On a cold and rainy day in early December, nearly a decade ago, I joined a group of Arkansas prison officials, businessmen and pastors for a two-day visit to the state prison in Cleveland, Texas.
Our mission was to see how its “Prison Entrepreneurial Program” (PEP), headed by Catherine Rohr, might help us reduce high recidivism rates among newly released inmates in Arkansas prisons by helping them get jobs.
Two of us were recovering alcoholics with a special interest in helping addicts sober up and get jobs. Getting a job is frequently a crucial component of lasting sobriety.
Rohr, who was teaching a class at the prison when we first arrived, was born in Montreal and moved to California at age seven.
At her high school, she was the lone girl on the boy’s wrestling team. Later, at the University of California at Berkley, she played rugby. She had also earned a blue belt in Brazilian jujitsu. Obviously she could take care of herself.
She also knew her way around finance. After college, Rohr took her first job with Summit Partners in Palo Alto, a venture capital firm doing multi million dollar deals. Three years later she moved to American Securities in New York, a private equity firm, where she and her lawyer husband set up housekeeping in a Manhattan apartment.
In a material sense Rohr appeared to have it made, but it failed to fully satisfy her.
The Christian factor
What changed her, we learned, is that Rohr took a trip to Romania with a church group, where she worked for two weeks as a camp counselor in an orphanage. She came back grieving for the HIV infected children and unhappy with Wall Street and it’s deals.
“ This is not what life is all about,” she thought.
From that moment on, Rohr says, she began seeking God’s purpose for her life and began to find it when she visited Chuck Colson’s prison ministry in Sugarland, Texas on Easter weekend in 2004.
Colson had been a top aide in the Nixon Administration and a convicted Watergate conspirator. Colson became a Christian in 1973 and then served nearly a year in Alabama’s Maxwell prison in 1974, shortly after he had become a Christian.
Colson founded Prison Fellowship in 1976, which in turn launched InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) in 1997. IFI offered a rigorous, Christ-centered program to inmates.
Colson died at age 80 in 2012 and his IFI ministry was recently replaced in Arkansas by another Christian ministry, Pathways to Freedom, in which newspaper publisher and benefactor, Walter Hussman has played a key role
Rohr’s visit to Sugarland was transforming, she said.
Within a month of the Colson trip, Rohr and her husband packed up their belongings in a trailer, left New York and headed west to Houston where she met with prison officials. Later she developed the rudiments of the PEP program.
As part of the process, she signed up MBA’s from Harvard Business School to edit the inmates’ projected proposals, and other top business schools joined the project.
Rohr also sent letters to hundreds of executives around the country inviting them to come to a prison in Texas to judge business plans, and she began a fundraising effort that brought in $1.7 million for PEP in 2007.
Drug lord entrepreneurs
Referring to the gang leaders and drug lords in her student population she says, “These guys have already proven to be entrepreneurs. We’re just helping them excel at something they’re already good at, legally.”
It was not easy getting into her program. There was a 180 page application to fill out which took a week to finish, and only 20 percent made it into the program with only 60 per cent of that number making it through.
For those who are accepted, their first day was a 17 hour session where Rohr would begin, among other things, to attack the prison tough guy persona with such ice breakers as making them hug and do the “chicken dance,” which looks as silly as it sounds. Inmates also would begin doing public speaking.
While writing a business plan was the main focus of the PEP program, it is far more than that. The authors also have to present their plans to prospects and conduct themselves in a business-like way. As visitors to the Cleveland unit we got a first hand look at how effective that training is.
All of us in the Arkansas contingent met individually with small groups of PEP inmates to discuss their business plans and personal goals, and all of us were impressed by the high level of professionalism.
One young man who presented to all of us and then got together with me later had an idea for promoting bi-lingualism in companies, which he delivered in both English and Spanish. He made a strong case for the value of the improved communications that would result and was seeking to raise $10,000 in start-up costs.
PEP encourages outside investment in the budding companies with a share in the business being negotiable. Investors deal with PEP, not the inmate, at least in the initial negotiations.
At the end of 2007, PEP had graduated 369 inmates from eight classes at a cost of $15,000 per student; maintained a recidivism rate of less than 5%; and assisted 46 graduates in launching businesses, which included a real estate investment company, hedge fund, T-shirt printing operation, Bible cover producer and educational software company.
Graduates achieved a 98% employment rate within four weeks of release with average starting rates of $11 and hour.
The Drug factor
During our visit, I talked to or heard from a dozen inmates and former inmates at Cleveland or on staff at PEP, and every one had a history of drug abuse which had been a factor in their arrest and incarceration. Most of them were not involved in 12-step programs, believing the success they were achieving in PEP and IFI eliminated the root cause of their addictions and the need for a recovery program.
I agreed that in the PEP and IFI groups substance abuse will probably decline without a 12-step program, but we must remember that addiction can strike anyone at any time under the right circumstances, particularly if you have been addicted.
The same can be said about sex.
Tragically, in 2009, Rohr was found in an inappropriate relationship with four of her students and was dismissed.
In 2010, Rohr founded Defy Ventures an entrepreneurship, employment and character development training program for currently and formerly incarcerated men, women and youth.
The 501 (c) 3 non-profit company has offices in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Omaha.
In 2013, she remarried and became Mrs. Charles Hoke.
For communities looking for resources for their local prison programs, the PEP program in Texas is blue chip. We would also be looking at Defy Ventures.
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