Harvard-Yale Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety Develops Peer-facilitated Self-help Programs for Prisoners in California
By Ghostwrite Mike & Matthew Fletcher
Most people don’t realize that the majority of group counseling programs that happen inside California’s prisons are peer-facilitated, either by a currently incarcerated resident, or a recently paroled former lifer working for a non-profit, who has returned to hold groups in the same circle he or she once sat in wearing state issue. One Yale law professor who knows the visiting room procedure for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) first hand, owing to having visited multiple family members housed in the Golden State, has leveraged her Ivy League resources and social justice capital to extend to residents of the carceral state a critical array of learning opportunities otherwise derailed by budget cuts and staffing shortages.
“As a species, we have an obligation to deploy every tool of self-improvement we can muster to the trauma centers of our society—prisons—in the same way we herald higher education,” said Elizabeth Hinton, professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and professor of Law at Yale Law School. “Its about curating our collective free world knowledge and mainlining it to those who are living in confinement and legitimately crave the transformative power of self-awareness, ethical renewal, and constructive positive change. We need to foster the system-wide accumulation of and access to this free world knowledge on the inside – inside knowledge.”
At Valley State Prison (VSP), a low security adult facility in central California featured in a three-part 2023 Hallie Jackson NOW NBC News series called, Prisneyland, and since profiled by Hulu’s The Kardashians, a novel resident culture of volunteer mentorship is being funded and amplified by Hinton, one of the nation’s most preeminent carceral studies scholars and authors. As several institutions of higher learning come under attack by the Trump administration, VSP residents say Harvard-Yale IPIPS (Institute of Policing, Incarceration, & Public Safety,) is enabling them to do the work the state of California can’t afford to do.
“Our Community Resource Manager (CRM) recently cut all of our prison’s self-help groups, including AA,” said Oleg Tarasuk, a lifer who killed a pedestrian with his truck while driving drunk. “They eliminated the rosters, the spaces we meet in, and the staff who supervise our groups, leaving us with no community. Relapse prevention requires support, sponsors, and meetings; thank God, iPIPS has given us material and support from the outside.”
Thanks to CDCR’s California Model, a corrections philosophy inspired by Norway’s prison reforms, and using a collaborative outside-in model, a core group of VSP residents who are college students and paid by CDCR to work by day with the population as Peer Health Educators, moonlight as volunteer IPIPS group facilitators to deploy five key modules of self-learning that augment programs impacted by budget cuts by convening within the Honor Block classroom on C-yard.
“VSP’s Captain Welch, who runs C/D Complex, Associate Warden Davi, and acting Warden Bailey,” Hinton affirmed, “each deserve exceptional credit for enabling responsible and capable residents to create a safe space to harness agency for a proper purpose—the purpose for which we have classrooms at all. VSP is a different sort of prison, because its administration endorses a more humane culture. Sadly, CDCR is the exception—not the rule.”
Dominick Porter, a youth offender and former gang member serving a life term, spent over fifteen years in high school before climbing into college.
“I didn’t learn to read or write until my late thirties, but I’ve completed more than sixty self-help groups,” said Porter. “Now I co-facilitate multiple iPIPS groups and actively work to nurture my community. This housing unit is like my neighborhood. I care about its continuity, safety, and health. I feel accountable to it. I’m glad we get the opportunity to shape the space we share with one another. It makes a difference when residents get to have influence on the programs in prisons. IPIPS has been a game changer for us – we actually get to do the work we know we need to do – and we do it voluntarily.”
The groups recently cut at VSP are groups that afford residents sentence reduction credits for attendance and completion.
“Nobody in any of our iPIPS groups is getting time reduction credit for their participation,” acknowledged Porter. “I consider that a badge of honor. Nobody can say this work is transactional or motivated by some carrot held out for us. There’s nothing performative here. We’re doing the work for the sake of doing the work, because it must be done, no matter what. To me, that’s honorable—like the LWOPs who go to college without an out date. Knowledge is a human right, right?”
iPIPS supports five key self-help modalities at VSP: Barz Behind Bars (a literacy-affirming poetry workshop supported by Freedom Reads, PEN America, Radical Reversal, and featured in a practitioner paper published in the Journal of Prison Education Research); Writer’s Room (a journalism program supported by the Carceral Studies Journalism Guild and recently featured in Editor and Publisher magazine); PLOW (a parole suitability course emphasizing accountability and relapse prevention); Trauma Speaks (adverse childhood experiences processing); and Peer To Peer (group facilitator training).
“I’ve sat in a lot of rooms in prison, hearing a lot of people talk at me about this or that,” said Chase Doulphus, a first time youth offender serving a 38-year sentence, “but these iPIPS programs are different. I believe that’s largely because the quality of the folks who are sitting in the circle are there by choice, without external inducement, and thus, the caliber of people in the circle is higher. The shares are more profound. The honesty is complete. The listening is sincere. The feedback is deep. Its a legit community of serious people gathered to do a serious thing. When grown men in prison give up yard, the phone, video calls, and NFL/NBA games on TV in order to gather on the weekend to talk, listen, write, and speak out loud about difficult things, there is power in that proximity. It matters. I wish people could sit in that room with us and feel what happens there.”
Change isn’t easy. Deconstructing one’s worst moments on the planet isn’t comfortable. Reliving horrible experiences requires trust, bravery, and a cadre of firm but compassionate listeners to catch you when you fall, prod you when you need it, and sew you back together after you’ve spilled your guts onto the floor. Accountability, ironically, is one thing a real prison group will always deliver. Grace, however, is pretty rare.
None of it is possible without serious people sharing the space. The space can’t be shared if it can’t be accessed. At VSP, the space is accessible. The public may scoff at the thought of men circled up to talk – but these are the conversations most men in prison never learned to have. These are the subjects few men in prison want to explore. These are the teachable moments that, if internalized, make society safer when we parole.
Thank you CDCR. Thank you VSP. Thank you C1 Honor Block staff. Thank you to the men who show up, share, and affirm the very work so many of us, sadly, had to come to prison to discover at all.
Thank you iPIPS—it takes a village.
