And you realize that you're giving someone a few reading skills, hopefully some confidence and security, but that you're trying to heal the scars of decades and that as you prepare to return to Harvard you've ignored a thousand other prisoners. To me it always feels like sending someone in Biafra a care package.

Many members of Phillips Brooks House Prisons Committee feel that teaching reading in the prisons does more harm than good.

"A lot of things have been done in the name of rehabilitation that have done nothing but increase the power of the existing prison system," committee chairman Joseph E. Sandler '75 says. "We've been used in the past to build up that system."

Sandler and others point to the Martinson report, released last fall in New York by the governor's special committee on criminal offenders, that said no rehabilitation program within the prisons has reduced recidivism rates or increased inmates' educational or post prison income levels.

"Our position is that we don't want rehabilitation to occur within the prisons," Sandler says. "Because it doesn't work."

He says he would prefer to see volunteers working on research and political projects, such as lobbying for the bill now before the state legislature that would take SDPs out of the prison and place them in mental hospitals.

Almost everyone who teaches at Bridgewater feels the futility at times and questions his own actions.

Basically of agree with the prisons committee, because it does keep up the myth of rehabilitation. Korastion said. "But for me the positive side of going and establishing a relationship outweighs it."

Jeffrey" Schnitzer, who did public relations work for SNCC and large-scale organizing in the late 1960s, says he finds benefits in the one-to-one approach that he did not find in mass organizing.

"After a while you need to feel that you can specialize, that you can directly help someone," he says. "I don't have much hope for massive change right now the times are not right."

"In the long-run I hope to work for reform on a larger scale," says Eric Mandelbaum '78. "Now I'm doing what I feel I need to do. Besides, what would I say to my tutee?"

A just and sensible corrections system should distinguish between those who need continuing care and treatment and those who if given some therapy and a job, could live peacefully outside an institution. But this is a job for highly competent psychiatrists, not the Department of Correction's informally-trained charlatans. A system of rehabilition that minimized the ex-convict's trouble in adjusting would make life easier for him and everyone else. Whether any rehabilitation can occur in a system dominated by corrections officers becomes the essential question.

It is difficult to determine how much if any improvement has occurred within the prisons system in the last two decades. Department of Corrections statistics show that work by therapists and non-disciplinary work by guards reduces recidivism rates; the Martinson report offers contradictory evidence. Gaughan points out that younger guards show more of a desire to help the inmates and calls them a new breed, but their enthusiasm may wane after years of work as corrections officers. Inmates do not always get along well with the few social workers and therapists, but on the whole they relate better to them than to the guards, who they know always have security foremost on their minds.

"Some patients respond to authority." One Department of Corrections supervisor says. "But for most of them, after dealing with the cops and all that, the last thing they want to see is another uniform."

The state hospital has an occupational therapy center, but only a fraction of the institution's population uses any of the facilities. For many of these inmates occupational therapy means making stuffed animals or mailing letters.