me that I was smart and the only limits I had were the ones I put on myself, but she seemed to believe it. Today I know that she told me that I would be back in a year to make sure that I would do everything in my power to prove her wrong. She was right, I didn’t go back.

When two drapery shops paid me with bounced checks, Laurel was in my psyche telling me that I could do it myself. Somewhere in the 1970s I borrowed $500 from my father, he built my tables, and I opened my drapery business. It started as Bonnie’s Drapery and ended up as Dwinell’s Quality Custom Drapery and Decorating Business in Adel, Iowa. The manager of the prison drapery department consigned one wing of the nursing home in Dallas Center to me.

I had knitted a skirt and poncho and wore it when I picked up the fabric at the prison. Looking back, I know the outfit was pretty ugly, but Laurel could see how hard I had worked on it and told me that she was proud of me, that my outfit was great, and I saw in her eyes how much she wanted me to succeed.

That is the last time I remember seeing Laurel. She never got to watch me discover “it”. It has been a process. I was in my fifties, sitting in an undergraduate psychology class at Drake University, when I realized that everything wrong with my family was not my fault. That burden was physically ripped out of me that day and left me free to strive for a better life.

Laurel modeled how to share her feelings with me. It had never occurred to me that I should identify them, let alone talk about them with another person. My mother said she would kill me if I told anyone and the “lifer” taught me to not put my business on the streets, but Laurel spent time listening to me even when I didn’t know how to say anything meaningful.

When Phyllis Kocur, the woman who had been my parole officer a couple decades before, told me to not bother applying for an executive pardon from Governor Ray because he didn’t give pardons, I heard Laurel saying, “All he can do is tell you no.” I received my pardon August 27, 1982. When I was hurt driving semi over-the-road, I wasn’t afraid to go to college again. When husband after husband became abusive, I heard Laurel saying, “Love doesn’t hurt and you don’t have to put up with that!” Laurel laid the foundation for other mentors to help me become a person who is comfortable in my own skin most of the time. Thank you, Laurel.

MENTOR

A mentor does not give a person a fish. They teach them how to fish. If the person is given a fish, they are stuck there waiting for the handout. When they learn to fish on their own, they can go anywhere.

A mentor plants the seeds of hope in a person and asks God to water their protégé. They stand back and watch miracles happen in people’s lives. They understand that some miracles take more time, struggles and failures than others.

A mentor is not a banker, hotel, taxicab or childcare. They provide the names of agencies where the errant can find help meeting their needs. Mentors applaud successes and supply alternatives for disappointments and failures. They allow the student to learn in their own way and on their own time frame. Compassionate mentors recognize the emotional whiplash the errant must endure to change from the survival mode they learned as a child in a dysfunctional family to socially acceptable thinking and behavior.

Alcoholics and drug addicts do not make linear progress. They advance in a stair step fashion with the treads representing adjustment and sometimes regression. This frustrates many well-intentioned tutors and some even give up saying, “They just don’t get it!” However, patience, fortitude and a positive attitude have allowed many mentors to witness accomplishments beyond understanding. We have a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous, “If they live, we’ll get them.” Some die to teach us what not to do.
(2008- Bonnie L. Kern) (pp 3-5)

I do everything I can to help those sitting in the chair I once occupied and crying into the pillow my tears once soiled: http://assessingdisabilitybarriers.blogspot.com…