Return To Honor

In a recent broadcast by National Public Radio on the plight of men locked up before trial and held for lack of sufficient funds to make bail, the commentator said that there are now more children impacted by their fathers being incarcerated than there are from divorce. I haven’t researched that rather shocking statistic, but as one who had an opportunity to experience such a thing on a first-hand basis for two and a half years over two decades ago, I have no doubt that it’s true.

According to www.divorcerate.org, present divorce rates in America run from nearly 50% for first marriages to as high as 73% for third marriages, so if NPR’s commentator is even close to being accurate, that’s a lot of children with no father present in their lives. Add them together, and it’s clear that America is a nation of “fatherless” children. Given this nation’s justice system’s obsessiveness with locking people up for nonviolent and drug related crimes, it’s no wonder that we can’t build prisons fast enough, or that we continue to have such exorbitant crime rates. We’ve got a burgeoning population of children with no place to go and no father to help them figure things out.

Before you think to yourself, “Well, what kind of fathers would a bunch of inmates and criminals make, anyway?” consider that the majority…not the minority…of inmates in America’s prisons today are not the heinous, scarred and tattooed gladiators one sees in the movies and television programs. A full 70% of those incarcerated are for nonviolent, first and second offenses…usually drug-related crimes. Even so, I’ve watched first-hand even the “gladiators” in visiting rooms, bouncing small children on their knees, and being warm, kind and loving with them…and returning to their cell blocks fighting back the tears everyone knows are flooding their eyes.

The damage, sociologically, to this country in locking men (and women) up for interminable periods for crimes of a relatively harmless nature is far-reaching, and much more destructive in the long run than all the crimes put together that create such a rip in the fabric of our society. We’re breeding generation after generation of young criminals, at a rate that far exceeds that of radical Islamic terrorists who cultivate and train their young children to become suicide bombers…and we’re oblivious to how and why crime is so rampant in our streets.

I’m not suggesting that we do not punish law-breakers, by any means. I’m saying that we must have legislative reform in this critically important aspect of our development. We cannot continue to justify such extremes in retaliating against people who break the law, and expect that just because we remove them from our streets that we are going to be safer. There is a delusion in so thinking, because the more we do that, the more we ignore the children who are left to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile world facing economic and political upheaval.

If we don’t take steps NOW to change the laws, and redirect those many individuals who can be trained to function more responsibly while performing community services instead of wasting away behind bars and Plexiglas cellblocks, we will soon find ourselves like I did once…facing the wrong end of a loaded gun while my car and pockets, and bank account were emptied. Thank God that at least one of those young perpetrators wasn’t quite yet so strung out on Meth that the chamber of that gun he held wasn’t emptied on me.

Don Kirchner

Sedona, Arizona

I recently saw a trailer for a new movie, “The Visitor.” I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m certainly going to because the tag line hooked me: You can live your whole life and never know who you are…until you’ve seen the world through others’ eyes.

The trailer went on to show a man bored with his life who, by chance, is exposed to the lives of people less fortunate than him. In a few short minutes, I was swept up into his new outlook as he began to reach out to others and use his professional skills and insights to make life a little better and more meaningful for them.

Have you looked at the world through others’ eyes? I have…and now I can hardly do anything but that. I was born into a fairly respectable family…a career Army officer and mother who raised us as morally as anyone in the Midwest, where we were all from. But he bailed out early in my life for reasons known only to his soul, and I was left to make crucial decisions way too early for that busy little mind of mine to handle. As a result, what should have been a pretty decent future became for a while a series of jail and prison cells.

I was forced to discover that life was very different for a whole lot of people outside of my protected military upbringing. Those people had lived through outrageous challenges that most people can only imagine through graphic portrayals of prison life in movies, books and television programs.

What I experienced, once I got over the initial fears and posturing that goes on between ethnic groups and different cultures, was a common human thread…men who were struggling with the same fears, angers and remorse…albeit often hidden…that I was.

Once I began to use my education and communication skills to help them better understand their behavior and how to change their attitudes and their outlook, I discovered a whole world of men who could overcome anything…and many who actually wanted to. They just didn’t know how…nor had anyone on the outside willing to help them make the lasting changes needed. More often than you might believe, I had hardened criminals with tattoos and scars all over their bodies in tears as they told me stories of their childhoods and how much they wanted to be respected and cared about by society.

Whether you’re dealing with prisoners or former prisoners, or people who are merely prisoners of their own minds and negative attitudes, the willingness on your part to see the world through their eyes can and will make the biggest difference in bringing about deep and lasting changes in the way we live our lives and build toward a more meaningful future. If you will pause from time to time and be willing to see the world through others’ eyes, your world will change for the better…guaranteed.

Don Kirchner

http://ReturnToHonor.org

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections provides public safety by not only ensuring secure confinement but by delivering evidenced-based treatment, education and an array of re-entry services for those returning to communities from confinement. Evidenced-based supervision and services are also provided for those under community supervision. Investment in Oklahoma’s most valuable asset, its citizens, is as paramount an investment as infrastructure such as bridges and roads.

