A Violent Offender Programme at Westgate Correctional Facility aimed at helping perpetrators of violent crime accept responsibility for their behaviour graduated its third class last week.

However, success of the 12-week programme cannot be truly measured until some of the graduates of the class are released back into society.

Presently, all 30 of the graduates, whose offences range from robbery, assault, rape and murder, are still imprisoned. However, Director of the programme, Forensic Clinical Psychologist Dr. James Buccigross, is encouraged by the changes he is seeing in the inmates.

He realises a new approach to an old problem is needed if the rise of violence in the community is to be tackled. The programme is less than a year old and some adjustments have been made to it in order to make it more effective.

“It got off the ground, but it was like an ongoing therapy group, which is only half the equation, in my view,” said Dr. Buccigross who joined the Department of Corrections last year. He also runs a sex offender programme, and some of those found guilty of rape go through both the violent offender and sex offender programmes.

“I decided we had to have some definite objectives for treatment, if nothing else what do we want these guys to walk away with? What kind of tools do we want to provide them, keeping in mind it is always going to be on them to use them?”

Dr. Buccigross was quick to put a disclaimer on the programme, saying:”This programme is not a guarantee everybody is fixed.”

Dr. Buccigross revealed the programme was structured around an American programme called “Commitment to Change” by Dr. Stanton Samenow and adapted for Bermuda.

“He is credited with being one of the fellas who started looking at how inmates think,” explained Dr. Buccigross.

“In the past what you would find is someone had this nice little theory about how to rehabilitate someone and bring it into a prison and fit everybody to the theory.

“However, Samenow and his partner Samuel Yochelson - he was a Psychiatrist and Samenow a Psychologist - did it the opposite way. Before they tried to do anything, they studied the (prison) population, learned from them and derived their theory of treatment from directly working with the inmate population.

“In 20 years in corrections this is the only approach I've seen that has worked at all. When I was with the State of Ohio, it (programmes) was like flavour of the month. Our department had a new official theory that it was going to work off, it changed every single year and none of them worked.

“That we didn't have the consistency was probably not very helpful, either.”

Already Dr. Buccigross says he has “seen some dramatic changes” to the inmates participating in the Violence Offender Programme at Westgate.

“We had several inmates who were problematic, their behaviour was off the hook,” the Psychologist revealed.

“But I've had officers come up to me and say ‘what did you do to so-and-so', he is behaving himself'. I can't take all the credit, the case workers worked with them as well.”

He said getting the offenders to take responsibility for their actions was only one aspect of the rehabilitation process.

“We try to teach them victim empathy and it's not something that you can just put on a blackboard,” said Dr. Buccigross.

“I've done things like play an actual tape of a 911 phone call from the United States where the woman is in utter terror. The tape goes all through a violent rape as the phone line was held open.

“You can hear the terror in this woman's voice and the whole point is getting them to look out of the eyes of their victim. I have seen guys break down and cry.

“Many of these guys have been victim themselves of various forms of abuse growing up. You already know what it felt like to be a victim yourself and now you know what your victim felt like. Many of them hadn't made that connection previously.

“You did such and such to that person, but that is somebody's mother. What if somebody did that to your mother... or sister... or daughter?”

The graduating ceremony was held at Westgate last Wednesday, attended by graduates, Commissioner of Corrections, Lt. Col. John Prescod, Assistant Commissioner of Corrections for Programmes, Randall Woolridge, and family members of the graduates.

Two of the latest graduates spoke to the audience, one saying he had “learned a lot of things about people, myself and the ABCs... anger, behaviour and consequences”.

Addressing the inmates, Lt. Col. Prescod urged them to be responsible for their actions and consider the choices they make. “You can't force a person not to be violent, we are all capable of violence, so nobody is exempt, including me,” he told the audience.

“You have to say ‘I'm not going to allow someone to influence me to do something I will face the consequences for later. Education plays a very big part in not being drawn into violent behaviour. Read... because knowledge gives you power.”

Dr. Buccigross admits changing a person's behaviour can only happen with the willing participation of the offender.

“We have to live out there and they are going to go back out there and ‘warehousing' doesn't work,” he stressed.

“I was really getting pessimistic back home because I was starting to see children of guys I worked with coming in and just repeating these patterns over and over,” he said.

“We've moved towards an ‘offence specific' programme, where if you are in for a violent offence we want you to do the violent offender's class. Granted, we cannot force them to take the class, but we have got a pretty good response. They are guys who were reluctant at first but they came along.”

