FBI? OR FBI?:

Prison Marriage Classes Instill Stability (RICK LYMAN, 4/16/05, NY Times)

Keen to keep traditional families together and battling high divorce rates, officials in more than 24 states have inaugurated marriage programs.

The Bush administration has proposed to spend several hundred million dollars a year for five years on marriage, fatherhood and sexual-abstinence initiatives, a plan that has wide support among religious and conservative groups. The proposal calls for $100 million in annual grants to the states, plus an additional $100 million in grants that the states would have to match.

Perhaps no state program is as ambitious or multifaceted as the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, in a state where the divorce rate was the second highest in the nation in 1994 and has continued to hover near the top, according to officials.

Begun in March 1999 by Gov. Frank Keating, a Republican, the initiative has survived the transition to the administration of a Democrat, Brad Henry, and continues to grow. This recent push into the prisons is to be followed, Mr. Hendrick said, by a program aimed at couples who are preparing for the birth of their first children.

Since the initiative got up and running in 2001, nearly 30,000 high-school students have received training in the skills and savvy needed for dating, sustaining relationships and getting married. In addition, 1,364 people like preachers and county agricultural extension agents have had training to teach marriage-skills classes and have conducted more than 2,000 workshops attended by more than 27,000 people, a little more than 1 percent of the state's adult population. And 1,447 of the state's religious leaders have signed a covenant that commits them to encourage premarital counseling.

The average workshop size is 12, or six couples, and the sessions have been conducted at housing projects, universities, military bases, churches, Head Start programs, drug rehabilitation centers and Indian reservations.

State officials say there is more than compassion in their decision to take the program into cells, as well. The prison chaplain, Ron Grant, pointed to a recent study of 524 California parolees.

"When they looked at all the factors affecting whether the inmate returned to prison," he said, "the No. 1 factor, more than drugs, more than race, more than any other demographic category, was whether they were part of a stable family relationship."

Mary Myrick, president of Public Strategies, a company that has a contract to help manage the initiative, said the program was having unexpected effects.

"Initially in the prisons, we were thinking about it as a reintegration tool, for those about to be released back into society," Ms. Myrick said. "But to our surprise, it has been embraced even by some who are not getting out soon, or ever, but who want to keep their relationships intact."

And intact relationships keep people from becoming dependents of the State.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 16, 2005 7:27 AM