'Walk in the shoes:' Therapists, law enforcement role-play for parolee empathy

May 24—TRAVERSE CITY — On a typical day, Mary Schiller works as a part-time therapist for Catholic Human Services in Traverse City.

For the past two decades, she's worked with lot of people from all walks of life. In Traverse City, she said she typically sees about 20 clients a week, with each appointment taking an hour. Many of the people she currently sees are court-ordered to go to therapy.

That's why she decided to attend the Jail Release Simulation exercise and panel discussion this month at Northwestern Michigan College's Timothy J. Nelson Innovation Center. The event was co-sponsored by Networks Northwest and the Michigan Department of Corrections Offender Success Reentry Services Program; Before, During and After Incarceration and the Northern Michigan Opioid Response Consortium.

Schiller, alongside 75 others, spent the morning going through the motions of what many leaving the prison system face.

The goal for the day was to build empathy and understanding between primary care providers and frontline employees and people who are released from county jail or prison.

Attendees included therapists and mental health providers like Schiller, as well as Grand Traverse County Sheriff Michael Shea, and corrections Capt. Chris Barsheff.

In a plastic packet that was underneath her chair, Schiller learned that she'd be going through the simulation as "Christina."

Her character recently served 13 years in federal prison for drug manufacturing with intent to distribute and had a history of drug use, according to the instructions. Christina's highest educational attainment was a GED she had earned during her sentence. She would earn $320 a week at her full time job and be living with her spouse.

As "Christina," Schiller was required to work, buy bus passes, pay child support, attend Alcoholic Anonymous meetings, buy groceries, pay rent and get drug tested. If she failed to complete any of the requirements, a wandering volunteer acting as a parole officer could remand her back to jail.

These expenses included $30 for probation, $15 for treatment, $25 for food, $500 for rent and utilities, $200 for child support and $5 per drug test. The bus pass was an additional $5.

Schiller quickly realized meeting those numbers was pretty much impossible on $320 per week. And Christina was one of the lucky ones relative to other characters in the simulation who began the game with a part-time job or were unemployed.

Participants had 15 minutes to complete all the activities listed for their week. When the timer went off, the week was over. During those 15 minutes, the energy in the room became electric with each person striving to complete the requirements in the allotted time.

By week three, Schiller said she was "so stressed out."

By the last round, more than three-quarters of the participants ended the exercise back in jail. That included Schiller.

"Learning some empathy is important," she said at the end of the exercise, adding that she understands why some of her recently released client sessions focus on logistics and life planning.

Jeanne Marriott, simulation organizer and program associate for NMORC, said that means the training program did its job.

The NMORC is a project developed by the Michigan Center for Rural Health that received federal funding from the Rural Communities Opioid Response Program by the Health Resources and Services Administration, according to Marriott.

"The aim of the federal grant funding is to reduce the morbidity and mortality of substance use and opioid use disorder," she said. "There is a high incidence of [Substance Use Disorder] associated with incarcerated persons and many overdoses occur as people are released and return to use, especially if they do not modulate their use after having been without it for a significant amount of time. Due to this last point, jail release is a focus to help keep communities and community members safe."

She said she first got the idea for the program from the West Virginia Department of Justice, which also provided the materials for the activities.

Based on her knowledge, Marriott said this was the first jail release exercise in the lower Northern Michigan region. The training costs approximately $4,000, which came from grant funding.

According to data from the Prison Policy Initiative, 53,000 Michigan residents are currently incarcerated. Out of that total, 32,000 are in state prison and 16,000 are in local jails.

In the future, Marriott and other community partners expressed interest in having this program travel to other Michigan communities as a way to build a bridge between people released from incarceration and their providers.

"But these simulations where you 'walk in the shoes' of someone facing circumstances that you don't know about offers a 'field of dreams' moment that can be quite profound," she said. "People often think that incarcerated persons will not change, but they are only right to the extent that we are not providing the tools or mechanisms for them to change and we need to own that solution if we want a better world going forward."