FEMALE INMATES HELPED BY HORSES
Equine-assisted therapy encourages prisoners to deal with obstacles
EAST GOSHEN » On a recent fall morning, four women inmates from Chester County Prison entered an indoor arena at the Thorncroft Equestrian Center and began to meet the duo who have been helping them navigate their way toward success outside of the prison walls.
But Jubilee and Mia are not your traditional counselors or social workers. Rather, they are the horses the quartet have come to know while engaging in equine therapy at the center outside Malvern, a developing part of the county’s acclaimed Women’s Reentry Assessment and Programming (WRAP) initiative.
The inmates, under the supervision of human therapists and a probation officer, engage the horses in narrative exercises that are meant to help them deal with the obstacles that have kept them revolving through the doors of prisons as they try to deal with the underlying traumas, anxieties, and addictions that contribute to their criminal histories.
The intent of the equine Stable Pathways program, funded by local nonprofit organizations but run by the county’s Adult Proba-
tion Department, is ultimately to help the women conquer the cycle of dysfunction that has led to their recidivism. Staying out of jail becomes an attainable goal, they learn, as they find themselves able to face the root causes of their bad behavior.
“Being with the horses is such a good, sober activity,” said one of the women, who asked to remain anonymous, during the session last month, among the last of the eight-week program. “You get away from the negativity of the jail system. It’s a judgement-free zone. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been around horses your whole life or not.
“I feel like I have some life preservers now,” said the woman, dressed in a standard-issue blue prison uniform. “This program has exceeded my expectations so much.”
“This program means a lot to us,” echoed Joy, another inmate who asked that her last name not be used in this story but who happily described how much help it had been preparing her for life in release. “I have had years of addiction and trauma, and I’ve been in and out of prison since I was 18. I’m 48. Normally, you just leave jail and go home and start getting high. This therapy gives me a plan to keep me going.
“The horses don’t care who you are, and they help you get in touch with lot of very difficult issues,” she said. “It’s a good program. I recommend it to everyone.”
According to Jennifer Lopez, the deputy probation director who oversaw the start of the WRAP program, in April the Chester County Women’s Commission funded a pilot program for Stable Pathways. Five women from the WRAP program participated in eight weeks of equine-assisted therapy. Afterwards, Gateway HorseWorks — a local equine therapy organization run by Executive Director Kristen de Marco — applied for a grant from the Chester County Fund for Women and Girls and were successful in receiving funds to run the program for one year.
“I reached out to Warden Ed McFadden about involving women who are in pre-release,” as opposed to those women who had already left the prison and went circulating back into the community, Lopez said. In September, Lopez and WRAP Supervisor Sharon Dickinson and at times Probation Supervisor Donna Brown began picking up the women from the prison’s pre-release center in Pocopson and taking them to Thorncroft, a 30-minute drive. They receive an hour of therapy with the horses and then they are given a meal and time to process.
On this Tuesday morning in October, de Marco met with McFadden and Christopher Murphy, head of the probation department, to walk them through the program and explain the details of the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association (EAGALA) therapeutic model she and Melissa Anderson, a licensed clinical psychologist who works with her, use.
Participants are given specific and deliberate exercises with the horses each session to deal with their trauma. The horses become metaphors for their issues, or act as barriers as they describe their fears, concerns, and anxieties. The response of the horses serve as “unfiltered mirrors” to the inmates’ behavior, offering honest feedback without judgement.
“People become aware of their own conscious and unconscious intentions and energy,” de Marco maintains. The horses “allow them to begin to experience themselves differently.”
Speaking of the inmates, de Marco said that she found them to be enthusiastically willing to try the therapy. “They want to be back in the group, they want to be part of society. And they can find a connection with the horses.” Unlike traditional “talk” counseling the women might have received, in EAGALA therapy, “you don’t have someone telling them to talk about an experience in their lives.” As the horses react instinctually to them, “they talk about taking care of themselves.
“It allows them to see themselves in a mirror that you really don’t see any place else,” she said.
McFadden and Murphy are quick to point out that the time spent at Thorncroft — while it might serve as a relief from the confines of the prison — is not recreation. It is meant ultimately help keep the women from re-offending, disrupting their lives and families, and re-entering the prison.
It is a pilot program that does not rely on taxpayer funding, but which may be expanded. McFadden — whose own daughter is an accomplished equestrian — said that continued participation would come with factbased evidence that the therapy is helping reduce recidivism.
Lopez said those who participate in the program are in their final months of incarceration, and have been assessed for the WRAP program. Housed in the prison’s pre-release center, they are considered low risk and non-violent. The WRAP program has already been proven effective in reducing both recidivism and technical violations among women inmates, winning acclaim through recognition by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which this year announced that the program has been listed as a top 25 finalist for the 2017 Innovations in American Government Awards competition.
The Stable Pathways program will run at least through 2018.
“It’s an extraordinary opportunity to come in here and find peace with the animals,” said another of the inmates at the session last month. “It’s a healing process.”