Cliff Footes was just a 10-year-old kid in Bowie the day a man put a package of heroin into his hand and a pistol into his belt. Walk to that waiting car down at the corner, he told the boy, hand the dope through the window, bring back the money.
"But you keep one hand on your pistol," warned the man. "If they pull that package out of your hand, you shoot and you run."
Dutifully, the kid walked to the car. Why wouldn't he? The man who'd given him the heroin was his brother-in-law.
When he reached the car, somebody inside started to grab for the heroin. The 10-year-old drew his gun and fired blindly through the window, even as he and the car raced off in different directions. The last he saw it, the car was plunging down an embankment.
"I was brought up in a world of violence," says Footes softly, almost shyly, in the shadow of blackened bars at the 19th-century Maryland House of Correction in Jessup.
It is here he serves a life sentence -- not for that crime but for other acts committed in the violent years after that day in Bowie more than 30 years ago. "I seen the older guys. I wanted to be just like them. I didn't care about nothin'. I would shoot you just as soon as look at you."
And so it went until three years ago when an older, harder Footes, long since imprisoned for life on a multiple-felony kidnapping charge, bumped into a rival from one of those Bowie gangs. "My first thought," he admits, "was to go find me a knife."
But another inmate got to him first, telling him about a group of prisoners who had discovered other ways to deal with violent feelings. Curiously, Footes felt relief.
"Most guys want to get away from the violence," he says.
Footes' dark hair is done up neatly in stylish braids. Behind him in the Artists Club room at the prison hang several of his paintings, stunning portraits of faces etched, like his, with pain. "Guys are really afraid, and that's why a lot of the stabbings go on. But when you see guys changing from their old ways, you think, 'If he can do it, I can do it.' "
Footes is seated in the Activity Area of the 130-year-old prison, whose reputation for violence is aptly summed up in its nickname: The Cut. With him are four other inmates, all of them members of the self-styled Management Council in the Alternatives to Violence Program, known as AVP.
Run by prisoners, it has, since 1989, so successfully deprogrammed more than 90 hardened prisoners -- many convicted murderers -- from previously violent lifestyles, that none since has been charged with even the slightest prison-rules infraction.
Meanwhile, teachers, principals, middle-school kids, college students, even police officers and judges have made their way to the House of Correction to learn the secrets of a program capable of changing someone like Cliff Footes.
They include Baltimore County police officer Kevin Scott, who works almost exclusively with troubled kids out of the Woodlawn precinct. After attending a recent prisoner-run AVP seminar at the Cut, he and local high-school officials began incorporating ideas from the inmates into a program aimed at heading off student violence.
"Kids can really learn from this," says Officer Scott, "coming as it does from inmates who have been where kids are and who know where kids are heading if they don't get help. It makes a kid think, 'How can I handle a situation differently?' Right now we deal with problems after they occur as opposed to helping kids find solutions."
Another supporter of AVP is Richard Lanham, the tough former chief of the Baltimore City homicide squad and now Commissioner of Corrections.
"It's an important program for the management and safety of an institution," says Mr. Lanham, who has spoken at AVP seminars, "but also [for] the future, when an inmate gets released. We need to attempt to intercede and give them a better method of resolving problems without violence."
Rooted in the non-violent theories of Gandhi and introduced to American prisons in the 1960s by a group of Quakers, AVP goes beyond the popular conflict-resolution strategies cropping up in schools and corporations.
Dealing with emotions
"Conflict resolution tells two people how to get along," says Dennis Wise, another member of the management council. "But the most important part of AVP is that it helps me deal with fear, anger or rage," adds Wise, who is serving a life sentence for murder. "It tells me how to get along with myself."
A third inmate management-council member, Nadim Page, who is also under a life sentence for murder, says that "at one time if someone did something to me I got emotional to the point I would resort to violence. I just reacted. There's a great deal of people in here like that. AVP teaches you how to think before you react."
The program initiates its members with a three-day basic workshop; it then offers a three-day advanced workshop and a workshop for trainers. About 300 of the 1,200 inmates at the House of Correction have in some way participated in the program, begun there several years ago by the late Lee D. Stern, a Quaker volunteer.
His role has been assumed by Bob Waldman, a former Jesuit priest with a Ph.D. in conflict resolution. Dr. Waldman, the outside volunteer coordinator of the AVP program, says the program makes three assumptions of its followers.
"First, you take responsibility for who you are and for its consequences," he says. "Second, you accept the reality that we're each other's community, for better or worse, and that we're going to pull each other down or build each other up. And third, as human beings, we have options other than fight or flight."
Many prisoners, he argues, have never known alternatives.
"Most of these guys grow up seeing violence and thinking of violence as really the only way to deal with something," he says.
