Why Program Units?
Welcome to Sunday Morning Coffee! What a beautiful morning it is here in the Mid-Atlantic.I hope you’re enjoying beautiful weather as well and spending it with people you love or in blissful solitude, whichever one you need today.
I’ve been talking a lot about the use of program housing units this week. I have an article in the newest edition of the COABE Journal about using peer mentors on such units, I spoke at the COABE/CEA symposium about the components I use in building a unit, and subsequently am discussing helping folks implement ideas where they are. I’m not always a fan of program units, which may sound weird. My approach to education for incarcerated individuals is that everyone should get something rather than a small population getting everything. What happens frequently with program units is that the best “behaved” people get chosen to go in a unit where programming is more robust than anywhere else in a facility and then there’s lots of hype about how great an institution is doing at providing rehabilitative programs when the reality is they’re serving a modicum of programming to 10-50 residents and the other few thousand get a whole lot of nothing.
I’ve designed program units in various settings…juvenile, adult, jail, max prisons…and they’ve all been successful. Always my theory, though, was that if we can do this in one space, we should be able to make every unit run like this…with programming tailored to the population living there. At the last jurisdiction where I was employed, we started with one, then expanded to four, and when I left, there were about four more planned. Everyone gets something…no one gets nothing. It’s a good plan. It can also be expensive in the terms of resources, so you have to be creative.
My designs are always centered around education, of course, since that’s my area of expertise. But much like working with students in a public school, or working with justice impacted individuals coming home from incarceration, education may be a cornerstone, but I always design holistically to make sure everyone’s getting everything they need to be successful…cognitive behavior therapy, mental health services, physical health and wellness activities, workforce prep, family reunification, social and life skills, spiritual and emotional support, and plenty of healthy leisure activities. One of the hallmarks of a great program unit is connection. All members have at least one go-to staff member with whom they build a professional relationship, and they’re connected to the community (both inside and outside the fence).
We always start with paint and furniture, if we have money for furniture. Anything we can do to take the edge off the harsh space. There’s not a lot you can do in some spaces, but anything helps. If you’ve never been in a prison, it’s hard to imagine that some people live for decades in a space where there are no windows. Zero. I worked for a system where an entire facility had every housing unit built in the center of the building so no units had windows, and the hallways along the outside edges that originally had windows had at some point been replaced with some sort of opaque plastic, so even when you were walking with some diffused light coming through, you didn’t see the sky. The rec yard was too small for the number of residents they housed 40 years after it was built, so folks didn’t go outside daily or even weekly. Imagine that, if you can. Decades of living that way. So anything we can do to put some color (prisons also love the absence of color in housing units) in the space goes a long way.
Planning all of the services I listed earlier is a must, and deciding what the goal of the unit will be is ground zero. Why are you building it? Who needs to live there? How will you get the right people there to serve the residents, and how will you get buy-in? It’s a lot of planning, but it’s not difficult, and the return on your investment is, literally, in the lives of the people served within.
If you’re interested in programming we can help build, you can check out some ideas here. If you want to talk about ideas, contact me here.
Enjoy this gorgeous spring day and dream of summer lazy days, all while sipping your morning beverage, of course.
Cheers!
