This story was told by a person incarcerated at Soledad.
Caller: Like the self-help groups.
Oh, man, so many lifers in particular who are still going to board telephonically. They’re not going to any self-groups, they’re not able to self-improve in any meaningful way sitting idle staring across the dorm, and another guy, 24 hours a day. So, that’s kind of just, you know, I see some guys come back with denied paroles and that just didn’t have to be the case.
There’s just, they’re just not being exposed to programming that could help them learn some tools to, you know, look inside themselves and do some exploring and understand what brought them to prison. I know this stuff because I facilitated groups myself prior to COVID shutdown.
So, it’s a little extra frustrating to myself because I was running these groups. But I get how much they helped these guys. I’ve seen these guys come through these groups, especially, particularly, these minimum.
And they come up out of their parole hearings with some pretty good results, you know, just takes a little bit of self-exploration. And they’re not getting that now. So, it just doesn’t seem to me anything positive is coming out of this lack of programming. That’s a big one.
