Teaching Young Offenders to Graduate From Crime : Counseling: A rigid educational approach seeks to divert convicted defendants from costly prison terms.

NEW YORK —  It was a unique graduation ceremony in the basement auditorium of a junior high school in Upper Manhattan.

Before the class of 1992 entered, planning committee members hung bunting and streamers, inflated brightly colored balloons and set up a large welcoming sign at the Eleanor Roosevelt Junior High School. They also remembered to bring the hand-held metal detectors. Even New York City’s Probation Commissioner Michael P. Jacobson was frisked when he arrived.

Presentation of diplomas to the first graduating class of the Edgecombe Day Treatment Center was not only a milestone to the young men who strode on stage amid cheers from relatives and friends. It also was significant for probation officials struggling to find more effective ways of re-educating and controlling convicted criminals in the communities where they live.

“This is a great occasion for me,” Jacobson told the graduates, who had passed an intensive regimen of drug treatment, remedial education and individual counseling, lasting as long as five months. “If you can make it through this program, you can make it, period.”

Edgecombe, the probation department’s special daytime high-security facility, is a major model in a series of experiments across the nation designed to try to divert criminals from costly prisons.

Many of the models build on lessons of the 1980s, when it became obvious to some law enforcement officials that more sophisticated methods of community corrections were needed.

Taken together, these efforts represent the search for a new face for probation at a time when it is under extreme pressure.

“People have begun to look for effective ways to rebuild probation even though resources are limited,” said Todd R. Clear, professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University. “ . . . The aim is to revitalize probation and make it relevant to its environment.”

Among the new programs:

* An effort in the District of Columbia to turn smart, aggressive, young drug dealers into business entrepreneurs and a second, also in Washington, aimed at hard-to-reach juvenile offenders;

* Courses in Denver designed to teach criminals ethics and a social conscience;

* A quick-response approach to drug treatment in Oakland;

* An innovative collaboration in Phoenix to bring literacy to probationers.

Some probation experts see Edgecombe and its sister experiments assuming a unique educational role as quasi-schools to retrain high-risk young criminals to re-enter society.

“We are taking everybody’s dropouts and educating them,” said Paul O’Connell, literacy and education services program manager for the Maricopa County Adult Probation Department in Phoenix. “ . . . Education is a real frontier for community corrections.”

The aim not only is to reform criminals but to provide them with schooling and skills so they can find productive jobs.

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The Edgecombe Center in New York’s Washington Heights, a drug-saturated Upper Manhattan neighborhood, is the last stop for young, often violent probationers on the verge of being sent to prison after failing traditional supervision. Many are addicted not only to drugs, but to the excitement of life on the streets.

Reaching probationers often is difficult and time consuming. But the results so far at Edgecombe have been encouraging. When the center opened almost a year ago, planners estimated half its population would flunk out and end up in prison. The rate has been only 5%.

“Without a lot of support . . . they (the probationers) are always on the brink of kind of slipping into the Grand Canyon,” said Richard Baxt, an assistant commissioner and the center’s director.

Offenders spend several hours each day in drug rehabilitation and attend remedial classes stressing such subjects as reading and math.

Probationers live at home and report to the center 8 1/2 hours a day, five days a week, entering through a metal detector. In New York City, where it costs $59,130 a year to maintain a prisoner in jail for one year, treatment at Edgecombe costs $4,000.

Many of the high-risk probationers read below a fifth grade level and are mired in a web of problems--not only drugs and illiteracy, but unemployment, emotional difficulties and dysfunctional families.

Graduates of the program, which can last up to 150 days, are phased back into traditional probation to finish the rest of their sentences.

The Probation Department is putting in place a system to track Edgecombe’s graduates over the next five years to determine the success of the curriculum. But officials say it is too early to judge the results, since the first class has just left the facility.

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In the District of Columbia, an unusual partnership is seeking to turn prosperous teen-age drug dealers into legal entrepreneurs. It also stresses values and choices.

