Recidivism rate cut from 70% to 10%

Run by Dr Timothy Leary and his colleagues in Concord State Prison in Massachusetts, the Leary's prison programme had in its time a most dramatic impact in keeping ex-prisoners from re-offending. Over 35 convicts and 15 Harvard graduate students formed a group that in various sessions took psilocybin pills together. The convicts chose which new prison members could join the group. When the convicts started to be paroled, the ex-cons and the Harvard students were paired up in buddy-system teams, with the students visiting the ex-cons in their homes. There was a twenty-four hour telephone to rush help in case of emergencies. 'We sobered them up, praised them to the parole officers, cooled out angry bosses,' writes Leary. 'In short we did what a family does for its confused members. We kept them out of jail.'

The project succeeded in cutting the return-to-prison rate from 70% to 10%, until it was closed down after Leary's expulsion from Harvard University. Leary gives the primary credit for the project's success to the drug experience: 'The drugs appeared to suspend previous imprints of reality (in this case, the prison mentality) inducing a critical period during which new imprints could be made. People tended to form powerful attachments to those present during a trip, sometimes following one another around like one of Lorenz's imprinted goslings. In a positive, supportive environment, new, non-criminal realities were being imprinted.'

Michael Forcier of the Social Science Research and Evaluation in the States and Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) are carrying out a long-term follow up to Leary's prison work, with in-depth interviews of the original prisoners.

Rick Doblin, MAPS, 1801 Tippah Avenue, Charlotte, NC28205, USA (tel 0101 704 358 9830; fax 0101 704 358 1650). See the Winter '92 issue of the MAPS newsletter (a membership subs. costs $40) for more about the follow-up study.