The New York Times - December 28, 1986
Tessa Melvin

The $10,000 grant is a donation from the Self Development of People Fund of the Presbytery of the Hudson River. It will allow the inmates to purchase $6,000 worth of equipment for the Taconic video center and to use the remaining $4,000 to develop a training tape for inmate tutors working with Literacy Volunteers, a national organization that provides volunteer tutors in reading and math in programs throughout the country.

"This is the first time, so far as anyone here can recall, in which a group of inmates and staff applied for an outside grant for an in-prison program," James B. Flateau, a spokesman for the department, said last week.

Funds for the project will be administered by a sub-group of the Church and Society Committee of the Presbytery, a seven-county organization representing 103 Presbyterian churches.

"A lot of churches want to 'do for' groups that need their help, but we have other funds that do that," the Rev. Shirley A. Wooden, associate executive for the Mission Program of the Presbytery, said in an interview last week. The Self Development of People Fund, Reverend Wooden added, is for "projects initiated by the community of need and for that community of need."

Although grants in prior years have been given directly to recipients, including a tenant organization in Mount Vernon and a housing development group in Kingston, Reverend Wooden said, "this money can't be turned over to the inmates, and we don't want it turned over to the state."

The grant proposal was created and written by Greg Simpson, an Emmy Award-winning television producer and the inmate production coordinator of the center, assisted by six other inmates in the production unit and by Mary Louise Cox, coordinator of volunteer tutors at the Taconic facility.

"We sat together and planned for it," Mrs. Cox said, adding, "I think the men thought it was a little silly since the idea of getting a grant was really pretty remote."

Inmate efforts to win the grant received strong support from the Criminal Justice Group of the Presbytery, a small committee of ministers and lay people who were familiar with the video center. The group's secretary, Ruth K. Batchelor, said: "We visited the center several times and were able to find equipment for them when the state could not."

Taconic's deputy superintendent for programs, Norma A. White, said the administration thought the grant was "fantastic" and, she added: "We've never had a real budget. We've always had to do the best we could with what we had."

With the help of $20,000 in state-supplied equipment that came in the first year, the production center opened in April 1985 and was soon operating seven days a week producing tapes for use inside the prison, ranging from self-help programs to a video library with over 400 hours of educational programs. The original equipment included two older-model video cassette recorders and a string of garden lights.

Hoping to produce an original program, inmates in the video center received permission in July of 1985 for a video documentary on AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. As only one inmate at Taconic, at that time, had contracted AIDS, the inmates needed permission to go "on location," and four inmates traveled to nearby Sing Sing Prison to interview three AIDS patients in the special health unit there.

Although all three of the inmates died of the disease before the video could be completed, the resulting 38-minute documentary, "AIDS: A Bad Way to Die," has been distributed to correction facilities throughout New York State. It also was shown at a national conference of correction officials in Washington last October and is being entered in two film competitions. One, called Innovations in Government, is co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the submission was made by Department of Correction's Commissioner Thomas A. Coughlin; the other competition is the Brooklyn Academy of Cultural Arts Film Festival.

New York City Councilman Joseph F. Lisa, Democrat of Queens, chairman of the City Council's Subcommittee on AIDS, appears in the video and is spearheading efforts to distribute it around the country. "The magic of this film is that there are no actors," Mr. Lisa said. "The stars are the inmate victims." Assisting Mr. Lisa is Wayne Sherman, an ex-member of the Taconic video center, who joined Mr. Lisa's staff as a video-production coordinator after he was released from the correction facility earlier this year.

The men in the video production unit at Taconic now are deciding whether to spend their grant on a new, three-tube color camera, an editing player, a character generator or some of the half-dozen other items they need for the center. The inmates will require more money for their next project - a public-education film on life inside prison.

"There are more than 600,000 people in prison in this country," Mrs. Cox observed. "almost as many as the population of South Dakota. We need to do this film so people can understand the magnitude of what we're talking about."

Mrs. Cox said she was delighted: "This grant shows a real hope on the part of the Presbytery that rehabilitation can work, at least a percentage of the time."

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