Sobriety, Service, and Second Chances [Season 1, Episode 5]

- The views and opinions expressed during this podcast are those of our guests. No one person speaks for A.A. as a whole. - Clinton T. Duffy served as the warden of the San Quentin Penitentiary from 1940 to 1952. A pioneer in prison reform, focusing on rehabilitation instead of punishment, Duffy was one of the first to introduce Alcoholics Anonymous behind prison walls. Even in those early years, Duffy noticed how many men were coming to his prison as a direct result of their drinking.

Becoming convinced of the potential benefits of A.A., he recognized the necessity of bringing in outside A.A. members who could share their own recovery to the men behind the walls. He was the very first to do so. Here is Duffy speaking at the 1950 International Convention, telling the story of the first outside A.A. member who came to San Quentin. - I'll never forget his opening remarks.

"Fellows," he said, looking over the stiff audience, "before we start talking about Alcoholics Anonymous, I have a confession to make. I want to tell you, but for the grace of a power greater than myself, I would be sitting out there with you today, listening to someone else make this speech. For you see, I am an alcoholic, just like you.

I'm one of the guys who knows what it's like to go through those blackout spells where you can't remember where you've been or what happened when you got there. There's been a lot of mornings when you could have told me I killed or robbed someone and I would have had to take your word for it. There have been plenty of times on the day after a spree that I've answered my doorbell expecting a policeman to be there.

Maybe there should have been one because there are plenty of nights that I don't remember what happened. Alcoholics Anonymous deserves full credit for the difference from the way you entered those front gates and the circumstances under which I came through them today. Alcoholics Anonymous is the only thing that makes it possible for me to leave again this afternoon when the meeting is over."

- Duffy went on to say that those who participated in A.A. while in prison were more than three times as likely to make a success of parole than the man who avoided the program. Despite this stat, our primary purpose of delivering the A.A. message into correctional institutions proves to be a challenge time and again. But since Duffy introduced A.A. Behind the Walls, we've yet to be deterred. My name is Nathan, and I'm an alcoholic. Welcome to GSO.

(light thoughtful music) I sat down with Eileen, the Corrections Staff Coordinator, to discuss how her experience in the position had been, and how the General Service Office, along with countless trusted servants, carry the message of A.A. to the persons inside and released from custody. Hi, Eileen. - Hi, Nathan. - Thanks for joining us. - Thanks for having me. - You were hired in 2022. - Yeah. - And they immediately put you on the corrections desk. - Yeah. - Yeah.

And the correspondence you have with persons in custody, these are letters. - Yeah. Yeah, we get anywhere from 80 to 100 a week that we read, and we respond to. And we meet the need, whether they want literature, whether they want a service we provide, the Corrections Correspondence Service. - Yeah, what's that? - So the Corrections Correspondence Service is a service where we match an inside member, outside member, and they correspond. So I think, in 2023, we've matched 3,500 pairs.

- Wow. - So it's a huge service that we offer. And what it helps to provide is that personal support for a member in custody, who, especially now after COVID, many facilities don't have staff. So there's not a lot of volunteer activities going on where people come in and bring meetings. And so this gives that person in custody an opportunity to have contact with an A.A. member on a more regular basis. - Could anyone get involved with the Corrections Correspondence Service?

- Yes. Any outside member can write to us. There's a signup sheet on the website, AA.org. If you go to Corrections Committee, there's all sorts of information on correction service work, and there's a CCS signup form. - And now what about the Pre-Release Contact Service? What's that? - Yeah, that service is a little different because we provide it as well as local areas.

So the pre-release is when a person's gonna come out of custody; we try to match them with a member outside who's gonna take them to their first meeting. We want to meet them and take them to their first meeting and be that contact for them. - On this desk you're in contact with persons in custody a lot, but then also you have a lot of correspondence with trusted servants. - Mm-hmm. Yeah. - What is it like to be immediately working with trusted servants? - They are so passionate.

It's an interesting service position because often the facility requires a relationship with that A.A. member. So you're going to have a longer relationship with the correctional facility, and people don't rotate like we usually do in A.A. And I feel like I share all the time that I have been spiritually rearranged by working on this desk.

