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Dec 12, 2007 7:46 pm US/Pacific
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Fighting Crime from the Inside Out
Jefferson Award Winner: Allyson West
(CBS 5)
Each year, Allyson West recruits about 25 volunteers to come to San Quentin. Together, they help the hundreds of men locked up to escape -- not from prison, but from circumstances that put them there.
For Allyson, it started when she was a volunteer teacher at the prison about five years ago.
"I had a student in my algebra class who came to me and said, 'Allyson I've never been to college except at San Quentin and I really want to go to college on the outside. How on earth do I do that?'"
Allyson helped him get the information and forms he needed to get into college, and soon:
"Next guy comes to me, 'Well Rodney says you'd help me find some place to live in Oakland.' I went, Oakland, housing, ok. Then the next guy would come to me and say 'Well, I want to transfer my parole from San Mateo to SF County.' Oh, parole transfer," she explains.
They were all tasks that nobody had been doing before, so Allyson gave birth to the California Re-entry Program, providing advice and resources to inmates about to be released from prison, like 36-year-old LaMont, one month from getting out.
LaMont says, "If it wasn't for this class, nobody wouldn't know nothing about what is going on in the streets, what's the updates on the computers and everything else, what's on line for you, what's available to you and how to see your resume on the computer -- all that."
Inmates clamor to talk with Allyson and her volunteers on the two nights a week they show up. They know the small room she uses is the pathway to jobs, education, housing -- whatever they need to succeed on the outside. And Allyson knows there are those on the outside who feel she shouldn't be giving criminals so much help.
She says, "I am very interested and dedicated in public safety and I feel that if you let someone out who has a criminal history without giving him the tools or the resources or the training or the education or the hope or the dignity to do something else, guess what he's going to do?"
Right now, Allyson's program doesn't have enough money to do formal follow up studies on parolees, but she does hear from them.
"The same parolee that I talked about who's now attending university, he sent me a card after he got out and he said, 'You're the real crime fighter.' I just thought that was so amusing, but then I thought about it and I thought, yeah, it is," she says.
For fighting crime by giving parolees education, information, and the tools to create successful lives outside prison walls, this week's Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Allyson West.
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)