June 27, 2002 | Read Time: 8 minutes
Michael G. Veal’s life has been filled with excuses and hard time.
When his younger
brother was killed in a robbery a few years ago in his nearby hometown of Avondale, La., Mr. Veal started using and selling drugs — again. “I was just feeling sorry for myself,” he says. “Another excuse.”
Upon being released in February from his second stint in jail — at a Mississippi prison where he had spent three years for peddling crack and powdered cocaine — Mr. Veal reported to a halfway house here. During his stay, he says, he was badgered by employees to find a job that paid well, and was denied weekend passes to visit his wife and his children when he couldn’t.
The halfway house’s get-tough approach struck him as negative and, at times, coercive. “At the halfway house, I was feeling like I might as well just go back to prison,” says Mr. Veal, 39. “My feeling about life was, ‘Screw the world.’”
But instead of giving in to his worst instincts this time, he sought help from Project Return of Louisiana, a program in three cities that encourages recently released inmates to talk about their problems, get drug counseling, education, and job training — and stay out of trouble.
Started in 1993 by a dentist-turned-sociologist with a penchant for tribal rituals and a belief in the benefits of grief counseling with a new-age twist, Project Return has since turned the heads of federal officials looking for ways to lower recidivism rates among former prisoners. An independent study completed in 1997 by the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission found that 25 percent of Project Return graduates were back in jail within four years, compared with 75 percent statewide. The program got $3-million of its $4-million budget from the state last year.
Unusual Methods
Mr. Veal decided to give Project Return a try after hearing about it from a friend at the halfway house. His wife drives him to the program five days a week at its flagship operation in New Orleans, a city that frequently leads the country in murders per capita. Mr. Veal spends 37-1/2 hours during each of the program’s 13 weeks attending classes, getting tips on job interviewing, and receiving treatment to help him stay off drugs. For his attendance, he is paid $5 per hour.
“I’ve never been through anything like this before,” says Mr. Veal, who says he had been addicted to drugs since he was 13. “It’s been hard for me because I’m not used to talking to people like we do here. There have been times when I’ve wanted to run from it all, but if it weren’t for this place, I’d probably be insane.”
The program has also caught the eyes of officials at nonprofit groups and state departments of corrections from across the country. Representatives from nine states have made visits here to watch Project Return in action in hopes of re-creating its model elsewhere, and a nonprofit group in Los Angeles and a foundation in New York started by the actor Richard Gere want Project Return to start new programs there.
Winning over skeptics has not always been easy given Project Return’s sometimes unorthodox methods. Ex-prisoners pound out tribal rhythms on native drums donated by John Densmore — a former drummer for the rock group the Doors, and a friend of the program’s founder and executive director, Robert E. Roberts. As a regular part of drug treatment, acupuncture is used to control cravings.
Former inmates also spend two-and-a-half days straight immediately after they enter the program in sometimes-grueling grief workshops, during which they sit in circles and recount their suffering.
“I talked about my brother’s death and how my father would get angry and call me ‘stupid,’” says Mr. Veal. “It was very hard for me, because I’m used to people rejecting me when I speak. Before I came here, I never would have tried to talk about any of these things.”
Perry Bernard, assistant director of programs for Project Return — and, like two-thirds of the program’s 30 staff members, a convicted criminal — says the 200 to 300 ex-prisoners the charity tries to help each year spend many hours in the grief workshops “so they can develop trust and build relationships.”
Another staff member, Russell L. Gardner, an ex-Marine who served a hitch in jail for attempted murder, then went through Project Return’s program, says the sessions “taught me to listen, to be able to hear what someone is saying without returning it with anger or violence.”
Seeing that one’s emotional wounds are recognized by others is central to the program’s mission, says Dr. Roberts, a man with a gentle voice and a bearish presence. A disciple of M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, and Malidoma Somé, a medicine man for the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, Dr. Roberts says helping his clients work through repressed grief can lower ex-prisoners’ propensity for self-destruction and violence.
“The monstrous form of grief is rage,” says Dr. Roberts. “The most so-called primitive peoples understand this. They have rites of initiation to help turn boys into men that deal with grief issues. Basically, in our prisons, we treat men as boys. When they get out, we have to do an initiation of sorts.”
Genesis of a Program
The son of poor farmers in Shreveport, Dr. Roberts, 58, overcame a guidance counselor’s verdict in ninth grade that he wasn’t college material, attending both college and then dental school. He ran a thriving hometown dental practice for 20 years.
“I loved my patients, my time, and my money, but I was unfulfilled,” he recalls. “I wanted to treat the whole person.”
After years he says he spent as an “adrenaline junkie,” during which he raced Porsches and performed stunt-flying tricks, Dr. Roberts left dentistry to go back to school to study sociology. He also began leading volunteer programs in a Louisiana prison in the late 1980s, where he would encourage inmates to deal with their anger and grief.
Using observations from his jailhouse work, Dr. Roberts finished his doctorate and started hatching a plan for what would become Project Return.
Help From Donors
A primary goal for Project Return at the end of the 90-day program is to have participants gainfully employed. For some, Dr. Roberts recommends seeking jobs that are located away from their homes. “An offshore oil rig is the best halfway house in the world,” says Dr. Roberts. “It doesn’t make sense to send people back home when there might be nine people there on crack.”
Some other charity leaders, however, criticize Project Return for not doing more to provide counseling and services to program participants’ family members.
“Eighty percent of the people who fail while they’re on parole in New York fail because they return to unstable family situations,” says Elizabeth Gaynes, executive director of the Osborne Association, a New York charity that emphasizes family counseling for former inmates.
While Project Return has received most of its budget from the Louisiana government in recent years, the program owes part of its existence to philanthropy. When a sizable federal grant to the organization was withdrawn in the mid-1990s, business executives in New Orleans stepped up, tossing in more than $500,000 to keep the group up and running, says Dr. Roberts.
Among the handful of small grant makers that support it, Project Return’s mission has resonated because of its success in making a dent in the high number of the 14,400 ex-inmates who return to Louisiana cities and parishes each year and eventually end up back in jail.
“We’ve been impressed with all of the success they’ve had in getting people back into society,” says Joan Coulter, treasurer for the Reily Foundation, a corporate grant maker in New Orleans that has given Project Return $40,000 in grants to evaluate its programs.
The charity has also received $25,000 from the North Star Fund, in New York.
Such private donors may play an even more important role in coming months. Facing a budget shortfall, the Louisiana government has put new requirements on its grant recipients that could halt the flow of state money to the charity for several months. Dr. Roberts says he is hopeful foundations and others will once again step in to help fill the gap in government support.
In addition to such support, Dr. Roberts says private donors are crucial in providing help to programs such as his in their infancy. Philanthropy’s role should be to spur innovative efforts that can then be picked up by government after some proven successes, he says.
Such support, says Dr. Roberts, might lead to more chances for men such as Mr. Veal.
Mr. Veal recently set a goal of taking computer classes at a nearby community college part time while working at an assembly plant.
Instead of using drugs, he says, he now reads, performs t’ai chi, and does breathing exercises to stay focused: “After being negative all my life, this place has taught me I can be positive.”
