US: OKLAHOMA CITY, April 12 - Marriage anxiety has gripped much of the heartland, and in Oklahoma it has reached into the cellblock in perhaps the most unexpected permutation of the state's six-year effort to bolster wedded bliss.In the Joseph Harp Correctional Center, sprawling across the tawny plains 40 miles south of Oklahoma City, officials are running a six-part course on maintaining a healthy marriage, available for the last year or so to inmates in good standing.
"There are 600,000 Americans leaving prison in the next few years," the human services director, Howard H. Hendrick, said in explaining the effort to teach felons to be good spouses. "And those guys are all coming to an apartment complex near you."
In small workshops in prisons around the state, inmates, often with their spouses present, discuss problems like money and sex that underlie disputes within a marriage. If the examples cited might seem irrelevant to relationships separated by prison walls - how, say, an argument about washing the dishes is really about power - the inmates seemed at a recent session to have little trouble connecting to these or to deeper hidden issues like fear of abandonment.
"I had nobody," said Dunnino Moreland, 12 years into a life sentence for murder that began when he was 16. "I'd been abandoned by my family, my friends, by everybody I ever knew. I was all alone in here, forever. And then I met Tammy, and now I have someone who I care about, who comes to see me on Sundays, who I can share a life with. But I'm afraid, we're all afraid, that maybe she won't come back some Sunday."
Tammy Moreland leaned her head on the shoulder of the husband she had married just a few years ago, long after he went to prison.
"I'll be here while there's breath in my body," she said and then turned to explain to the class. "This man, who has never touched me sexually, because of this situation that we're in, has treated me better than any man I ever met out there."
She gestured vaguely toward the windows overlooking a grass yard ringed by concertina wire.
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.."
The curriculum was developed by two Colorado researchers, Howard Markham and Scott Stanley, and focuses on communications skills, teaching people to slow down and listen to one another before disputes mutate into arguments.
One instructor is Aaron Cosar, 19 years into a life sentence for first-degree murder and an assistant to the chaplain. He went through the course two years ago when it was a pilot program and credits it for making his marriage so important that he celebrates not one, but five anniversaries.
There is the day seven years ago when he met his wife, Justeen; their first date; their engagement; their wedding; and, perhaps dearest to him, the first time she visited him at the prison.
"And we celebrate them all," Mr. Cosar said, gently tapping his wife's forearm with his fingers as they sat side by side on mustard-color fiberglass chairs in a playroom for inmates' visiting children.
Mr. Cosar, using one of the shorthand terms in the curriculum, said the key to his class was "understanding the filters."
Mr. Moreland, a student, explained, "Sometimes you don't actually say what you mean, or you might hear things wrong, because of the filters that you put up in front of you."
Filters, he said, are the invisible barriers that people put up between themselves, hampering communication.
That had been the subject of the first two-hour session the previous Sunday.. A second Sunday session would be about everyday "issues" like money and sex that underlie disputes or "hidden issues" like fears of abandonment - hardly irrational for someone in prison.
Between a married man's arrest and the end of his first year in prison, 80 percent of marriages break up, Mr. Grant said. For female inmates, the divorce rate is closer to 100 percent, he said.
Although some couples who have gone through the marriage program were married before the man entered prison, most married after the prison terms started.
Some, like the Cosars, met during a church group's visit. Others like Terry and Carolyn Ree met through a prison pen pal program.
"I am taking this course because I want to show how committed I am to this relationship," said Mr. Ree, who is serving a life sentence for murder.
His wife smiled.
"We are learning if we ever have an argument to step back before we say something to hurt each other," Ms. Ree said.
With prison marriages and their lack of conjugal visits, Mr. Cosar said, the major question is whether the men really want relationships or merely someone to visit them.
"It's the one thing in your week that you can look forward to, so those visits can take on a huge importance," he said.
Mr. Moreland talked about the tension of going from the prison world, with its imperative to appear strong, to a Sunday visit with his wife, Tammy.
"It used to be really hard to tell her I loved her, because it was like I was exposing a weakness," he said. "And in here, you never expose a weakness."
The most unexpected result of the program, the inmates said, is that it has helped them improve relationships in the prison with other inmates and the guards.
"I find myself using some of the techniques on people inside," Mr.. Ree said. "And it works."
But that is not why the couples do it, they said. They do it because they want to get as much as possible out of the few short hours they spend together each week and because they want to think of themselves for even a short time as a normal married couple. And then, maybe, someday, if they ever get out, they will be ready.
"It's all about knowing you have a safe place to go to," Mr. Cosar said. "A place to rest."
By RICK LYMAN posted 21 April 05
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