Setting up a wide circle of chairs in front of the altar, about 20 men slowly assemble. Former inmates themselves, 47-year-old Fateen and Marcos Morales, 57, have returned to prison to facilitate this 13-month course. It’s a program called Guiding Rage Into Power, or GRIP, which began more than a dozen years ago and is now offered in seven California prisons. We are at one in Vacaville, southwest of Sacramento, where GRIP classes meet for eight hours once a month, with homework and study sessions in between.
Nearly all GRIP students are long-term prisoners convicted of violent crimes. Taking the course is no guarantee of early parole. Many graduates are not freed until years later—some never. In a country with a colossal incarceration rate (five times that of the European Union, for example) our grim, revolving-door prisons seldom provide much to cheer about. But I’ve come to Vacaville, which houses some 2,000 prisoners, and will return monthly because of a remarkable pair of statistics:
- In the United States, the likelihood that a released convict will return to prison within five years is 45.8 percent.
- For the 750 GRIP graduates since 2012 who have subsequently been released, the figure is 1.71 percent.
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