In NY’s Prisons, People Have Started Programs to Wrestle With Their Crimes

By Wyatt Stayner

Jan. 20, 2023

When Charles Moore was incarcerated for second-degree murder in 2000, he found it strange that Sing Sing Correctional Facility didn’t offer programs to help him grapple with his violent crime.

Moore noticed programming for anger management and programming for substance and alcohol abuse and mandated behavior modification programming for people who committed sexual offenses.

But he didn’t see anything that specifically addressed what he felt: immense remorse and shame for choking someone to death during a fight.

While New York prisons offer programs on how to train a dog, how to use a computer and how to make home repairs, the state does not offer programming that helps someone come to terms with what sent them to prison in the first place.

At that time, Moore felt he didn’t deserve the chance to build a better life. He felt defined by his crime, his worst moment ever. A decade into his 17-years-to-life sentence he finally found a program that connected his remorse to accountability for his crime and healing for himself. 

The state didn’t offer the program. It instead came from The Osborne Association, a New York City nonprofit that develops initiatives for criminal justice reform. Dubbed The Longtermers’ Responsibility Project, Moore participated in group sessions with other incarcerated people who were in prison for 10 or more years because they committed a crime that resulted in someone’s death. The group gathered for 16 sessions and explored the pain they experienced growing up and pain they caused by taking a life.

“When you’re in prison, you can talk about how many guns you had, how many drugs you sold, but one of the things that is just not a conversation is, ‘I killed someone.’ No one is very proud of that,” said Moore, 57. “The therapeutic part was that we were able to share (our crime) with others and find some healing.”

Lila Kazemian, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said programs for long-term incarcerated people are “at the bottom of the priority list” because their release date is far away, and many people assume they are “beyond rehabilitation.” Oftentimes, programs won’t even be available to people until a year or two before their release date, Kazemian said.  

As a facilitator of therapeutic group meetings in New York prisons, Kazemian saw grown men allow themselves to be vulnerable about love, rejection and depression.

“These are hard topics to talk about — immediately after, they might make you feel worse,” Kazemian said. “But when you get to the root of it, as you bring it up to the surface, you see transformation.”

The Longtermers Project is one of many effective programs run by people who have lived behind bars. Longtermers Project started offering group sessions in 2009. Separately, five years earlier Challenge to Change, was started by incarcerated people in Shawangunk Correctional Facility.

The programs emerged from the experiences of incarcerated people searching for a way to address their own need for growth and healing behind bars. The programs have helped people who won’t ever leave prison, and those who will.

Leaders say the programs combined have helped more than 100 formerly incarcerated people return to their communities and flourish. Those graduates now use their lived experiences to guide or assist others, who have been affected by incarceration.

Sharon Richardson, 62, cites her experience with Longtermers Project at Bedford Hills, a maximum security prison for women in Westchester County, for her ability to change. Richardson now runs a successful catering company staffed with formerly incarcerated women. She also started a nonprofit group called Re-entry Rocks, which helps incarcerated women who suffered domestic abuse transition back to society.

Wilfredo Laracuente, 46, was serving 20 years in prison for second-degree murder when he started Longtermers. Now free, Laracuente facilitates transitional reentry groups, where he helps formerly incarcerated people develop professional skills. He also serves as a mentor to young people impacted by incarceration for Columbia University’s Center for Justice, and sits on New York Mayor Eric Adams’ Bronx Peace Advisory Board.

“I've worked to be the cure instead of the epidemic that destroyed my communities,” Laracuente said. “I like the person I've become today.”  

Jose Saldana, 70, co-founded Challenge to Change with two other men at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in 2004. After serving 38 years in prison, he’s now the executive director of Releasing Aging People in Prison. RAPP is one of the main advocacy groups pushing for parole changes that connect to these very programs in the sense that parole decisions are not based on how you have grown in prison, but rather on the crime that sent you there.

