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| Women at ACI now have programs made just for them |
| By projo.com |
| Published: 02/16/2010 |
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CRANSTON — It was a shining moment for the three dozen women who gathered in the Dorothea Dix Building last week to receive certificates and commendations for their academic accomplishments, graduate equivalency degrees and community college course completions. “For some,” Women’s Unit Warden Carole Dwyer said of the recipients, all dressed in their pine-green prison garb, “this is the first thing they have graduated from.” The all-female nature of the group was a sign of a new approach in the Corrections Department to develop rehabilitation programs for women. In the past few years, more and more prisons, which in the past may have taken the vocational and drug-counseling programs in the men’s units and transplanted them into the women’s units, have begun to redesign their approaches specifically for female inmates. Drug counseling in particular is being reexamined, said Dr. Fredric C. Friedman, clinical director of behavioral and mental health at the Adult Correctional Institutions. Women’s programs need to be more relationship driven, he said, because of the different ways women and men develop socially. Men and women, from very early ages, relate to their peers differently. Boys grow up playing army, then play competitive sports, women’s unit Warden Carole Dwyer said, settings where there is a conflict, a result and a setting of the pecking order. Girls grow up in a web of relationships, defining themselves on how they relate to others. “With women, it’s ‘How do we get along,’ ” she said. Friedman said men are more intellectually oriented. You can put them in a room, give them the facts and they will process them, he said. But because women develop their images of themselves based how they relate to the people around them, women will need to talk it through, he said. Dwyer looked at it the other way. “You want to sit some men in a classroom and tell them to talk about their feelings?” she said. There are statistical differences between the male and female populations at the ACI. The biggest is sheer numbers. In 2009, the Adult Correctional Institutions held about 3,500 men and 215 women. Dwyer said that difference alone means most of the resources go to the men’s institutions and programs. Among women at the ACI, about 80 percent were there for either a drug offense or a nonviolent crime such as larceny or prostitution that they used to finance their drug habit, Dwyer said. Among the men that number is closer to 60 percent. Because more of their crimes are nonviolent, women tend to get out sooner than men. More than 80 percent of female inmates are sentenced to less than a year. Among those serving sentences longer than six months, the average sentence for a woman is two years; for men, it’s three years and three months. Friedman said, in a way, the mercy of those short sentences works against rehabilitation of drug-addicted female inmates. For a drug-counseling program to really work it needs at least six months, he said. But with most female inmates sentenced to less time than that, the ACI and its drug-treatment subcontractor Spectrum Health Systems, have developed a program that can be done in two months. “I don’t wish anyone to spend time here,” Friedman said, “but, because they have such short sentences, we are not doing them a favor. At six months, you’re just beginning to address the problems.” Read More. |
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