The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Virginia's DOC has four detention centers, three for adult males and one for adult females, and White Post is home to one of the male detention centers. Kline has been superintendent of the White Post Detention Center since 1996, but his career in corrections goes back 40 years to when he was a dispatcher for the Winchester City Police Department and its five-cell jail. He joined the Virginia DOC more than 31 years ago and has been with that department ever since.

Kline is blunt about the men in his care; he and his staff cannot "correct" his offenders. They have to want to change; it's their decision. Most of the offenders at the detention center are on intensive probation having been sentenced by a circuit court judge to prison and then having the prison sentence suspended pending successful completion of their program at White Post.

The 20-week program is rigorous. The first two weeks spent by an offender include a military-style environment emphasizing drill, strict hygienic practices and physical exertion. This program is not as physically intense as the DOC's boot camp program though, because older offenders are sent to the detention centers.

The offenders sentenced to the White Post Detention Center are, for the most part, men who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to non-violent crimes. And they must be physically and mentally able to work. Once in the program, they are provided with the tools needed to succeed upon release.

Superintendent Kline says the offenders get substance abuse counseling, cognitive restructuring, anger management and parenting classes, GED classes and life skills training such as interviewing for a job. Not all of the programming is done inside the detention center. Offenders also have the opportunity to leave the center for public works projects in the community under the supervision of correctional officers.

Kline's enthusiasm with community corrections comes from what he calls "evidence-based practices," a progressive plan that has been used in some European countries for the past 30 years. This means motivating the offender to want to change his ways, "to work on the offender's thinking as well as his behavior," Kline said.

An offender's behavior is not all that hard to change in a locked, secure environment, according to the superintendent. After all, if you're locked up, you're locked up. But changing a man's thinking to prepare him for release is not so simple. That's why Kline and his staff "uses what works" in motivating offenders to change their way of thinking prior to release.

When one deals with convicted criminals, there is no such thing as total success across the board. But Kline said that the recidivism rate for offenders in Virginia's community corrections program is about 30 percent statewide. That is about half the recidivism rate of parolees released from prison on the national level. And he said he was proud of the fact that White Post's offenders lead the commonwealth's detention centers in the completion of their GED program.

The White Post Detention Center has a rated capacity of 104 beds, and the superintendent said that, unlike many prisons, that capacity is not exceeded. He said that the average offender population at White Post is 90-95 at any given time. When asked about problems with violence, Kline said the occasional fistfight between offenders does occur, but not assaults on staff, and inmate-on-inmate violence is infrequent.

The DOC's detention centers are a necessary component in the supervision of probationers who are simply not ready to be on the street. The security of the community, after all, is the commonwealth's highest priority. But the use of evidence-based practices that have worked in the past also is a "high priority" in the detention centers, Kline said.

Kline said his staff has worked very hard in using these practices, even though Virginia's correctional officers were not originally trained in this vein. In fact, he says his C.O.s have really taken to this process of working with the offenders in their charge. And the rural setting seems to have a therapeutic effect on the offenders.

As Kline said, "The only grass some of these guys have ever seen is what they've smoked." But at the detention center, they can work in the agribusiness program where they work with livestock and both organic and hydroponics greenhouses where they grow their own vegetables which reduces the cost of incarceration to the commonwealth.

It should come as no surprise then to note that Ray of Hope Lane leading to the White Post Detention Center was named by Kline himself. That is the outlook he has for providing the programming to the offenders in his charge.
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