This program is unique in many ways, so to model it and replicate it will require an understanding of the dynamics and processes that enable it. Participation is an active choice of each participant and there are 52 rules created by the participants that govern the program. Add to this the personal dynamics of autonomy with accountability, trust, empowerment, collective reflection and, not least, a very specific form of unconditional love as part of the vision: the result is a program with an inverted recidivism rate (23%) compared to the national standard (70%).

I visited as a representative of the Peaceful Heart Network in July 2024. Asked to describe the program shortly I crafted a description which was approved by the mental staff and participants in the male and female pods:

“HARP (Helping Addicts Recover Progressively) is a unique road to recovery program that takes advantage of the confinement of jail to provide a safe space of learning and soul recovery for those seeking alternatives to addiction and criminality on a 100% voluntary and self-powered ideology with peer-to-peer mentorship and professional holistic mental health treatment.” 

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Aim of visit and this report

My aim was twofold:

1. To contribute with any part of our experiences from our work in the Peaceful Heart Network that may benefit the program, with First Aid for Stress and Trauma (FAST) using tapping and Havening as the starting point, and also group dynamics, leadership development, one-on-one sessions with hypnosis and modeling of strategies that may be useful long-term, such as letting go of shame and other triggers that are common in relapse.

2. To understand the “secret sauce” of the program to be able to replicate it in other jails, prisons and programs, since we are active both in Rwanda, England and Sweden in these areas.

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My background

The parts of my background that seem relevant in this context are layered. I have served in the military and have a naval training background giving me experience of authoritarian leadership cultures. I have worked as a trauma consultant internationally over 15 years in the Peaceful Heart Network. I have training in sports psychology, hypnosis, Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and clinical practice with thousands of clients ranging from suicide to addiction recovery, extremist reschooling and refugees. I have studied cognitive neuroscience and leadership versus group dynamics. I mention this to frame the reflections I give on the mechanisms that seem to be in play in HARP.  I do not assume to have understood things correctly and any misunderstanding is fully on me.

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The model

Sun Tzu (5 BC) posits in his seminal work, “The Art of War,” that "Every battle is won or lost before it's ever fought".

1. A clear promise
   Looking for a common denominator of the program it will be a clear and true wish for the participants to recover and flourish in society, far beyond sobriety. This intent is everything, it marinates every action and part of the program. It holds what every great self-organizing collaboration has: a clear promise. A cause.
   
   
2. A voluntary application process
   Every person has to apply and be granted access by a jury of peers participating in the program. You are not a part of this program unless you actively chose to. No judge or program can order participants to the program.
   
   
3. Clear rules
   There are 52 rules every participant signs a contract to follow with zero tolerance to stealing, lying, selling or using drugs etc. Not following the rules usually leads to consequences and sanctions within the program and possibly from the program.
   
   
4. You are a student for life
   Once you are in the program you graduate into the outside world and become an alumni. Instead of upholding an identity of a sober addict, the focus is on a student of recovering your personality, emotional balance and soul. As an alumnus you can ring the doorbell on the door of the jail and be let in overnight at any point. A vital part of safe recovery (see point 6).
   
   
5. An accepting spirit of love
   The whole program has a spirit of a loving community. A place where you are safe physically, and emotionally. A safety most participants never have experienced in their life. This is the secret sauce in my opinion. All therapy starts with a safe space, this space adds a special form of love, expressed as a part of the program. One for all, all for one - in the spirit of elite army units and musketeers alike. No man or woman left behind. You can fall, get up and repeat.
   
   
6. An unprecedented level of autonomy
   Citing Allen DuPraw in his article about HARP: “The HARP program is unique in that it allows program participants an unprecedented level of autonomy, even while still incarcerated. Furthermore, participants who are released from jail may return to the jail to attend the group meetings. They may even check themselves into the jail overnight if they fear a relapse. These elements of the HARP program directly address one of the greatest challenges at the intersection of incarceration and addiction - that upon release, participants often lose access to the support network they leaned on while incarcerated.” See full article.
   
   
7. A dedicated mental health staff thinking outside the box
   In tv-series Star Trek, the Starship Enterprise is on a five-year mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before”. If you wish to create unheard of recovery from addiction and criminality, you need to look for the unheard interventions that may allow for this to happen. The mental health staff has two components that, in my experience, guarantee results: A personal investment in the outcome, which makes it a personal quest to find, evaluate and incorporate anything and everything that seems to work, like tapping, Havening, hypnosis, sports psychology and peer to peer support autonomy. This team will spend free time happily looking into possible improvements, because their motivation is personal.
   
   
8. Endorsement from the top
   I doubt a program like this can be implemented anywhere unless the leadership at the very top endorse it. It breaks every rule, and it does so because sometimes, the rules are wrong. Only a strong leader with integrity will make this happen. Sheriff Karl Leonard took a risk endorsing ideas about reform that had yet to be proven in reality, but came from 30 years of experience as a law enforcement officer, so the gut instinct was based on personal data points and a belief in the “good” in people. This is civil courage in uniform. 

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NOTE: The HARP program uses a culture of affiliative leadership style

This leadership style involves building strong emotional bonds, creating a sense of camaraderie and team spirit, and fostering a positive and supportive workplace. This helps team members feel like they belong, can freely share ideas and feedback, and work together towards common goals.

According to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist best known for his work on emotional intelligence, “Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances may call for different approaches.” You can create a caring, cohesive community rather than an administrative machine by getting to know your participants on a personal level and celebrating their wins, he says. See full article. 

