Program offered

There’s a new program for inmates at the jail.

Moral Reconation Therapy, a cognitive-behavioral treatment intended to help participants make better decisions and improve their behavior, is now in full swing at Jay County Jail.

Kandi Sapp, a rural Pennville resident who has worked for A Better Life – Brianna’s Hope for almost five years, leads the group that meets for an hour and a half every Friday.

Developed in the 1980s, Moral Reconation Therapy started in a prison-based therapeutic community. It spread to more facilities over time, leading to a decrease in disciplinary infractions, lower recidivism rates and beneficial changes in inmates’ personality characteristics, according to the program’s website.

Moral Reconation Therapy is defined as “a cognitive-behavioral treatment system that leads to enhanced moral reasoning, better decision making and more appropriate behavior.”

The word “moral” refers to the levels of moral reasoning theory developed by Lawrence Kohlberg. “Reconation” is a combination of the terms “conative” and “conation,” which both refer to making conscious decisions, Sapp explained.

The program can serve to help those struggling with substance abuse or mental health issues, she continued.

“It’s for anybody that wants to try to refresh their way of thinking,” Sapp said. “We’re raised with the basic life skills of, you know, teamwork and resiliency and trustworthiness and being truthful, and somewhere along the way within our life those basic life skills can get misconstrued.”

She noted decisions can be made based on pleasure and pain, or they can be made for selfish reasons. 

Moral Reconation Therapy helps to refocus the decision-making process.

Participants work through various exercises, challenging their way of thinking.

“Every exercise just walks you through, trying to get you back to what’s most important to you and keeping those things in mind while you’re making decisions,” said Sapp.

Moral Reconation Therapy has a 16-step process, referred to as the Freedom Ladder, for participants to work through over the course of their time in the program. (It’s not a variation of 12-step programs often used in substance abuse recovery groups and it’s not an education group, she noted.) It breaks the steps into nine stages: disloyalty, opposition, uncertainty, injury, non-existence, danger, emergency, normal and grace.

Sapp discovered the program while writing a letter of reference for A Better Life – Brianna’s Hope meeting attendee who had completed a similar program. Sapp checked out the website and quickly became interested.

“It was promoted as a really good tool to also use alongside any kind of substance abuse treatment,” she said.

Sapp completed training to become a Moral Reconation Therapy facilitator in December. An Indiana Wesleyan University alumna with a bachelor’s degree in social work, Sapp noted the program fits in with her career field.

“Me personally, I feel like it helped refresh me,” said Sapp. “It’s not just for people that have substance abuse issues. It’s not just for inmates. It’s for anybody that has had a rough go at things and just feels like they need to be re-centered, be reminded what they feel like their purpose is, and how they should be behaving.”

Sapp has been leading the program at Jay County Jail since May, with participants trickling in over the weeks. As of the end of June, the program had 13 inmates involved.

“We’re building a supportive environment,” she explained. “I’m just there to kind of oversee and make sure everybody stays on task.”

Sheriff Ray Newton noted A Better Life – Brianna’s Hope has been offering programs — such as addiction-recovery support meetings — at the jail since last year. Moral Reconation Therapy is a new program intended to help inmates avoid repeat offenses after they leave incarceration, he explained.

“I feel like our job here is to prevent them from coming back in,” said Newton. “When they do come back in, I feel like we’ve failed … The more programs we offer them, the better chance we have.”

It takes anywhere from 20 to 32 weeks for participants to complete the program, varying based on the individual and their progress. Participants must expect to be at the jail for that amount of time in order to join the group.

“You’ll have people graduating at different times,” she explained, noting participants who have completed the program and are still inmates at the jail are welcome to continue attending the group to help others.

Groups are split for men and women. The current group at the jail is intended for males only, although a second group for women could be started in the future.

Sapp said she would love to start a program in the community as well. She specifically noted those who don’t meet the criteria, such as inmates awaiting a prison transfer or being released before the end of the 32 weeks.

“I’m hoping that by starting in jail, I’ll be able to get some sort of good word of mouth going on and it’ll encourage others that want to join,” she said.