In a proposal for Washington’s Business Enterprise Project, Systems for Educational Support, a private educational advocacy group, painted a gripping portrait of its clientele of young street-savvy drug sellers:

” . . . As in control as they appear to be, street-smart kids cannot hide an underlying melancholy. They mask feelings well; they appear numb to the relentless violence and detached from the continual deaths. Some cannot imagine what they want to be when they are 21. The most cynical believe they will be dead.”

The program works in partnership with probation. Applicants, 16 to 20 years old, undergo intensive screening, including an interview with the project’s co-directors. They answer probing essay questions and take an aptitude test and a computerized career and educational assessment.

When the process is complete, a portrait of the probationer’s strengths, weaknesses and interests starts to emerge. From that point, career and school planning begins. During the yearlong program, 200 hours are devoted in small groups to life skills and workplace readiness. Topics include how to get and keep a job, how to interview and office etiquette.

Soon after the project started in 1990, college preparation began to play a major part. Many of the drug dealers grew to realize higher education was necessary.

College-bound probationers visit campuses, spend more than 25 hours working on applications and scholarship forms. Business Enterprise staff members often will work closely with college and technical school admissions officers, sensitizing them to who is applying.

To widen horizons, the former drug dealers attend symphony concerts and plays and visit museums. They meet successful minority entrepreneurs.

The probationers hold part-time jobs, do community service and attend regular Friday night basketball games at Washington’s Downtown YMCA. At the Y, the probationers, many of whom are black, gravitate to college-educated black men--role models missing from their lives. The former drug dealers are taught how to dress for success. Many learn for the first time in their lives how to tie a necktie.

So far, 39 people have gone through Business Enterprise, with a 75% completion rate. All the graduates were scheduled to attend school.

“We think this program shows kids need expectations,” said co-director Alix Myerson. “If you have high expectations for them, they can meet them.”

A second bright spot in the District of Columbia is the Probation Department’s High Intensity Treatment Supervision Program. Only 8% of the people in HITS commit new crimes, as opposed to more than 40% in general probation.

“The HITS program was set up to deal with the drug distributor on the brink of being sent to jail,” said Alan M. Schuman, director of social services for Washington’s Superior Court who serves as the district’s chief probation officer. “It costs about one-tenth of what it costs to institutionalize a kid in the juvenile system.”

Not only must the young probationers keep a strict curfew seven days a week for a year. They must submit to weekly drug testing and complete a 13-week drug counseling group. They are required to participate in up to 200 hours of community service, attend school or receive vocational training and family counseling. Sometimes, probationers elect jail rather than join the HITS program, saying it is easier to be locked up for three to six months than to observe the stringent home curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. seven days a week.

Single violations of the HITS curfew can bring reprimands; a sustained pattern can mean incarceration.

To assure that teen-agers abide by the curfew, a special late-night team of probation officers rides through the city in a van, phoning the young offenders and ordering them to appear at the front doors of their homes. When the phone isn’t answered, the officers visit. This is often dangerous work, carried out in the dead of the night in a city with the highest homicide rate in the nation.

One recent night, after showing their gold badges to guards at a gate, probation officers Terry Boozer and Stephen Liggon entered a sand-colored brick building at the Clifton Terrace Apartments in Northwest Washington. It was 25 minutes past midnight; a security guard at the project had been wounded days earlier.

The elevator was stuck, so Boozer and Liggon, who were unarmed, climbed flights of stairs carpeted with a vast menu of spilled fast foods on their way to an apartment on the fourth floor.

Liggon knocked, there was no answer. The story was the same in a second building: stuck elevator and no one home.

On their way back to the van, the probation officers spotted one of their targets sitting nonchalantly on a courtyard bench. They didn’t believe his reason for breaking curfew--that he had just returned from visiting his mother in the hospital. The other teen-ager was nowhere to be found, and both probationers were listed as violators.

Two other programs take the educational role of probation a step further.

