Eating the Ashes: Seeking Rehabilitation

About the Book

Serving a very long prison sentence, Compton-Wallace has experienced some of the best and worst of correctional theory and practice. In this study, she relates heart-rending images of lives in disarray and describes programs that have been successful in producing rehabilitation. In Eating the Ashes, Ms. Compton-Wallace provides a brief history of the shift in penal theory, from "treatment" to "punishment," during the past few decades and provides anecdotal illustrations of the effects that shift has made. She describes programs that have proven successful in the restoration or rehabilitation of criminals. She relates some of the painstaking effort it took for her to earn the right to be a working part of such programs; she provides case studies of other successful examples, and gives credit to those who provided the counseling. Sadly, such programs are now increasingly scarce or nonexistent.

Introduction

FIRST REALIZATION ' "THE ASHES." I am a woman who was found guilty of attempting the most serious of crimes ' murder. This book deals with what I found and learned in an experience that few women have ever had, and none has ever written about in much detail. In my twenty-plus years as a prisoner, I have been afforded a rare view of correctional evolution. Having experienced some of the best and worst of penal design and theory, I've chosen to highlight what I've found to prove successful; success being measured in human emotional healing and cognitive well being, the combination making for what we think of as rehabilitation.When I came down off drugs, in prison, and began to realize what I had tried to do, I had two choices ' to deny or rationalize in an attempt to cover up my fear of reality, or to try to find that unknown which had led me there. I chose the latter. To find the answer, I had to take a gut wrenching inventory of my soul. Reading in sociology and psychology added value, but as the unknown was beginning to take shape, I was to discover I was not alone in my misconceptions.At first, I considered myself to be out of place. I didn't belong there, in that crowd of dangerous criminals. Someone had made some sort of mistake. I didn't know why, but I thought the others were truly deviant; not just individuals who had made a crazy mistake. So I tried to evoke my toughest faÃ?§ade, as a way of protecting the person I really was inside. In the meantime, to maintain avoidance of reality and responsibility I found ways to get drugs to take me away from 'the horror of it all.' I expected that the prison system would recognize what was wrong with me and set it right. Wasn't that 'rehabilitation,' after all? Back in the 1980s, fragments of programs designed earlier to achieve the rehabilitation of the prisoners remained, though many program titles now served only to cover the institution's two major objectives: retribution and control, with emphasis on the latter.During the early 1980s, Washington State was weaning itself from the 1960-70s rehabilitation model. Dubbed the 'model prison' in the United States in the 1970s, by 1980 Purdy Treatment Center for Women had begun to lose its luster. The traces left were behavior-modification practices which ' given the political temperament of the day ' were forced to get in synch with the new pendulum swing of a punishment theory. The prison's name was changed to establish the beginning of this hard-edged new era: Washington Correctional Center for Women.Unknowingly, I was a participant in these new corrections-minded punishment theories (adverse behavior modification). Gone were the once open discussions between staff and prisoners. Attempts to educate the women received less and less funding. Everything was changing'¦