Mark (not his real name) was one of them, probably because he didn't see his offence - attempted robbery of a tourist - as a violent crime.

“I was asked ‘did you introduce yourself to the person and say good afternoon, I'm here to rob you',” Mark says of the question he was asked in the programme.

Mark is serving an eight year sentence for his crime, which he says was to get money to support an $800 a day drug habit. He is coming to grips with both the crime and his own drug addiction.

“The victim was traumatised, as well as the whole society,” he accepts.

“Robbing a tourist has caused an effect on the economy. I never looked at it like that.”

Mark joined the programme because he accepted he needed help.

“I'm tired of living the life I was living, going from pillar to post,” he says.

“I was involved in drugs, selling drugs and after awhile I started to use drugs. Then the drugs started to use me, I needed it to survive.

“I was involved in heroin and sometimes I was spending $700 to $800 a day doing drugs. With no work the next thing was crime, looking for an easy victim.

“I wasn't trying to hurt nobody but my needs had to be met and the only way to do it was commit a crime, not thinking of the consequences.”

The Violent Offender Programme has given Mark the tools to make changes to his life.

“Being in this class has taught me a lot, helped me go through some of the stages in my childhood which I was afraid to talk about. Not that I came from a disfunctional family, but sometimes I felt neglected a little bit. Being the oldest and with two sisters, I had to look out for them.”

Added Mark, who has a young son: “At one time I never accepted the responsibility for the things I did, but coming in here and feeling the consequences of the things I have done to myself and my family, is a hurting feeling.”

Dr. Buccigross admits drugs “seem to be a very common denominator” in such crimes.

“I agree that treatment for drugs is important and I agree with the ATI (alternative to incarceration) direction completely, but I don't agree with lighter sentences and letting someone off because they were on drugs when they committed an offence,” said the Psychologist.

“I don't believe in allowing that responsibility to be taken away. A lot of times guys will say ‘I committed my offence because I was on drugs', but not always. A lot of times it's ‘I took drugs so that I could commit my offence, because I needed to have the guts to do it, that I needed to get past the things in me that would have stopped me'.”

Added Dr. Buccigross: “Those are actual inmates on the tapes that we show, done in a prison. One of the guys said ‘I didn't hurt my victim, I didn't touch her, I just robbed her. I didn't realise she might be traumatised, that she might not be able to go out by herself without being fearful'. But that is harming someone.

“They actually hear it from real inmates, telling their stories which they can relate to. Hearing it from them means a lot more than when it's coming from me.”

Dr. Buccigross admits it is very disturbing to see the ages of those going before the courts for violent offences. The offence committed against senior citizen Josie Ray is the latest crime to shock the community.

“When I first started in corrections (in the US), I worked with juveniles in the late 1980s and had an entire unit with approximately 40 juvenile homicide offenders all under the age of 18,”Dr. Buccigross recalled.

“Some of them were very violent. I had a 16-year-old professional hit man who was incarcerated for four very professional hits. That was his business.

“He was 16 at the time we incarcerated him, was a model inmate and got out at 21 because that was the law if you go in as a juvenile. He was sentenced as a juvenile because he turned state evidence against the person who ordered the killings. He was also suspected of six more.

“When he got out he went back to his old profession and is now on death row in Ohio. I had a guy at the age of 15 who was the most heinous sex offender in the State of Ohio. He had 30 known victims and all involved torture.”

Thankfully, Bermuda doesn't have criminals of that calibre, but Dr. Buccigross warns “the world is getting smaller”.

“Bermuda has been pretty lucky because there has been that geographical isolation, where the Atlantic forms a pretty good barrier,” he says with hope.

“But with the satellites, internet and drugs all those negative influences are coming here. I've been in Bermuda a year now and I can tell it (violent crime) is way out of character.

“I shudder that now Bermuda is seeing an increase in violence by juveniles. I'm told that it was in my lifetime that people used to keep their doors unlocked here in Bermuda.

“It's a loss of innocence, that's what it is. You have to do something, you can't just let guys sit (in prison). If they are going to be walking out the door one day then we have to work with them.”

Added Dr. Buccigross: “This programme is in a state of constant improvement. I know we're not coming right off the bat with perfection.

“I don't want to fit an American method to Bermuda. This has to be a Bermudian programme.

“When they come in it is natural to ask ‘what's this all about, who are you to tell me anything'? My response is ‘I'm not here to tell you anything, I'm here to help you discover it on your own'.”

Friday: “Convicted armed robber Randy Lightbourne speaks about his determination to turn his life around.