Freedom to Choose
Last Sunday night, actor Clarence Maclin spoke to a sold-out Arlington Theatre audience at SBIFF’s Virtuosos Awards about why he had spent years co-writing and then acting in Sing Sing, the feature film up for Best Picture at next month’s Academy Awards. The movie depicts his earlier life, when he was sentenced to 17 years for robbery and found an outlet and healing by participating in Sing Sing prison’s revolutionary Rehabilitation Through the Arts program.
“The message of this movie to the people on the other side of the prison’s walls is that people in prison are just that – people,” Maclin said. “They have the ability to change, to grow, to see something other than what’s in front of us inside.”
That’s nothing new to The Freedom to Choose Project, the Santa Barbara-based nonprofit that for more than 20 years has been equipping participants in its programs – who almost exclusively are individuals incarcerated in California state prisons – with a palette of essential life skills, including conflict resolution, nonviolent communication, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, positive choice-making skills and self-awareness.
The prison program began as what was originally planned as a one-off workshop at Valley State prison, with a bare-bones curriculum developed by Santa Barbara husband-and-wife psychologists David and Bonnie Paul. Twenty years later, Freedom to Choose has led in-person programs for more than 7,200 members of the prison population, providing over 225,000 hours of in-person education, impacting rehabilitation and reintegration and reducing recidivism in every state prison across California as well as the Santa Barbara County Jail.
“We have served a lot of people who have been able to find a new way in their life by utilizing the skills to get out on parole and become contributing and productive members of society,” said Forrest Leichtberg, the Project’s Executive Director. “There are in-person workshops twice a year at each institution, and monthly support groups that provide participants with the opportunity to continue practicing the curriculum that focuses on working with triggers, healing from traumas and developing interpersonal communication skills.”
It’s hard to accurately measure with data the impact of Freedom to Choose programs, but there’s one yardstick that can’t be denied. Two of the seven full time employees at the organization are actually former inmates – and alumni who partook of the Freedom to Choose program while they were incarcerated.
Eddie Torres, now the nonprofit’s Education & Project Coordinator and part of its facilitation team, was nearly a decade into his 17-year sentence for a violent crime when he was exposed to Freedom to Choose shortly after being transferred to Valley State in 2016.
Just like a stirring scene in the movie Sing Sing, he called an inmate he recognized by his gang moniker, Lazy, when he ran into him at Valley State.
“He told me, that’s not my name anymore,” Torres recalled. “I couldn’t believe it. This guy was with me at another prison for three years and he was a knucklehead, not into rehabilitation or self-development, awareness, remorse or anything like that. But when he told me, ‘it’s true, I’m changing my life’, it sparked my curiosity.”
It was only about a week later that Torres attended the Freedom to Choose weekend workshop in the gym, and those first moments are still as fresh in his mind as the day it happened.
“There were 80 volunteers dressed in civilian clothes with huge smiles greeting everyone, which I’d never seen before,” he said. “I was very nervous, and not really ready to be very vulnerable.”
But when he spent time in his first Trio – the three-person format employed by the in-person program – he found himself softening.
“That night when I fell asleep, there was a sense of peace, a sense of something that was stirring inside of me to seek more.”
The next day was even more impactful, Torres recalled.
“It found something I had been searching for my entire life going back to being a young boy – unconditional love. No judgment, no advice, just the quiet presence of safety and compassion. I opened up and then I just broke down in tears.”
Torres was able to participate in the first cohort of the monthly program at Valley State Prison, working the exercises and moving through segments on respectful communication, confirming understanding, managing emotions and more.
“The pinnacle of the Freedom to Choose curriculum for me was working with your inner wounded child, being able to go back and talk to my little self and what he wanted or needed,” he recalled. “Being able to heal those wounds and go through all the developmental stages for me was life changing.”
More than six years after he first encountered Freedom to Choose, Torres was granted parole at his first opportunity. Shortly afterward he ran into another former inmate who was working at the nonprofit, began volunteering as an intern and was hired full time early last year.
“Freedom to Choose allowed me to understand myself, to be able to dig deep and heal myself from the traumas and abuses, learn to be vulnerable and authentic and to feel safe within a community,” Torres said. “I have the strength to work on a healthy self-esteem, understand my boundaries, be able to communicate and seek help when I need it.”
So deciding to work at the organization was a no-brainer.
“Early on, there was a volunteer at Valley State who had been incarcerated there, and he was a co-facilitator who told us, ‘I used to sit in that chair where you are,’” said Torres, who is still on parole. “That instilled the hope that change is possible. I’m so grateful to be able to give back what was given to me.”
With its low overhead, the vast majority of donations to Freedom to Choose goes directly towards making a difference. But there’s always also a need for more volunteers – which over the years have numbered more than 1,000. More volunteers would allow the nonprofit to expand its work to more prisons more frequently, in addition to affording volunteers themselves the chance to experience firsthand the difference you can make.
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