A Positive Prison Experience

To deal with the problem, the Ehrlich administration in November 2003 proposed a philosophical shift in the prison system.

"The bottom line is that these offenders are getting out anyway, whether we do something or not," said Tomi Hiers, who oversees the offender reentry strategy for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. "I think it behooves us to ask the question: In what state do we want these offenders to be released into our communities?"

A Life Out of Control

Riscart, who grew up in New Jersey, said her life began to spiral out of control after she developed a marijuana habit and dropped out of school in ninth grade. But the real turning point came, she said, when she was 19 and someone at a party offered her a drug she had not tried before: cocaine.

Soon she began selling her body to support a crack cocaine addiction and ended up in jail for stealing from her johns. For years, she said, she was in and out of jail and prison -- in New Jersey and Maryland -- without receiving drug treatment or training. When she landed in Jessup, she expected an equally pointless stay.

"I was broken. I was depressed. I was sad," she said. "I felt I was a nobody."

But two months into her sentence, she received an out-of-the-blue invitation to join a new program.

Other inmates and staff members have said RESTART transformed her, physically and emotionally, from a timid shell of a woman into a bubbly force who bounces around the prison waving to people. Now she has false teeth and shows off a black-and-white French manicure. Barrettes pull her jet-black hair away from her mascara-painted eyes. For the first time, Riscart believes she is beautiful.

"Can you believe that she was shy?" said a friend, Angela Thomas, who, like other inmates, likes to hear Riscart read from a book of prayers called "My Daily Bread."

Riscart will be released this month into an in-patient rehabilitation program in a quiet Maryland suburb. But the warden has invited her to come back and speak to other prisoners.

Legislative Skepticism

There were no inmates last month in Room 210 of the House Office Building in Annapolis. The chamber was filled with legislators, prison guards and correctional officials in navy suits . They were there for a subcommittee hearing on the future of RESTART, which has been the subject of bitter fights for two years.

The administration originally proposed rolling out the program throughout the correctional system. But it was eventually scaled back to two pilot sites -- the women's prison in Jessup and the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown -- after strong resistance from legislators who doubted the program would be effective.

This year, the department proposed a $542,000 expansion of the program into the department's pre-release sites. One inmate advocate described the cost as no larger than a rounding error in the state's proposed $30 billion budget. Several legislators expressed skepticism about the program. A report from the General Assembly's Department of Legislative Services opposed most of the expansion until fiscal 2009 to gather more data on the program's effectiveness.

Del. Doyle L. Niemann (D-Prince George's), who supports the expansion, said that the administration did a poor job of selling RESTART and that the legislature failed to do enough research to understand the program's benefits. He said partisanship had little to do with the stalemate, although others vigorously disagreed.

"It's all about politics. The Democrats don't want to give a Republican governor a feather in his hat," said Tara Andrews, director of Justice Maryland, an inmate advocacy group and a self-described liberal who opposes Ehrlich on most issues. "Its just a bizarre situation. This is the direction we've been trying to move prisons in Maryland for 20 years, and now the Democrats are fighting us tooth and nail."

Keri Beth Cain, an analyst with the Department of Legislative Services, said one of the main concerns was the impact on the budget when there are so many other demands.

"Let's be honest: When you're choosing between additional dollars for schools or for prison services, not a lot of people are going to choose prison services," she said. "That's just the way it works."

A Sunny Outlook

On a recent weekday afternoon, Riscart showed a visitor her cell. She had a Bible and self-help books, her laminated GED diploma (stowed for safekeeping under her mattress) and a TV set in the corner, on which she watches the evening news.

"There is no way I am ever going to end up here again," she said.

As the sky outside her prison window began to turn charcoal gray, Riscart pulled out a stick of burgundy lipstick and applied it delicately around her mouth. Then she looked in the mirror and smiled.