By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 8, 2006

In all the times Allyson Riscart had landed in jail -- and she says there were more than she can remember -- the cocaine-addicted prostitute couldn't get into GED classes or a drug treatment program or a job-training initiative. In short, she couldn't get help.

So when she arrived in 2004 at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup, Riscart expected more of the same. With three teeth in her mouth and such self-loathing that she couldn't look in the mirror, she planned to serve out her six-year sentence by watching TV and dreaming of her return to Baltimore.

But in a stroke of fate that she believes transformed her life, Riscart, now 40, enrolled in a pilot program that focused on rehabilitation, not retribution. The ninth-grade dropout earned her general equivalency diploma, kicked her drug habit and got a sewing shop job. She is preparing to leave this month for the outside world, where she hopes to work in real estate. 

"Getting locked up here is the best thing that ever happened to me," said Riscart, who has been incarcerated at least six times.

Riscart is a beneficiary of a shift in priorities. After a quarter-century of dwindling emphasis on rehabilitating inmates, corrections systems across the country are refocusing on drug treatment, education and vocational programs. Virginia, for example, has created a committee focused on programs to prepare inmates for release.

"We're seeing a sea change now away from the lock-'em-up-and-
throw-away-the-key approach," said Debbie A. Mukamal, director of the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College of criminal Justice.

Contrary to political stereotypes, some of the programs are being pushed by Republicans, such as Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., although the GOP is generally thought of as the law-and-order party. And in Maryland and some other states, Democrats are blocking initiatives because of concerns that they will be ineffective and a waste of money.

The Maryland program, RESTART (for Reentry Enforcement Services Targeting Addiction, Rehabilitation and Treatment), is designed to help inmates before they are released so they don't commit crimes and end up back in the penal system. But because of a standoff between the Ehrlich administration and the Democrat-controlled legislature, the initiative -- with a $5.2 million budget this fiscal year -- has only two pilot sites, and expansion is in doubt.

For Riscart, though, the efficacy of the program is not in doubt. When asked where she would be if not for RESTART, her almost-constant smile quickly disappeared.

"Dead," she said flatly. "If it weren't for this program, I would be six feet under."

Some people assume that prisons are filled with programs that enable inmates to save themselves if only they make the effort. But experts said incarceration hasn't been like that since at least the 1970s, when states began to cut programs that the public viewed as ineffective mollycoddling.

But in recent years, corrections departments nationwide increasingly came to believe that the system wasn't working. Incarceration rates were pinching state budgets, and recidivism was high. In Maryland, about half of all released inmates end up back in prison or with increased parole time within three years.

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?"

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.

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."

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.