EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR'S ANNUAL MEETING REPORT

The year that is concluding might be recorded in the history of the Pennsylvania Prison Society as the Year of Good Fortune. We made great strides on all fronts - advocacy, service, and operations.

But the year we are about to begin will most likely go down as the Year of Great Challenges. We are confronted with significant obstacles everywhere we turn: excessively partisan politics, strident tough-on-crime advocacy and a no-growth economy.

None of these developments is new. They've been with us for years, but it seems that by degrees they are massing before us and will require considerable attention and commitment. Before I get into that, though, I'd like to report on what has been happening over the year that is just concluding.

This afternoon, preparations are underway for our move to the Prison Society's new headquarters at 245 North Broad Street. This move is an exciting development for the Prison Society - a coming out event, if you will. It will put the agency at Broad and Vine Streets -- one of the state's busiest crossroads. And after 216 years, it's about time the Prison Society increased its visibility!

OUTREACH

I am pleased to report that the Prison Society has reached out directly to more than 28,000 of our primary constituents during the past year. We did this through contacts by our expanding network of Official Visitors and by an increasing assortment of programs aimed at prisoners, ex-offenders and their families.

We now have 440 Official Visitors. And, we have records indicating that almost 5,000 visits with prisoners took place during the year. We have begun using a computerized tracking system to document these visits and the kind of problems discussed during the visits. As data accumulates, these records will enable us to identify trends and standards for this important aspect of our advocacy.

SERVICE PROGRAMS

We also are especially proud of our service programs. An aim of all these initiatives is to help people stay out of prison, which is one of our core goals. These programs not only reach a lot of needy people, but they provide meaningful and in some cases, trailblazing, services.

Our Restorative Justice Program, for example, is unusual in that it is offender - rather than victim - oriented. We have been involved in a variety of restorative justice activities with 400 men and women at five state prisons. And, we have been invited to participate in presentations for national and international audiences. In fact, our RJ manager took part in such conferences in Ireland and New Zealand during the past year.

On another front, without any promotion or fanfare, we started a Legal Referral Service late in the year. As you might expect, we were quickly inundated with requests from prisoners. The future of this project is uncertain because we have yet to find a sustaining funding stream, but we will keep it going as long as we can.

The SKIP program, which limped along for a number of years, has really taken off since we were able to hire a fulltime coordinator. We have been running five groups a week and are preparing a special summer program for these children of incarcerated parents.

In addition to these newer projects, our other existing programs reached new heights:

• The Service to Elder Prisoners program helped some 2,000 participants at state prisons across the Commonwealth.
• The Inmate Family Services group of programs -- including parenting education, family transportation, the resource center and virtual visitation - works with more than 8,000 inmates and family members each year.
• And, the Re-entry Services group - which includes walk-ins from the community, mail inquiries from inmates, welfare-to-work clients and others - assisted some 2,000 ex-offenders with their job-hunting skills.

We also began work on three special projects:

The Working Group is a coalition of individuals and organizations that provide services to women at Philadelphia County Prisons and is being honored at the Philadelphia Prison System's annual volunteer banquet at the end of this month.

The Run-a-thon - operated by Centrepeace for the past 20 years - was turned over to the Prison Society last year. It is the largest inmate philanthropic effort in the world. Funds raised by the annual event are donated by the inmates to organizations helping at-risk children.

And, Graterfriends, the monthly newsletter that originated at SCI Graterford and has been serving as the voice for prisoners for the past 20 years, is now being distributed at the Visiting Rooms of all state prisons in Pennsylvania as a publication of the Prison Society.

VISIBILITY

During the past year, the visibility of the Prison Society has been increasing beyond our state borders. I mentioned our travels on the restorative justice circuit. But we also have been getting out-of-state inquires about our advocacy model and programs. These calls have come from as far away as California, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, South Carolina and Vermont.

And, most recently, we received an "offer of collaboration" from the Republican Association of the Support of Prisoners in Republic of Moldova. I'm not sure where any of this is leading, but I'm taking it as a sign that we must be doing something correctly.

On the advocacy front, we were honored by the Philadelphia Bar Foundation as this past year's recipient of the Apothaker Award in recognition of our pursuit of justice. Last fall, we were appointed to Governor Rendell's Transition Team where we worked on reports on corrections and probation and parole. We also were named to the advisory committee for the joint legislative task force studying aged and seriously ill inmates, a group that will hold its first meeting at the end of this month.

For several years now we have been meeting quarterly with the top officers at the Department of Corrections to discuss policy issues, operational problems, and concerns of our constituents. During the past year, we initiated a similar series of quarterly meetings with the administrative officers of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole.

We testified twice before the House Judiciary Committee on our legislative priorities and on community corrections. We also testified before Philadelphia City Council on the issue of medical experimentation at Holmesburg Prison.

Along with this, we placed some timely articles in the news media, including a major display in the Harrisburg paper that focused attention on the lack of cooperation between Corrections and Parole. Coincidentally, since then there seems to be a marked improvement in this relationship - undoubtedly due to changes in personnel and direction. And, I'm pleased to say, there has also been a noticeable increase in the rate of parole releases.

We conducted a joint board-staff retreat which served as the kick-off for a five year strategic plan that a board committee developed for the agency. Also, we held a two-day team building and training session for the staff. By the way, the entire statewide staff is up to 63 now.

Finally, while all these things were occurring, our development efforts were quietly but aggressively reaching out to potential supporters at a rate we never achieved before because we have never had an organized approach to the philanthropic arena in the past. And, even though the rejection letters also piled up at a record clip, I believe these contacts will pay off in the future.

PRESENT

That leads me to the present and the challenges I mentioned earlier. We have all heard about, if not actually felt, the effects of our current economy. It appears now that the Prison Society's Virtual Visitation program might fall victim to the budget crunch.

This program is one of our most popular because it has enabled thousands of prisoners and their children and other family members to visit each other without traveling hundreds of miles across the state. In many cases these virtual visits were the first time in years that mothers saw their sons, and children were able to speak with their fathers and mothers.

If the financial crunch weren't threat enough, however, this and other programs are being restricted as part of the on-going fallout from the VH-1 rock music show. What is so distressing about this is that the emotional outcry of a single crime victim can cause the entire prison system in this state to halt programming that it had considered good practices.

Finally, the political system at the state level seems to be at one of its worst configurations - a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature. This does not bode well for an organization hoping for reform of criminal justice laws.

Despite these unhappy indicators, the Prison Society is strong and well positioned for the struggles of the coming year:

Our advocacy is credible; our commitment, unwavering, and our mission, honorable.

It will be essential to our success to stay focused on the issues that count:

• A moratorium on the death penalty
• Parole eligibility for lifers
• Shorter sentences overall
• Use of alternatives to incarceration as diversion programs and not as add-ons to other punishments.

We must challenge conditions of confinement that are substandard. We must head off policies that diminish human dignity. And, we must - as we have for 216 years --continue an unremitting message of hope to those who are incarcerated.