A good example, says Footes, is a recent incident in the dining hall where one inmate stabbed another.
"It was over a $3 tattoo book," says Footes, shaking his head. "That's what goes on in here. You go back to your cell and you think about what you just saw and you ask yourself, why is this happening. That's what makes you change."
Many counseling programs deal with consequences, says Wise, "but if you warn a kid about consequences, you don't take away his frustrations. Why talk about his future if he feels bad about himself? If he's frustrated he's going to explode anyhow. So the first thing you've got to deal with is the conflict inside."
That is handled in the first day of the three-day basic workshop, with an emphasis on "affirmation." Each participant is encouraged to give himself an alliterative nickname combining a positive adjective with his first name. Cliff Footes, for example, became Confident Cliff; Wise is Determined Dennis.
"The first rule is you only say positive things about each other," says Dr. Waldman. "Which doesn't mean you can't say hard things to people. But it does mean you say them in a positive way."
Violence, he says, is rooted "in kind of a blind hatred with other people who you've never really had any contact with. You've never had a chance to get to see what they're like. That first day you get people to see each other in a way they've never seen each other. Guys realize they can drop a mask."
A key element in starting an AVP program is to involve the hardest cases in the prison -- something Dr. Waldman did at the Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore a few years ago. Into the room that first day came inmates who were sworn enemies, and after three days they had learned to accommodate each other.
"Once a person starts feeling better about himself, the amount of value he places on his life determines what he does with his life," says Wise, who was part of Dr. Waldman's first AVP program. "One of the common threads you find among people who come to prison is that people who take chances, who take drugs, don't care. So the first thing you have to do, if you want them to change, is teach them about value."
Learning the lessons
Seated beside him is Saleem el-Amin, also serving life for murder. One recent day while waiting in line to use the pay phone at the prison, he explains, he realized the man ahead of him was talking far beyond his allotted 10 minutes.
"Now, the old me, I would have had to make a stand," he says. "You know, you're worried about what the other people in line are going to say. But then I start to think, we're going to end up FTC fighting, we're both going to be on lock up, we're both going to lose some good days, and neither one of us will be on the phone. That's what we call rational scaling in AVP. You weigh the consequences, you think it through before you make that final decision."
The result? He made no fuss, the other man apologized for hogging the phone and the next week offered him extra minutes.
"I been here 23 years and I feel like I'm finally winning at something," says el-Amin. "Because now I know violence ain't the only road. I don't have to impress anybody or strike anybody to come out on top. I didn't know I had these alternatives. I knew if I kept on getting pushed, the only result was violence."
Careen Mayer, who directs a community-education program at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Psychiatric Hospital that trains teachers and students in conflict resolution, understands.
Cycle of violence
"We have a family-of-origin style that we revert to in stress," she says. "If your family hit, then you hit. Many kids are told nowadays if someone hits you, you must hit back to show that you are strong. Many children are still hit at home."
And at most schools, she says, there are no formal programs that integrate conflict resolution into the daily curriculum. It's not surprising, she says, that almost three out of four fights among children start "because somebody pushed someone. Or 'Someone looked at me.' To get a good solution you've got to be creative, and we're not used to being creative in crises.
"What we're getting," she says, "is a generation of kids who are not consequential thinkers. We have to teach kids that the consequences of their actions are important. They need to think about if they took that pencil from you what your reaction might be and what is it going to do to the relationship."
Which is why Chris Franklin, a counselor with the Baltimore County Police Department was so impressed when he finished a recent AVP seminar at the Cut.
"I know a lot of counselors not nearly as proficient as these inmates are," he says. "If we really understood violence the way these men articulated it, we would spend less time talking about three-strikes-and-out programs and more time talking about education and early intervention. I probably never thought of poverty as being violent, but it was something they were able to articulate for me. These inmates are a resource we don't seem to have anywhere else."
And yet, says Dr. Waldman, "a lot of guys at the Cut would admit that they never thought seriously about making sense of their lives until they found themselves in prison. And in many cases it didn't happen until they had been there a long time and had gone through a lot of violent behavior."
What they learn, he says, goes beyond dealing with their own situation in prison, in realizing how their lives might be different had they learned the lesson years earlier.
"There is a point in time where people have a chance, where they haven't crossed that line," he says. "And these guys know that now. They've had a lot of time, a lot of pressure just to make sense of their own lives."
That's what Cliff Footes, who has been in prison the past 18 years, thinks he has done.
"Because of peer pressure, guys in prison think they have to keep up an image, to be this tough guy," he says. "And I was a hell-raiser."
Yet in the three years he's been in the AVP program, he's been a model prisoner.
"Most guys really want to change their lifestyle," he says. "And once you see aggressive guys make their change, you start to think, 'There's something about that program. I got to get with it.' "