Today we wanted to write about inmate support and rehabilitation, as we’ve written a few times in the past few weeks.
We came across an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, about a man with a vision – Charles W. Puttkammer, a Princeton graduate who helped found the Petey Greene Program - an organization that since 2007 connects universities and local department of corrections, helping to facilitate meaningful educational programming for incarcerated men and women, at no charge to the facilities. The program provides supplemental educational resources to corrections departments, with enthusiastic and knowledgeable volunteers who work one-on-one with inmates.
Mr. Charles W. Puttkammer
The idea of establishing a unique prison-tutoring program occurred to Puttkammer when he participated in a project where he spent one-on-one time, every week, with a person with a mental disability.
That is how he met Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene, Jr., a TV and radio talk show host and community activist. Charles helped him change his life, by overcoming drug addiction and a prison sentence. Greene went on to become one of the most notable media personalities in Washington, D.C. history. While incarcerated for armed robbery, Greene became the prison’s disc jockey and subsequently a role model for many other individuals incarcerated in the facility.
Petey Greene
His work with Petey inspired Putkammer; thinking about how life of an undergraduate is often concentrated only around campus activities, Puttakammer founded the Petey Greene Program with former classmates, and started connecting students and inmates for tutoring purposes, with the ultimate aim of strengthening correctional education services and offering college students the opportunity to pursue meaningful and valuable work in the criminal justice system.
Recently, he committed $200,000 to the organization for overall operational costs.
The program operates from Princeton University; it has grown from 26 volunteers in 2008 to 111 volunteers in the spring of 2014. The program is also at Rowan, Rutgers, Seton Hall, and Prison Teaching and Outreach at the College of New Jersey, and it also has a satellite program connecting Yale University students with a Connecticut prison.
Participants—around 300 in all—are tutors, not counselors, who help inmates to pass the high-school-equivalency test.
The program is currently working on expansion to Washington, D.C., Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Although this program shows great results, Puttkammer believes that treatment of young inmates still needs a great deal of improvement. Every effort can result in changing the inmates’ life patterns.
The goal should be to take advantage of the temporary incarceration of younger people, said Mr. Puttkammer, and “to do good with them, while you have the opportunity.”
If you want to join the Petey Greene program and become a volunteer, donate or start a new chapter, the program calls you to take action.
And we call you to send us your comments, contributions, join the conversion, and spread the word about our BUZZ.
If you want to read more about youth in prison, and issues surrounding incarceration of youth, check out our other articles: http://prisoncalldeals.com/buzz/tag/youth-incarceration/ and http://prisoncalldeals.com/buzz/tag/children-in-prison/ and http://prisoncalldeals.com/buzz/tag/youth-in-prison/