In Arizona, where surveys showed 65% of criminals on probation hadn’t completed high school and 10% were functionally illiterate, an aggressive effort is under way to combat illiteracy. Computerized learning centers were set up in probation offices throughout the state.

The computer programs, used with the help of school districts and volunteers, allow offenders to work at their own pace with immediate feedback. Several of the centers offer preparation for high school equivalency diplomas, and plans are underway to expand the program even further with computerized job skills training.

“Education is a preventive type of treatment,” said O’Connell, the official of the Maricopa County Adult Probation Department. “The biggest thing we see up front is people’s self-esteem level shoots up. Education is a real frontier for community corrections.”

Since the program began in 1990, about 2,000 criminals have taken the courses. Preliminary studies show that offenders who complete the curriculum are more likely to successfully finish probation than people who do not take advantage of the educational opportunity.

In Colorado, small groups of high-risk drug offenders meet in seminars designed to teach critical thinking, problem solving, values and social controls. Researchers have found that criminals often have serious deficits in reasoning skills.

During one exercise, each probationer is asked to write down a personal problem he or she has experienced. The teacher presents one of the papers to the class, who dissects it. The approach stresses recognition of other people’s feelings and perspectives, exploring the consequences of action and picking the most satisfactory solution.

“If you can increase a person’s social conduct, you can reduce their lack of concern for others which leads to victimization,” said Vern Fogg, administrator of intensive supervision programs in the Colorado Judicial Department. “We are teaching people to think in a socially acceptable way.”

Follow-up studies show that a group of high-risk drug offenders over age 26 who participated in the program were six times less likely to violate probation than a control group.

All the programs designed to re-educate offenders focus on a drug-free lifestyle.

A study by the National Institute of Drug Abuse found that 64% of all probationers used narcotics at the time of their arrest--and persuading offenders to break the drug habit remains difficult. One lesson is that speedy action is necessary.

Working closely with the municipal court in Oakland, the Alameda County Probation Department stresses prompt referral to mandatory drug counseling while criminals are most amenable to change.

Quick diversion steers first-time drug offenders into treatment within days of their arraignment. Previous protocols in Oakland called for a six- to eight-week waiting period before treatment began. The result: More than one-third of the probationers dropped out before the first class session. Now, probationers begin treatment an hour after the court approves diversion.

“The key word is immediacy,” said Jeffrey S. Tauber, a municipal court judge in the Oakland-Piedmont-Emeryville Judicial District. “You have to reach people while they are vulnerable and while there is a potential for intervention.”

“We are finding that recidivism of felonies is down by more than 50% and retention in the program is almost 100%,” he added.

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In New York City, officials estimate some 15,000 young offenders--almost one fourth of all probationers--could benefit from the Edgecombe Day Treatment Center.

One such offender was Andre, who stood at the crossroads of his life. At age 23, he struggled at Edgecombe to go straight and stay out of prison, but the lure of the streets still was strong.

“Out there, it’s the best,” he said wistfully. “You get fresh air. . . . I see girls just passing by. I love to talk to them, drink, smoke reefer, just live it up, feel good. In here, I’m wasting my time. I could be outside right now having fun--nice hot date. What I used to do from 13 on, before I got arrested, is steal cars and drive. I like to drive.”

But as Andre, a high school dropout who was arrested for auto theft, talked further in one of Edgecombe’s classrooms, fear also emerged. It was clear, beneath his bravado, that he was undergoing changes.

“I don’t know when I am going to die. I am going to try to live until I am 30. I could die out there. Half my friends have died,” Andre mused.

He paused for a moment. “I have been here for two months. It’s all right. . . . It’s not the street, but it’s not prison either. You don’t have drugs, there ain’t no fights, stabbings, shootings, no cursing. That’s nice. You just sit there, read, write, listen to what they got to say.”

Andre was asked what he would tell a son of his someday about Edgecombe.

“I would like to tell him, ‘Do what you gotta do, but just don’t get in no trouble--just don’t go against the law. . . . Don’t do nothing bad, please.’ I have been in that boat.”