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The benefits

The United States has the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, roughly 2.4 million people are incarcerated in the US, with 1.36 million in state prisons, 720,000 in local jails, and 210,000 in federal prisons.

Retributive justice, an understanding of criminal justice that focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation, still dominates in the US.

While there are many factors that contribute to these abnormally high numbers, from overcriminalization to long prison sentences, one factor driving such high incarceration rates is recidivism, namely formerly incarcerated people returning to prison after committing new crimes. In the United States, around 70 percent of released prisoners were rearrested within five years.

The HARP program has as we write this a waiting list of over 50 people, inside and outside the justice system, wishing to apply and be a part. 

Recidivism is 23% compared to 70% in the rest of the county and country. Reducing incarceration would reduce government spending: the US spends over $80 billion on incarceration every year.

In social economics it is estimated that the reform of a young person leading them out of addiction and criminality into becoming a contributing member of society, can be a saving of approximately 2 million dollars over a lifetime. 

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Some challenges

Justice, law enforcement, jail and prison are the parts of society intended to protect and serve the general population. To do so, a violence capital is necessary: the ability and possibility to use force. A well-known dilemma is when force is used in the wrong context, creating the exact opposite effect. 

The system and culture of law enforcement come from the military. Command staff have ranks of Major and Captain. It is by necessity and nature often a coercive leadership culture, with a do-what-I-say attitude that can be necessary in an emergency and debilitating over the long term by stripping initiatives, innovation, creativity and rewarding compliance. 

It is a delicate balance to hold a program of empowerment, accountability and frank vulnerability while looking to empower individuals that have challenges to their mental health and emotional regulation. That may at some point be a danger to themselves or others. 

Also, having a mental staff that is dedicated and personally attuned to the outcomes, working on a level of personal relationships and the specific kind of love that comes with truly seeing and caring for individuals, also comes with a high risk for burnout. A vital counterfactor is celebrating small victories and acknowledgement from higher levels of command. Burnout is a systemic disease in cultures of coercive leadership, which has a corrosive long-term impact on the company culture, leading to high employee turnover and a disillusioned, disengaged workforce. See leadership article.

The general challenge of handling mental health and law enforcement in the same place became clear with a young girl who entered the Chesterfield County Jail, let’s call her ”Amy”: 

Amy is a young woman with moderate to severe Autism, just over 18 years old, in a special-care home where she for some reason feels extremely unsafe to the point that when she was taken to a doctor’s appointment where she refused to go back, not in a bad way but in a stubborn autistic good humor: ”I can’t, I can’t go back. I can’t do that, I’d rather die!”.

The doctor says ”you need to go back” and she escalates, so the doctor calls people to help take her out of room because it’s needed for other people, to the point where they need to call law enforcement to get her out and now she is risking charges for resisting arrest and assault on law enforcement. She is brought to the jail where she has to be restrained because she is now harming herself, hitting her head against the wall and going into crisis. 

Crisis is not something you want to handle with restraint in a hostile environment with sworn staff, so the mental health staff, several deputies (3)  plus me spend five hours looking to calm her down in a way that hopefully might not be traumatizing to her, and that might allow her to get back to where she belongs in a place she can receive the help she needs. It dawned on me that so many people come to jail like this, needing something completely different and how important it is that the law enforcement officers understand trauma and flashbacks, and that the person in crisis has no cognition available online and that more force will instill more trauma.

It would be helpful to have a number for how many mental health staff is necessary to keep HARP running. How many are necessary to also be able to cater to the rest of the jail with completely different scenarios that require their skills and resources. This is crisis management: How many doctors do you need in the emergency ward on a normal day and what happens when there’s a bus crash and 20 kids are severely injured?  The need for headroom is obvious or harm will be done and the staff will burn out - making it a responsibility of those who design the budget.

I would love to see the cultural and natural strain between the command staff being responsible for security and the HARP Program and Mental Health leadership staff who are responsible for the reform and transformation of individuals, for the benefit of the individuals and society, addressed by monthly moderated After Action Review in a form that creates solutions that benefit both.  

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Conclusions

In my opinion a program for addiction recovery that lowers criminal recidivism as remarkably as HARP, should be urgently acknowledged, praised, bottled and presented to the entire nation. Anything short is a bullet in the foot of society. 

The program itself is working perfectly. If Chesterfield County Jail could convert into a facility that could focus 100% on HARP it would put the state on the forefront of social reform, social justice, safety and savings of billions of tax dollars. 

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I would like to see the numbers

- How many beds are needed in the County Hospital?

- How many more staff could be added and what would be possible then?

- How will this benefit the taxpayers (savings on each recovery and lowered recidivism)?

- What is the cost and consequences of one unnecessary detention of someone in need of mental health care - case study/partnership with a University to run a study.  

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I would like to see more calculations of the savings in years, months, court, imprisonment, personal suffering, how families are affected, how the trauma of addiction can be stopped from being passed on from one generation to another. How humanity can rise over the fears of “those people” and create a functioning “us”. 

Karl Leonard and Kerri Rhodes and their staff have taken the first bold steps of proving this concept. In my view of the world it is now up to local politicians in a position to create budgets and make decisions to allow the benefits of this program to be implemented on a larger scale. 

Being granted the opportunity to understand the HARP program and to share the resources and experiences gained through our international work in the Peaceful Heart Network in First Aid for Stress & Trauma (FAST) plus group dynamics and personal development has been a profound experience and a source of hope for addiction recovery and criminal reform.

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This is a song I composed about shameless recovery: Back Into The Light

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Ulf Sandström 

+46704888418, info@peacefulheart.se peacefulheart.se ulfsandstrom.com

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