It is like nothing I've ever experienced as an A.A. member, when you talk to people who are in custody who are grateful for a "Grapevine," for the preamble, for contact, and for a piece of literature, and I realize how much I took for granted. And these members, when you get that feeling of what it's like to give that, that's the magic of A.A., right? This is our purpose. We get sober to help others. So when you find something that hits that so deeply, it's no wonder there's a lot of passion.

And so a lot of the correspondence are... A lot of them are just from members who wanna bring a meeting to a facility. We say, "Okay, let's connect you to the area committee chair, the district committee chair, so we can all connect in a way that's we're not just showing up at a correction facility door." Although I'm sure that sometimes happens, too. The pioneering of A.A. is still going on. We still have so much work to do as far as getting the message out.

- What kind of requests do you receive directly from persons in custody? - So we get requests on what the Fellowship is asking for and trusted servants in Corrections that we're asking for information on online meetings, facilitating online meetings in prisons and jails. The people inside are in a room; they're in the meeting, and it's just like you would imagine an online meeting that we attend. And the people on the inside are the ones facilitating the meeting.

They're leading; they're reading how it works. It's literally an A.A. meeting, just like you would imagine. So what we've done on the desk, what we often do, is we'll reach out to the Fellowship and say, Please share your experience with facilitating online meetings or any experience you've had." A service piece we're working on is a way to communicate this service to the Fellowship.

We have shared experience from the members who benefit from this service, and they said, "Whatever you do, you need to get these stories out." So that's our work. - So, correspondence, meetings. I wanna talk about literature, too. But what about sponsorship? - The other thing that we worked hard on was the inside sponsorship. In order to serve a member, you have literature, you have meetings, but you have sponsorship.

And often when committees bring a meeting into a facility, you cannot have personal contact with those members inside, so you can't sponsor. So inside visitation allows the A.A. member to get on the person in custody's visitation list and have one-on-one meetings, and then sponsorship can emerge. And that's another new way of serving the people in custody so people can contact the corrections desk, and we can put you in contact with members serving in that way.

- Getting literature into correctional facilities is always a big challenge. You have certain requirements, usually no staples, no hard covers. But still, when you follow all those protocols, a lot of the time it'll still get denied. So I've heard about these tablet programs in jails and prisons. The folks who are incarcerated are able to access emails, books, music, other media. How does A.A. fit in? - We're able to have contracts with the vendors who supply information on those tablets.

So we have so many pieces of literature, and we also have audiobooks. And we just did the "Daily Reflection" in audiobook, and, like, I think there's thousands of people who have already downloaded that within, like, a very short amount of time. So it's been an amazing opportunity to provide the message of A.A. to people who sometimes don't get mail physically. It is one of hopefully many services we can provide, and that can only help for people who are in custody.

- Do you have an estimate of how many tablets are in correctional facilities? - Over 400,000 and I know that we had literature in about 340 prisons in a year. - Has there been any big surprises while working on the Corrections desk? - So it's changed my perspective and my respect for just the people. They're people who do their time; they come out, and then we get busy just treating them like A.A. members. - I can see behind your desk there's this very powerful photograph.

It's a group of men, but I can't see who they are because each person is holding up a copy of the "Grapevine" in front of their face. - It's a picture of a group in the Angola prison in Louisiana. The group is called The Last Supper, and it is a group of people on death row, and they meet feet from where they're gonna be executed, and they carry the message of Alcoholics Anonymous a day at a time and stay sober. - Thanks for joining us. - Thanks so much for having me.

(light thoughtful music) - For current and all previous issues of the newsletter, "Sharing from Behind the Walls," please visit our website, aa.org. If you are interested in getting involved in the Corrections Correspondence program, sign-up forms as well as Insider Request forms can also be found on our website along with all kinds of helpful information. - For more information about A.A., please visit our website at aa.org.

For more information on "Grapevine" and "La Viña," including the magazines, podcast, Instagram, and apps, please visit aagrapevine.org and aalavina.org. For local A.A. resources, check out the AA Near You finder on our homepage, at aa.org. - We've heard about how folks in the General Service Office try to support the dedicated A.A. members who carry the message of hope and recovery to those on the inside of correctional facilities. But what is like to get sober when you're locked up?

