I have been incarcerated in Connecticut for a little over 20 continuous years, since I was 18 years old. Sadly, my story is by no means unique. There are hundreds of people incarcerated in Connecticut prisons for crimes they committed as teenagers. There are thousands of individuals who have bee n incarcerated for a decade or more (many of whom have decades-long sentences).  But this piece is not about the propriety of those sentences. Rather, I’d like people to think about what is actually going on in the state’s prisons day-in and day-out.  What is the purpose of prison? Punishment, certainly, but do we (do you) have an expectation that our prisons are rehabilitating the ones they’re incarcerating? If I told the average uninformed citizen that there is startlingly little focus on the notion of “rehabilitation” for prisoners serving lengthy sentences, would this come as a surprise? Indeed, Connecticut’s correctional model increasingly shifts the focus of resources on individuals as they get closer to release. For those with lengthy sentences, the majority of those sentences will be spent idle and unstructured. For the first 16 years of my incarceration this was the case.  The focus of Connecticut’s Department of Correction has been this ubiquitous notion of “safety and security” which means: keeping prisoners locked in their cells for as much time as possible, limiting prisoner interaction, restricting prisoners’ movement and privileges. Around 2022, as the COVID pandemic was winding down, we started to see a change–or rather, we started to make a change for ourselves.  At the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a group of “lifers” (people doing 20+ year sentences) proposed an idea for a novel housing unit that would focus on rehabilitation, and personal development, all while creating a more positive and therapeutic space. The truly novel aspect of this unit was not the notion that we (prisoners) want better for ourselves but, rather, that we would be the change makers–no longer relying solely on the DOC, whose focus lay elsewhere. Thus the H.O.N.O.R. Program was born.  H.O.N.O.R. is an acronym for Honesty, Ownership, Nobility, Obligation, and Respect — lofty ideals that we strive to live by. This program offers about 90 incarcerated individuals with the opportunity to engage in peer mentoring across a variety of topics. Collectively, we have the lowest incident rate in a prison housing nearly 1,300 individuals, with zero incidents of violence in over two consecutive years of operation. The advent of this program coincided with Gov. Ned Lamont’s signing of the Protect Act  an executive order that limited the use of solitary confinement and guaranteed minimum out-of-cell time per day, ostensibly for structured activities. When this order went into effect, prisons in the state went from 22-hour-plus lockdown by default to granting a minimum of five and a half hours of out of cell time per day. The crucial second component of this increase was programming opportunities, but this has been conspicuously slow in coming to fruition — except for those of us who made it for ourselves. The goal of this program is not only peer support for one another but, eventually, to give back to our peers at large (the other ~1,210 people at Cheshire).  The goal is to be peer mentors and facilitators to those same individuals who have decades-long sentences and little to hope for. We do not claim to be perfect and we can’t do this alone. If your preference for incarceration includes opportunities for a positive change, then perhaps the H.O.N.O.R. Program is something that the state should be called on to support. Perhaps, we can create a shift in corrections that sees more positive opportunities and environments for prisoners and staff. And let’s not forget, the ultimate goal of all of this is to create better people to eventually return to society — to create a safer society for everyone. Ian Cooke is incarcerated at the Cheshire Correctional Institution. ...read more read less