Willard

Willard is unique in the DOCS system of institutions. Despite a double row of razor-ribbon perimeter fencing patrolled by armed Correction Officers, this is not a "correctional facility" as defined in New York's Correction Law, for the reason that the 900 men and women confined here are not inmates "under sentence of imprisonment." Rather, they are parolees under a "parole supervision sentence" - a new legal status created just for them.

Willard is a Drug Treatment Campus (DTC) operated by DOCS in collaboration with the Division of Parole and the state Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services (OASAS). It was created in 1995 as a new sentencing option for low-level drug offenders and parole violators who previously would have been sent to a traditional prison. The Willard program was created as an intermediate sanction - with teeth - to deal with the problem of relapse.

A proportional response to relapse

Recovery can be a rocky road, and fortunate is the addict or alcoholic who does not stumble on his or her way; by some accounts, relapse should he regarded as a standard step in the recovery process. Before Willard, however, there was no way to recognize this. Prosecutors and parole authorities were faced with an all-or-nothing choice: invoke the full measure of the state's punitive might and throw the relapse back in prison or, officially, look the other way.

Willard, however offers a third way. The DTC is a demanding, three-month, Shock Incarceration-style residential therapeutic program, followed by six months of out-patient treatment in the community under intensive supervision by parole officers affording a stronger measure of protection to the community than is provided by standard community treatment programs.

For the addict, Willard is not only a reprieve from a full prison term but a new opportunity to tackle his or her addiction. And should he fail to participate satisfactorily in Willard's "tough-love" style program, the maximum-security Five Points prison is just next door.

Recovery, Shock-style

Willard DTC is a version of Shock Incarceration, DOCS highly structured and regimented "boot camp" program. It is modified to reflect the shorter program duration (90 days at Willard as opposed to six months in Shock) and the looser restrictions that apply to participants' age and physical condition. Like Shock, the DTC is run as a therapeutic community combining military discipline and physical exercise, substance abuse treatment, education and work.

All Willard staff members - DOCS and Parole, administration, treatment, security, clerical and maintenance - are specially trained in military, therapeutic community and team concepts. Parolees will hear the same message from everyone.

Program components are interwoven. Military discipline, for example, is observed in the classroom as well as in formal drill sessions. Parolees march in formation, making tight corners, wherever they go. Willard's parolees stand at attention and ask permission to speak, beginning and ending every statement with "sir" or "ma 'am." This formulaic speech pattern is intended not only to engender habits of respect for authority, but to make the addict - generally unconcerned with his surroundings, oblivious to others and thinking only about his next fix - slow down and focus his attention on the here and now. It is quite literally a strategy for changing the way the addict thinks, reacts and responds.

A full and precise schedule teaches time management, typically problematical for addicts and alcoholics. The Willard day begins at 5:30 with physical training (PT) to assist in the detoxification process and to emphasize self-discipline. The rest of the morning and the early afternoon is devoted to academic and vocational training, alternating with work assignments at the institution or in the community. From 4 to 9 p.m., with a short dinner break, parolees participate in substance abuse therapeutic sessions, learning the physical and psychological facts of addiction, learning to cope with frustration, anxiety and stress and recognizing and dealing with the signs and symptoms of relapse. No one complains about lights out at 9:30 p.m.

Evolution of an institution: college, asylum, DTC

The DTC is located on grounds steeped in institutional history. One hears rumors of ghosts floating among the now-vacant buildings of what, for 126 years, was a state hospital for the insane.

In 1853, the site was acquired for the state's first agricultural college. The college - on 440 acres of farmland in the town of Ovid, "the geographical centre and Eden of the Empire State" - opened in December 1860, but it didn't last long. Within months, its president and most of the teachers and students marched off to fight in the Civil War, and the college never reopened. It was superseded by the new state university, established in Ithaca on land donated by state Senator Ezra Cornell.

Soon afterward, the site was earmarked for the Willard Asylum for the Insane, which would represent a second and major step toward transferring responsibility for the care of the mentally ill to the state. From colonial times, the care of insane persons had been a local function. Each county operated a poorhouse, or almshouse, wherein was indiscriminately lodged a hodgepodge of dependant persons: the mad, the feebleminded, the aged and crippled, drunks, epileptics and beggars. The almshouses provided custody and shelter, but "treatment" was not in their vocabulary.

The first step toward state assumption of responsibility was the opening of the Utica Lunatic Asylum in 1843. Utica was established as a treatment facility. It was reserved for new, acute eases and was required by law to return to county custody any patient who was not discharged as recovered within two years. Still condemned to the almshouse were the incurables, who, contrary to the unreal expectations of early asylum enthusiasts, were the norm among the pauper lunatic class. Dorothea Dix, among others including the underfunded county superintendents of the poor, drew the Legislature's attention to the unspeakable plight of the chronically ill.