We had a chance to sit down with one member who agreed to tell us their story. - Hi, my name is Tabber. I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober since January 28th, 2013. I got sober a few days before I went into prison. I had been to A.A. prior for about six months, but I relapsed. And then just before I went in, I had this thought that drinking or using drugs is not going to help me in prison. So I went into prison as a result of drinking and driving during a blackout and hitting this person.

And I ended up going to prison for three years and three months. They didn't have A.A., and they didn't have an alcohol and substance abuse treatment program. And I lobbied for both. And two volunteers who had combined over 60 years of sobriety began coming once a week to that prison to bring meetings to us. - What was that like, trying to stay sober in prison? - Prison is awful. Some people have tools to survive; some people don't. So being in prison was extremely challenging.

But gaining access to A.A., I was able to get a benefit of having A.A. in prison with these volunteers that, again, you know, went to great lengths to be there, to volunteer to drive in. People think that when you're in prison, you don't have access to alcohol and drugs, but that's not true. In prison, there's lots of supply of drugs and alcohol if you really want it. - So how did you get help?

- With A.A. there and having these volunteers coming in and hearing their stories and having them relate to us their journey, their way of overcoming their own addiction, and sharing with them our stories and our struggles, I think really helped us tremendously. I also availed myself of the program where you can write and request having a pen pal through A.A., - You mean the Corrections Correspondence program? - Absolutely, yes.

So, I would write letters to this person, and they would write back to me about once every couple months. And that was very helpful as well. And that was through A.A. The relationship was extremely helpful to me because I built a connection to people. And by having that Fellowship in that meeting in prison, it was almost like for a little bit each time we had that meeting, not being in prison. And so it made it actually easier overall. It felt a little bit more human again.

It felt like we were a little bit freer in some ways. (gentle contemplative music) One of the things that people in my situation are faced with are these parole hearings where you're judged over and over again based on something that you cannot change. So one of the things that you can do to show evidence of your change is not just in words but in actions.

So going to A.A., committing to doing that, learning from the volunteers, the communications with people on the outside, it shows that you have a connection to the community. And I think that that all helps you to show to the parole board that you deserve a fair chance at success in the community outside of prison. It also laid the groundwork when I got out of prison for me to be a success out in the community when I returned home. - So what was it like when you returned home?

- So when I was released from prison, I had lost all my money. I had a property bag that I was carrying around, and I didn't have a stable place to live for quite some time. But what I did have was A.A. I met other people in the program who gave me hope, you know? I completed the 12 steps, and I actually apologized to the person that I hurt drinking and driving in person. I was able to apologize to him and make amends to him in person, which was a very powerful experience,

only because, I think, of A.A. and my sober way of living. I was told by my sponsor when I got home that I should basically say yes to everything, within reason, but everything within A.A. So anytime someone asked me, even if I thought initially it was at a bad time, I found ways to schedule around it and to speak about my story. And I started speaking on DWI victim impact panels at hospitals and schools and rehab facilities, co-chairing meetings. Set up before and after.

Put away chairs, man, you know? - What would you say to anyone listening who's struggled with drinking that's now in jail or prison? - You are not alone. You are not alone. There are people in A.A., people who are sober, that will connect with you. And you may need to reach out to them, but I would highly encourage doing that. I'd highly encourage going to A.A. meetings in prison. It's a fantastic way to set yourself up for greater success when you come back home.

I would encourage people that are in A.A. to think about bringing meetings to prisons or jails where they can, if that's a possibility for them. If not, to volunteer with GSO to be people that can be reached out to in a confidential, anonymous kind of way. And also contributing funds where it helps to spread literature and send literature to people in prison. People in prison are people. Let's not judge people based solely on the very worst thing that they've ever done in life.

Just like you are not the worst thing that you've done in life. And so I believe that if we show love and compassion and support and connection with A.A., I think it could be a huge benefit to people. And to people on the outside, based on my own experience. I think being of service is a way to get you outside of your own head, is a way for you to live a better life, and this new way of living is really one where you can connect with people, and that's really what it's all about I think.

(light mid-tempo rock music) - We hope you enjoyed this week's episode; be sure to subscribe so you can keep coming back. - In this podcast, we respect the anonymity of A.A. members. Last names are shared only for those who are not in A.A. Thank you for listening to "Our Primary Purpose," a podcast produced by the General Service Office on behalf of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous in the U.S. and Canada.