Derrick “Bush” Hamilton and Kevin “Renny” Smith, 61, insisted on their innocence when they were incarcerated, but still credit Challenge to Change for helping them grow. They say the program is the catalyst for an advocacy organization they operate, Brooklyn-based Family and Friends of the Wrongfully Convicted, which has helped exonerate more than 17 people.

Roy Bolus, 53, spent more than 30 years in prison for his connection to a robbery that resulted in the fatal shooting of two men. Bolus didn’t fire any shots, but received an 80 years-to-life sentence. Governor Andrew Cuomo granted Bolus clemency in 2018. While incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility, Bolus helped bring Challenge to Change to his prison. Today, Bolus helps formerly incarcerated people find jobs. He is the first person to get a doctorate degree in a New York prison and now teaches at Yale University.

Bolus said confronting harm he caused made life harder in prison, but that very process is at the root of who he is today.

“You have to account for the mistreatment of other people,” he said. “The significance of having to acknowledge that some wrong was done, is that it is one first major step toward healing and making better what was worse.”

Kathy Boudin, who died in May, co-founded the Longtermers’ Responsibility Project after serving 22 years for a failed armed robbery that cost three people their lives. While incarcerated, Boudin saw how people serving long sentences changed drastically over the course of their sentence. She started the Longtermers Project to aid that change. In an essay Boudin wrote on Longtermers in 2014, she explained that “people in prison are often frozen in their own narrative and unable to go deeper or to move forward.”

People are rarely asked to be honest or accountable for their crime when they are sent to prison, said Laura Roan, who works for the Osborne Association and now directs Longtermers Project.

“The system teaches you, ‘Don’t talk to anybody,’” Roan said. “This is an adversarial system. We want to minimize everything you did so you don't get the maximum time.”

Longtermers Project participants have great success when it comes to parole release rates — the majority of graduates who come before the parole board have been released. Roan said Longtermers Project is about rehabilitation, regardless of whether it helps someone prepare for a parole hearing.

“This is how you get people not to do it again, to help people connect with their remorse,” she said. “If I hurt because of the harm I did, I can’t do it because it harms me.”

The Longtermers Project concludes with participants writing letters to their victim’s families. The apology letters get entered into the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Apology Bank. Victims can register with the Office of Victim Assistance for a notification of when a letter is submitted. They can then choose to read the letter if they wish.

New York State data shows that the letters are rarely read by victims or their families, but Sharon Richardson still found healing through writing her apology letter.

In 1991, Richardson was handed a 20-years-to-life sentence for second-degree murder and conspiracy in the first degree. A corrections officer at the time, Richardson started a romantic relationship with a man in the prison she worked at and continued the relationship after his release. He then abused Richardson and her two kids.

She hired people to kill her lover and was present when it happened.

Richardson participated in Longtermers before it used a group setting, so she met individually with a counselor. The sessions culminated with Richardson writing a letter to her victim’s family. Richardson cried as she revised her letter.

“It was difficult for me to put those words together,” Richardson said.

New York State law doesn’t allow people with felonies to contact their victims directly, so the letter and meeting with a crime victim are two ways the Longtermers Project incorporates a victim’s perspective. 

Toward the end of the 16 sessions, participants meet with a crime victim. In Moore’s case, he met with a woman whose niece went missing, and was, after months of searching, found dead. Moore said the heart-wrenching story was a chance to intimately see how hurt lingers after a violent crime. Moore, and other group members, apologized to the woman.

Nearly everyone in the Longtermers’ Project has something “massively traumatic” in their past, Roan said.

Moore has his own experience losing a loved one to violence. His mother was murdered when he was 3 years old. He remembers coming across old newspaper clippings about the murder as a teenager, and breaking down in tears.

“I am a victim and also a perpetrator,” Moore said.

Challenge to Change similarly explores past trauma and how that can connect to the present. Jose Saldana, Sekou Shakur and Ronald Robertson founded the program with the intent of transforming lives. They started Challenge to Change without outside help, while incarcerated. To this day, group sessions are run by incarcerated people. 