Finally, in 1864, the Legislature appointed Dr. Sylvester D. Willard to investigate conditions in almshouses, jails and other places where the insane were kept. His report of neglect, abuse and suffering led to the passage - six days before Lincoln's assassination - of a bill calling for a second state asylum, specifically designated for the care of the chronic insane. The asylum, located on the site of the abandoned Ovid Agricultural College, was named in memory of Dr. Willard, who died of typhoid fever just days before passage of the bill he authored.

In 1866, construction began on a large asylum building (razed in the early 1980's). Like the Eastern and Great Meadow prisons, the asylum was built on the approved institutional design of the day: a three-story center structure for administration with long wings radiating from either side for patient housing, males in one wing and females in the other.

On Oct. 13,1869, a steamboat docked at Ovid Landing and several men led a deformed, demented woman down the gangplank; Mary Rote, the asylum's first patient, had been chained for 10 years without a bed and without clothing in a cell in the Columbia County almshouse.

Three more patients, males, arrived at the dock that day, all in irons, one "in what looked like a chicken crate, 3 1/2 feet square. Many of the early patients had been considered difficult and were "quieted" by regular flogging, dousing and "pulleying" (hanging by the thumbs) in the almshouses. Within days of their arrival at the new asylum, however, they were bathed, dressed, fed and, usually, resting quietly on the wards.

Within a few months, admissions outstripped the building's 250-bed capacity, and the former college building, high on the hill overlooking the lake, was renovated as housing for higher-functioning patients. The Grandview, the oldest structure on the grounds, is still in use today. The Finger Lakes Federal Credit Union has offices in the Grandview, and DOCS uses it as a training building.

By the end of the first year, with the census approaching 700, Willard began to construct "detached buildings" away from the main building. The detached buildings housed working patients and their attendants. Work on the Sunnycroft, a salmon colored, two-story structure, began in 1872. It was rehabilitated in 1962 at a cost of $900,000 and is today enclosed within the DTC fence. Sunnycroft has eight 50-bed dormitories as well as offices and activity rooms.

Another detached structure from the 1870's, Edgemere, located outside the security fence, is now used by the DTC for training and staff functions of the type typically held in Quality of Work Life buildings.

Willard was growing rapidly. By 1877, with more than 1,500 patients, it was the largest asylum in the United States. By 1890, when the name was changed to Willard State Hospital and its function enlarged to include acute as well as chronic patients, the census hit 2,000. Willard grew outward, gathering neighboring properties for farmland, and of course kept building, eventually topping 70 buildings large and small.

Among later structures were the Birches (1934) and Hatch Building (1951); both, along with Sunnycroft, are inside the DTC security fence. The Birches (two magnificent birch trees frame the entryway) is used for parolee housing, classrooms, vocational shops and offices. Hatch is used for housing and is also the DTC administration building.

A world unto itself

We will probably never again see an institution like the old Willard state hospital. It was a self-reliant little world unto it self a village with its own stores, a large farm, a manufacturing capacity, a fire department, and its own transportation and social systems meeting all the needs of its patients - and its staff.

Because of the remote Finger Lakes location, employees had to be provided living quarters (that is still true today). Hours were long: until the eight-hour day arrived in 1936, attendants and nurses, like prison officers of that era, worked at least 84 hours a week. Stress was endemic: "Caring for mental cases who are noisy, violent, filthy and otherwise troublesome is about as irksome as any work there is," noted the superintendent in 1899.

And Willard was lonely. The institution was obliged to create diversions: picnics, games, dances. An auditorium serving staff as well as patients was built in 1883 (an advertisement for an 1885 dramatic performance advised patrons to "apply to the ushers for fans, bouquets and opera glasses; poodles must be left in the cloakroom"). A larger auditorium, Hadley Hall, was built in 1893 and serves similar purposes (it has a basketball court and fitness equipment) for the present DTC staff.

The "Nautilus" was another diversion. The 75-foot, 50-ton steamboat was purchased by the hospital in 1892 to ply the waters of Seneca Lake, fetching patients and supplies brought to lake ports by rail and canal. But in addition to official working trips, the Nautilus was used for pleasure excursions with box lunches and the institution band. Around 1917, when her transport duties had been taken over by trucks and automobiles, the Nautilus was sold. Sadly, she came to a bad end: reduced to rum-running on Lake Erie, the former pride of Willard was run aground and wrecked by the Coast Guard.

Another pre-automobile curiosity was the Willard railroad. The Willard campus was vast. Some of the detached buildings were a mile and a half from the dock and the main building. In 1876, the asylum was granted an appropriation for tracks and a locomotive. Within a few years, the line crossed the Simpson Creek ravine that divides the property. Eventually, the internal system was linked to outside lines; the ticket station was named "Asylum."

