MIDDLESEX COUNTY PRISON
COORDINATING COMMITTEE NEWSLETTER
MCPCC met in Bedford on May 11, 2005. Present were
Mary Ann Donaldson, Beverly Wilkins, Tom Crowther, Judy Lustig, Joanne Glover,
Lois Pulliam, Dorothy Weitzman and
Marjorie Moerschner. Our guest speaker was Morton Silverman, who is leading a
workshop on parenting skills at the Billerica House of Correction.
Mr. Silverman has worked in the mental health field for many years, including supervision of a methadone program. The program did not take people with serious psychiatric problems or who were on cross opiates. A dose of methadone stabilizes a person who is coming off drugs and enables that person to function without illegal substances. The dosage never needs to be increased. The statement that once an addict always an addict is not true.
The DOC gives methadone to inmates entering prison with a drug dependency but just for a few days to stabilize them.
Mort has volunteered for many years with Parents Helping Parents, an organization centered in Copley Square, Boston. PHP has only three paid leaders and trains parent volunteers to be co-leaders. The groups are open-ended. They focus on the basic, practical skills that mothers and fathers need, skills that a person growing up in a chaotic, fractured household uusually would not be able to learn: love, consistent discipline and schedules, shared responsibility and parents who are able to work out a disagreement without bringing their children into it.
Mort is currently leading a similar group at Billerica. Ideally he'd have only 8 or 9 men in the group, meeting together for 10 weeks. but at the moment he has a larger group and is not sure how long the program will run. He's also finding that keeping a group together long enough to do some good can be difficult in a short-term prison. He'd like to keep the men focused specifically on the situations they will face and parenting skills they will need when they return to family life. PHP has a help line, and he includes this information in his program, which meets in the Violence Intervention building. Many men in this unit have domestic abuse issues. This unit also has intensive programs targeted on the broader problem of violence.
In
other news, Carol Peters is now leading two Houses of Healing groups at the
Lowell Community Service Center.
Channel 2's Frontline had a program on the 500,000 mentally ill people currently incarcerated in US prisons.
Many thanks to Mort Silverman and his program which brings an important resource to prisoners and their families!