The state has achieved outstanding results with its approach to re-entry. The Bill Johnson Correctional Center in Alva is a prison-based drug treatment therapeutic community that received the American Correctional Association’s prestigious Exemplary Offender Program Award. Offenders who graduate from the program have an amazing 85% survival rate once they return home. There have been 14,341 offenders sentenced to the Community Sentencing Program since its inception in March 2000. The survival rate of graduates is 88%, which is one of the best rates of any community-based alternative program in the country.

Oklahoma discharges over 8,000 prisoners from its prison system each year and has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the nation at 27.8 percent. Their efforts to reduce recidivism are an enhancement to public safety by providing a returning citizen who will remain crime free, thereby reducing future victimization. At an over 70% success rate, that means that over 6,000 prisoners per year are being released that will not return to the prison system. Even though prevention is always a better investment in addressing social illnesses such as substance abuse and a multitude of other contributors to crime, successful re-entry to communities is an investment that pays dividends to many aspects of our communities to include the No. 1 service — public safety.

Click to read FULL ARTICLE.

This website is dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who are facing one of the scariest moments in their lives — one of those forks in the road that can determine the course of the rest of your life. You have to find a job coming from difficult circumstances. You can use all the help you can get, but how to find it?

First, I want everyone to know that we have all the tools you will need to put you on an even playing field with your competition. With the economy losing millions of jobs under the incompetence of our almost former President, you’ve got an uphill battle ahead, but you do have an organization on your side. We will be providing resources you can use online, NOW. This website is not only to help you in adjusting to the cold cruel world, but to give you a place to express yourselves as this blog grows.

In the song, “Wish You Were Here”, by Pink Floyd (and how many haven’t uttered those words in their minds over and over again?), Roger Waters really gets to the heart of the “caged” experience and his music conveys the kind of feeling I’d like visitors to this site to have as you become comfortable with TCF (The Cost of Freedom). He talks about experiencing the “same old fears, year after year”. Pink Floyd:

I often tell people I’ve counseled to consider leaving incarceration for “freedom” similar to a death. The old you is dead. The past is history. Your challenge is to focus on what lies ahead, your future. You are very lucky. Because the death you are experiencing is in no way like a real death experience. For instance, rock star Eric Clapton lost his beloved 4 year-old son, Conor, in a fall from a building in New York. For almost a year, he couldn’t sing, perform, or function. Then, he overcame it by facing it head-on, and writing a song for his son, “Tears in Heaven”. Enjoy the song and make sure to bookmark this site.

Posted by: The Candid Blogger

Don Kirchner's True Story - "A Matter of Time"

Don Kirchner's newest book "Return To Honor"

As we near the point of an “official” launch of something I set into motion over ten years ago, I feel it important to establish what this “Return To Honor” concept is all about. It’s about people, essentially, and how to begin respecting one another even though we might not agree with each other about politics, culture, religion or other important things. What is important is that we at least make an effort to understand cultural differences, and causes of ill behavior rather than reacting to the outward symptoms.

What makes me an expert on the subject? I’m not…but for 2 1/2 years I was an inmate in the federal prison system where I learned first-hand the best…and worst…lessons in human behavior, from people on BOTH sides of the fences and walls. I discovered that freedom is not a physical thing, but is emotional and psychological. I learned more about personal freedom from long-time inmates than I ever learned on the outside…and I’ve observed more people in prisons of their own minds on the outside than I did those who were actually locked up in prisons and jails. I laughed harder, cried more and felt more deeply about common human frailties, avarice and heroism on the inside of prison walls and jail cells than I have anywhere else, before or since.

The Return To Honor program was conceived at a time when my eyes, heart and mind first started to open to what really causes criminal behavior…and more importantly, what keeps it going…and its concept is simple but profound. With even a modicum of respect for one another, no matter what one’s personal history may be, we can make a measurable difference in criminal behavior that will have a ripple effect on every strata of American…and even global…society. Crime doesn’t happen because people are innately criminal. It happens because we don’t address the causes of crime. Instead, we react to it out of fear, ignorance and indifference…and we inflame it with racial and social prejudice and favoritism. No matter how “fair” we might think ourselves to be as a nation, we have created a correctional system that is anything but fair. It’s an incubator system where crime only begets more crime…and woe be it to anyone who enters it thinking otherwise. As individuals, some of us might make it through unscarred and untainted, but rarely “corrected.”

My comments and my views are not pointed at anyone in particular, nor as an outcry against “the system.” It’s what it is because we have allowed it to evolve the way it has. My respects to those who work in the justice, law enforcement and correctional systems. They have a horrendous job to do, which only gets harder and more complex as we continue to ignore the simplest approaches to human beings who have made mistakes. Some are incorrigible, granted. But the majority can and want to change. They just don’t know how, where to begin or whom to trust. My contention––and it’s been confirmed by many hundreds of people on both sides––is that we must be stern and resolute in correcting criminal behavior, but we must be willing to understand the causes and treat those. We do that with respect…and with common-sense approaches to creating bridges back “home” for those who have erred…many of whom never knew anything better.

In so doing, perhaps we can all “return to honor” as a nation of intelligent, compassionate people who take care of their own. With over two million men, women and children locked up somewhere in this country, every one of them someone’s father, brother, mother, sister, aunt, uncle or cousin, they ARE “our own.” Statistically, each one of them affects five to ten other people, so you can rest assured that any meaningful attempt to assist any of them in their successful return home WILL make a measurable difference for all of us.

More to come.

Don Kirchner