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This article was written for the PI News in the fall of
1996 by a member of the Regional PI Committee of Northern
California, presented here as a historical document.
Public Information Behind Bars
The Marin County Fellowship has the pleasure and
responsibility of maintaining one of the older H&I prison
commitments in Narcotics Anonymous. These are the San Quentin
meetings.
Although there are about 3,000 inmates who can attend
meetings, H&I sees only 60 to 100 inmates a week plus the 200
inmates at the boot camp who are required to attend the weekly
meeting. We estimate that this ongoing H&I effort reaches less
than 4% of the inmates who could benefit by our program.
The PI committee unsuccessfully reached out to the staff and
inmates for over 5 years. Recently, we had a face to face
meeting with the San Quentin Community Resource Manager while
dealing with an H&I issue. While discussing the H&I issue I
mentioned that we had a PI subcommittee that was available to do
presentations to the staff. He became very excited about this
and helped us to set up presentations in two different areas.
The first one was done in early July to 30 teachers in the
vocational education department. We will be making presentations
to the parole officers followed by the counselors. Each inmate
is interviewed by a counselor. Thus, it is important that they
understand who we are and what we do in and out of the prison.
By developing a rapport and understanding with this staff we
hope to increase the number of referrals to our meetings.
We will be doing PI presentations to the three staff groups
annually, at a minimum. Most of these people were unaware that
we had been bringing H&I meetings into San Quentin for over 10
years. While they recognized drugs as a common problem for most
of the inmates, they had very little understanding of NA. During
our 90 minute presentation, our 3 person panel worked to explain
what we do, how to find us, and what happens at our meetings.
Handouts included:
- Staying Clean on the
Outside, IP #23
- Facts About Narcotics
Anonymous
- Narcotics Anonymous: A
Commitment to Community Partnerships
- Narcotics Anonymous and
Harm Minimization Strategies
- The list of all California
NA Phonelines
We will be using the WSO Product Catalog in future
presentations so staff can order NA literature for their offices
if they wish.
The presentation was about 10 minutes of readings from our
Schools Project followed by 80 minutes of question and answer.
As usual, we spoke very little about our personal stories, and
quite a bit about NA and what it has to offer. The teachers
wanted to know if we would come back and do presentations to
their classes, if it was OK for them to refer people to our H&I
meetings, and why we were different from AA. We left a copy of
the Basic Text and It Works, How and Why for the education
department library.
This first presentation set the stage for monthly PI
presentations to the San Quentin pre-release class. This class
is made up of 33 men who will be released in the next 30 to 45
days. The class changes every month. This means we will be
talking to about 400 short timers each year.
Our presentation was 90 minutes long. (This seems to be ideal
for PI presentations) We again used our Schools Project
readings. We also read the 12 Steps. Again we did a very short
presentation with a lengthy question and answer period. Our only
handouts were Staying Clean on the Outside IP #23, and the
California Phoneline list.
A few of the inmates had attended NA while incarcerated. Even
more had tried it while on the street. One of the things that we
stressed was the importance of going to a meeting instead of the
connection on the day that you get out. We also explained
evidence of unmanageability by the fact that sheriff's deputies,
correctional officers, probation and parole officers and other
people in the system were involved in managing their lives for
them. It was also appropriate to explain that when you share in
a meeting it is better to talk about feelings rather than
felonies since the meetings are anonymous, not confidential.
There were a lot of questions about how to deal with feelings
that are brought up by attending meetings. We emphasized the
importance of getting a sponsor and developing a support group,
as well as working the steps and not taking anything including
someone else's property or self respect.
We were grateful for the opportunity to reach a number of men
who knew nothing about NA or had misconceptions and
misinformation about NA. Since these men are being released in a
short time and have made a decision to try to stay out of prison
by taking this class, we feel this is an ideal venue for PI.
California has 54 prisons and over a 100 camps housing a
total of over 120,000 inmates. This number is expected to rise
to close to 200,000 by the year 2005. The California Department
of Corrections is building 29 new prisons in the next 10 years.
In the last year they have included NA as a community resource
in their manuals and now recognize the importance of having our
program available in their facilities. It is an excellent time
for PI and H&I to come together and target this population.
PI and H&I can work together to provide meetings, inform
staff and have a cohesive plan for supporting each facility.
Jeff R
Northern California Region
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