By Alena Competello
Stacey Kindt, a Point Pleasant Beach resident, defied the odds after being incarcerated at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, New Jersey's only state prison for women, from 2002 to 2004.
During her incarceration, Ms. Kindt teamed up with five other incarcerated women to develop the Redeem-Her program. The program began within the prison walls and was expanded to the surrounding community when Ms. Kindt was released in 2004.
The Redeem-Her program consists of a collective of women who have made a commitment to remain free: free from incarceration, alcohol, addiction, abusive relationships and the like, Ms. Kindt said.
The program offers assistance to incarcerated women [while they are serving their sentences and upon their release] who are willing to make the same commitment, Ms. Kindt explained.
Women interested in becoming part of the program simply write a letter expressing their interest and are accepted "sight-unseen," Ms. Kindt explained, because communication between the women and the program is limited to written correspondence.
The women are picked up from the prison upon their release and brought to Redeem-Her's transitional housing, Ms. Kindt said.
While some women do reside in the transitional homes, others live with family members and friends, she said.
"The only criteria [to become a part of the program] is progress," Ms. Kindt asserted.
Ms. Kindt noted that with a full-time job and children to care for, she, along with the other women involved in running and directing the program, have "no time to mess around" with women who are not wholly committed to remaining free.
As former prisoners themselves, the women in the program can easily gauge who is sincere, Ms. Kindt said.
Every woman in the program, including Ms. Kindt, who is the program's founder and director, is held accountable for her actions by the other women, Ms. Kindt said. This helps ensure that no one is allowed to remain stagnant, she added.
When asked about the development of the Redeem-Her program, Ms. Kindt replied, "We did everything backwards."
According to Ms. Kindt, she and her fellow program developers saw women in desperate need and made it their goal to help them, she said. While the program's intentions were good, without the housing component, it was not seeing the results Ms. Kindt had hoped for, she said. Women were sleeping on friend's couches and floors. One woman with nowhere to go slept in Ms. Kindt's car, she said.
Thankfully, "the house fell upon us," Ms. Kindt said. "We were in the right place doing the right thing. Things just have a way of working out." It's been nearly five years since the program's inception and Ms. Kindt has now enrolled in college courses to obtain a certificate in non-profit management, she said.
The program is run on a strictly volunteer basis, Ms. Kindt said. All services are provided by women who have formerly been incarcerated, she added. Several counselors have also recently offered their services to the women in the program, Ms. Kindt happily reported.
For her work with the Redeem-Her program, Ms. Kindt was recently awarded $5,000 from the Avon Hello Tomorrow Fund. She is one of 13 weekly winners to be selected from more than 1,300 applicants from across the United States who applied in the current quarterly application cycle.
Ms. Kindt said the money will be used for IT systems, computers and Internet access within the transitional houses.
A portion of the money has already been used to help one of the program's participants obtain her high school diploma online. Due to a lack of transportation and a 6 p.m. curfew as a condition of her release, this woman was unable to participate in many local programs offering classes, Ms. Kindt explained.
Ms. Kindt credited her ability to break the cycle of re-entry into the prison system, in which so many women find themselves, to the Redeem-Her program.
"It allowed something shameful to become something wonderful," she said. "It is healing for me, personally. It gave me a way to make what had happened an asset not a liability."
With only one women's prison facility in New Jersey, the program is well-known, she said. This is a critical component of the program's success, Ms. Kindt added.
Yet, because the prison community consists of only 1,200 women and the re-entry rate is a staggering 67 percent, the women are easily discouraged when they see the same faces come back to prison, she said. "You only see failure on the inside," Ms. Kindt noted. The women begin to believe that failure is the only thing available to them, she added.
What the women in prison don't see is the 33 percent of the inmates who do not come back, Ms. Kindt asserted. The program is developed to bring the success stories to the women's attention, she said. "The first thing we need to change is to let women know it's possible to go out and succeed," she stressed.
Ms. Kindt also said that the program would not have the same impact if it was not run by formerly incarcerated women. The former prisoners have sympathy for each woman's situation but, at the same time, are more likely to see through any fake excuses, she said.
It is important for the women to see themselves progressing, Ms. Kindt noted. This program is a tangible way to help the prison community, she added.
Ms. Kindt also commented on the negative stigma many people place upon formerly incarcerated women.
"People have written us off," she said.
While the stigma created by the cycle of re-entry can be attributed to some women, it should not be attributed to others, Ms. Kindt added.
"You can't lump us all into one group," she noted.
The program allows women the opportunity to become valued members of their community by providing services to others, she explained. The support from the community has been amazing and "baffling," Ms. Kindt said.
"We didn't expect support. We are not innocent victims," she noted.
Ms. Kindt said that the program expected to rely solely on its own resources, however limited, without the support of the surrounding community, "and rightfully so," Ms. Kindt asserted. Happily, she reported, her assumptions were wrong.
"It doesn't feel deserved," she said. "We're just doing what we should have done all along."