Over the course of two years, the men researched and developed a 60-page curriculum for Challenge to Change that takes place over 18 weeks. Their goal: to help people take accountability for their actions, model better behavior and return them home as forces of good.

More than 40% of people who leave New York prisons reoffend within three years of their release. One of the broadest studies on national recidivism to date estimated that close to 70% of people are arrested within three years of leaving prison.

“To take full responsibility is an action,” Saldana said. “That means we have to develop programs or initiatives that will stop this cycle of violence in our community.”

Participants explore their childhood, how their actions harmed their families and how their actions harmed their victims. Saldana was moved by seeing people reveal their true emotions.

“For the first time people actually took off all those faces, and said, 'This is who I am,’ Saldana said. “It was really liberating to come to terms.”

Derrick Hamilton, who was exonerated in 2015, said Challenge to Change helped him navigate the rage he felt about his wrongful conviction. Hamilton said he was angry at prosecutors and judges. He dreamed about killing people to get revenge. His anger resulted in misbehavior reports and estranging himself from family and friends. He can still recite the advice fellow group members gave him.

“No matter what you’re going through, don’t let that become you,” Hamilton recalled. “Because the only people you are going to hurt now are your family. The only people who are going to suffer for this are the people you love.”

Challenge to Change helped Kevin Smith recognize he still hurt others as a drug dealer, even if he is innocent of the murder that sent him to prison. 

During his incarceration, Smith’s younger brother was murdered. He vowed to get revenge if he ever saw the person who killed his brother — in prison or in the streets. But Challenge to Change taught him that “revenge gets you nowhere.”

He remembers the group's advice to him: “You see how your family is hurting behind you losing your brother. Do you know if you cause harm to that man his family is going to feel the same pain that your family is feeling right now. Is that what you want?”  

Saldana also has a family member who is a crime survivor, and that experience changed how he felt about his own crime.  

Saldana went to prison for attempted murder of a police officer. While committing a robbery, Saldana and two other people fired at a cop who was shooting at them.

The cop was struck by gunfire and blinded. In prison, shooting a police officer is often seen as an acceptable crime, Saldana said.

But he started to question that narrative when a person close to him was abducted, sexually assaulted and shot in the head. Hurt by what happened to his relative, who survived the attack, Saldana started to assess the fallout of his crime. He initially justified his actions — a police officer tried to arrest him, so he got shot, Saldana told himself. But while reexamining his feelings he thought about the police officer’s family, something he hadn’t done before.

He asked friends for advice. They told him he disregarded the humanity of another human being, even if it was a cop.

“The officer didn't die, but he lost his vision from a shotgun blast to the face. He’s never going to see his child again. He's never going to see his wife again,” Saldana said. “These are the things we have to deal with. The transformation begins when you see the suffering you caused.”

Outside of prison, Saldana has dedicated himself to releasing older people from prison, who have likewise undergone tremendous growth.

His organization RAPP has advocated for legislation to base parole decisions off how a person has grown in prison, instead of the crime they committed years or decades ago.

“This is part of changing the narrative, of why we advocate for people to be released, because they have made this tremendous transformation in their thinking, their behavior and their attitude, in spite of the fact that prison is not conducive to this type of transformation,” Saldana said. “But they did it because they wanted to change. These are men and women we say are deserving of a second chance.”

In the six years since he left prison, Moore has taken advantage of his second chance. Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, he co-facilitated a Longtermers Project group in Sing Sing. He is hopeful to lead more groups in the future, as the program returns from a pandemic hiatus. 

As a full-time job, Moore works at Rehabilitation Through the Arts, where he helps bring art workshops to prisons. Moore is also a playwright and producer. When he entered prison, Moore felt like he would never be able to heal and move forward. Now he says the Longtermers Responsibility Project set the path to where he is today.

“You give yourself permission to move forward and know that you’re not the worst monster or the worst thing you’ve ever committed in your life,” Moore said. “You learn to pick yourself up.”