PRISON BREAK

There are many programs trying to reduce recidivism. This one works.

- Adam Hochschild

AT 8A.M., the August air of California's Central Valley already feels like a sauna. As we sign in at the gatehouse, Fateen Jackson nods approvingly at my red T-shirt. "Don't wear green," he told me several days ago, "and don't wear blue."

The reason for his advice becomes clear when a green-uniformed guard, belt bristling with a walkie-talkie and black leather pouches, leads us through the gate in a high fence topped with coils of razor wire and punctuated by watchtowers. Prisoners wear "blues"-baggy light blue shirts and dark blue pants. We walk past a sign, "Inmates Stay to the Right," and a red ceiling light that flashes to signal a head count. As an electrically operated gate slides open, we pass our IDs into a fortified booth, where a guard inspects them and then pushes a button to unlock a metal door. One more corridor takes us to the prison chapel.

Setting up a wide circle of chairs in front of the altar, about 20 men slowly assemble. Former inmates themselves, 47-year-old Fateen and Marcos Morales, 57, have returned to prison to facilitate this 13-month course. It's a program called Guiding Rage Into Power, or GRIP, which began more than a dozen years ago and is now offered in six California prisons. We are at one in Vacaville, southwest of Sacramento, where GRIP classes meet for eight hours once a month, with homework and study sessions in between.

Nearly all GRIP students are long-term prisoners convicted of violent crimes. Taking the course is no guarantee of early parole. Many graduates are not freed until years later-some never. In a country with a colossal incarceration rate (five times that of the European Union), our grim, revolving-door prisons seldom provide much to cheer about. But I've come to Vacaville, which houses some 2,000 prisoners, and will return monthly because of a remarkable pair of statistics: