Poorly coordinated agencies blamed as $650,000 unused

The U.S. Department of Justice gave Alabama $1.3 million in 2003 to help 160 serious or violent female prisoners re-enter society. The grant is soon to expire, having assisted only 69 women home from prison.
 
Meanwhile, $650,000 remains unspent, the women's prison population is at a three-year high, and the state is paying a private company almost $3 million a year to house female prisoners.
 
"It doesn't make any sense to me," said Foster Cook, director of Jefferson County Community Corrections and UAB's Treatment Alternatives for Safer Communities, part of the re-entry program. "Only 10 women have been released to the program by the Parole Board since July."
 
Another Chance, the program created by the federal grant, is a collaboration between state agencies and community non-profits. It works in prisons to prepare women, most of whom have served long sentences, to get out on parole. When they are released, they move into housing where they still are supervised. They get extensive counseling, help finding jobs and are tested for drugs.
 
It's the kind of post-release rehabilitation program Gov. Bob Riley's administration has been hailing as a critical solution to Alabama's prison crisis.
 
But Cook and other community providers say miscommunication, poor coordination and the Parole Board's unwillingness to release candidates means local nonprofit agencies either will give up hundreds of thousands in federal dollars or have to obtain a grant extension.
 
Without these kinds of programs, prisoners are released with $10 and a bus ticket, sometimes after decades of institutionalization.
 
Clotele Brantley, a lawyer who works with UAB TASC as the project manager for Another Chance, witnessed some of the flaws in the program recently when a woman who had completed all of Another Chance's pre-release classes at Tutwiler Prison was denied parole.
 
Angelica Willis, 31, has served 14 years for her role in the 1991 slaying of Sharma Johnson, the 22-year-old sister of a Birmingham police officer. Police say Willis lured Johnson to the car where her boyfriend Willie B. Smith robbed and killed her.
 
"This happened when she was 16. She went into the system at 17. She had no clue whatsoever about life at 17 years old," Brantley said.
 
Willis received some disciplinary citations her first years in prison. Since then, she's taken all of the self-help, anger management and domestic violence classes the prison offers, and she's been transferred to Tutwiler's Annex, a lower-security facility for trusted inmates.
 
"She's the type of person that our program exists to help," Brantley said. "I don't know who it is they want us to serve, if it's not people like Angelica."
 
Eddie Cook, assistant executive director of the Parole Board, said the board denied Willis because "granting parole on that case would undermine the seriousness of the offense."
 
The board does not provide prisoners with a checklist of criteria for earning parole, nor is the board required to give reasons for denials. So it's difficult to assess why so few women have qualified for Another Chance.
 
When the state first applied for the grant, the plan was to link the Department of Corrections, Pardons and Paroles and community agencies. Corrections officials who work with the prisoners would have a role in identifying the best candidates for parole.
 
Aid to Inmate Mothers, a Montgomery-based nonprofit, would teach classes at Tutwiler aimed at making life outside less daunting after long stints in institutions. The hope was that the Parole Board would feel more comfortable releasing women who would go straight to the community side of Another Chance, which offers a menu of services such as drug treatment and job readiness.
 
"The idea was to have a seamless transition, said Chris Retan, director of Aletheia House, a Birmingham drug treatment center that was to oversee housing and treatment. "But it never worked that way. That's the problem. We have a very disjointed system. There's not a close working relationship between the Department of Corrections, the Parole Board, the parole officers and the community-based programs."
 
Initially, Aletheia House dedicated an Ensley apartment building to house the women. The agency would be paid per client and promised a staff member would be there 24 hours a day. With only a handful of Another Chance clients, Aletheia House was not getting paid enough to provide constant staffing. Most of the apartments now house other clients.
 
Pieces don't fit:

"It's like Katrina," Retan said. "It's not that anyone was not attending to the needs of people in New Orleans, it's that none of the pieces were working together."
 
Another factor was that, soon after Another Chance began, Pardons and Paroles opened its own transitional program, LifeTech. Several hundred women were sent there. LifeTech confines the women to the campus of the former Tarwater mental health center, where they receive rehab and job-training for six months before going home.
 
"It's a different concept," Cook at UAB TASC said. "But we have been unable to explain to the powers that be, and I guess that would be the Parole Board, the difference between transition and re-entry."

Cook believes the federal grant will be extended another three years. Of the 69 women released, five have committed new crimes. Another 19 have been sent back to prison on technical violations such as failing to report to a parole officer or failing a drug test. Cook attributes the returns to the intense supervision the women are under.
 
Gov. Riley recently tapped new leadership for the prison system, officials who say community corrections is a priority.
 
"This is the direction that we're particularly interested in," said Vernon Barnett, who was appointed last month as chief deputy corrections commissioner.
 
He's working with Foster Cook to improve coordination between state agencies so federal money won't go to waste. "There's plenty of inmates to go around," he said.

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