Until it was given up in 1936, the institution train made daily rounds, delivering coal and supplies, picking up and returning sheets and clothes from the laundry and hauling ashes and other garbage to the piggery. The routine was disrupted one morning in 1912, when a car broke loose at the top of the hill by Grandview. Gaining speed as it careened down the tracks toward the lake, the runaway barely missed a party of patients at a crossing. It raced across the ravine and, at the end of the line near Edgemere, shot off a coal trestle and hurtled 60 feet through the air, embedding itself in an eight-bed dormitory.

Miraculously, no one was hurt.

In the early years, severely ill patients were confined to wards in the main building. Security was upgraded in the late 1880's, not as a safeguard against the escape of dangerous lunatics - but to protect the patients from the public. The Seneca Lake tourist industry had hit upon the idea of advertising asylum sightseeing excursions. Boatloads of people carrying picnic lunches swarmed from the docks over the grounds to gawk and taunt, making a mockery of the asylum program of "moral treatment." To restore tranquility and dignity, barbed wire fencing was erected, entrances were gated and a constable was hired.

Willard's patient census reached 3,500 in the 1950's and '60's. Then several factors including the development of anti-psychotic drugs and an unwillingness to continue funding the massive institutions of a bygone era - steadily reduced the inpatient count to 135. To reduce adverse economic impact on the community, closure was delayed until an alternate use for the site could be found. That came in 1995, with the approval of the DTC concept.

Creating the DTC: legal and political challenges

The creative maneuvering to bring about the DTC, a brand new kind of institution in New York, is a story in itself. Shortly after taking office in 1995, Governor Pataki proposed the most sweeping revision of New York's sentencing laws in two decades. Under his Omnibus Sentencing Reform Act (SWA), minimum sentences for first-time violent offenders would be increased; for repeat violent felony offenders, the SRA mandated determinate sentences with no discretionary parole. Before the SRA could be passed, there were several problems to be worked out.

The extra time to be served by violent offenders would, of course, increase the demand for bed-space, a potentially costly consequence. The solution was a drug treatment campus, which would create space for violent offenders by permitting judges to divert certain repeat, nonviolent drug addicts out of the prison system.

But the DTC proposal raised a tricky cost allocation issue. Normally, any alternative to prison is by diversion to a form of probation, a county responsibility. For the state to pass on the costs of the SRA to the counties by tying it to an offsetting probation treatment alternative was unpalatable to the Governor.

To clear this hurdle, DOCS proposed that the alternative be not to probation but to parole (like prison, a state responsibility). The revolutionary "parole supervision sentence gave judges the historic option of sentencing nonviolent, low-level (Class D or E) second felony drug offenders straight to parole, bypassing prison, with special conditions attached: satisfactory attendance in a three-month treatment program at Willard followed by a six-month period of intensive community supervision.

As finally crafted, the bill provided that Willard would accept two categories of parolees. In addition to judicially-sentenced offenders, the program treats people who have violated the conditions of parole, usually by relapsing to drug use. Technical violators, who would otherwise be returned to prison, are sent to Willard through the mechanism of "revoke and restore": parole authorities revoke parole per standard procedures, but then immediately restore the violator to parole status with the special Willard conditions imposed. (For a short period, under a retroactivity clause, a third group - inmates with a similar offense history who were sent to prison prior to the Willard bill - participated in the program with the special approval of the Board of Parole.)

Conversion of the Willard campus

Over the summer of l995, DOCS staff, outside contractors and Monterey Shock inmates readied the campus. A mile of security fencing was erected around a 110-acre section containing the Hatch, Birches and Sunnycroft buildings. Along Main Street, adjacent to the DTC, a line of evergreens was planted which, when mature, will shield the razor ribbon from the residences on the north side and muffle the cadence calls of parolees in drill and morning exercise. The hotel-like lobby of Hatch was renovated as a control room and arsenal; the employee snack bar was converted to a visiting room. Hatch, Birches and Sunnycroft were renovated for inmate housing and office and program areas. Work was done on exterior buildings, including Grandview, Hadley Hall and Edgemere, for conversion to training facilities. Other exterior buildings were slated for staff housing.

Willard opened on September 26,1995, with 750 beds. It was able to absorb approximately 120 employees from the psychiatric center, providing direct links to the site's rich tradition of caring, humane custody. The DTC has since expanded to 900 beds, with 104 reserved for female parolees. It is staffed by 249 security employees, 105 administrative and support employees and 83 program services employees. Additionally, 35 parole staff are on site full-time, working on treatment teams with DOCS staff.

OASAS, the third agency in the partnership, participates as advisor and as a training agent. In a unique arrangement designed to assure professional integrity, OASAS also licenses the DTC, using the same standards as apply to privately-operated programs. No other correctional program in the country is similarly licensed.

The creative Willard alternative advanced Governor Pataki's highly-successful program to "right-size" the prison system. With 900 beds for parolees spending 90 days in the program, Willard has the capacity to divert nearly 3,600 low-level offenders a year from the prisons. Since its opening through July 2000, the program has saved taxpayers $138.3 million in capacity expansion and operating costs.

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