Inmate Ownership: Father Peter G. Young on the Key to Recovery Behind the Walls

Father Peter G. Young spent years as a chaplain inside New York’s prisons, and he built a recovery program there that the men ran with their own hands. In this clip from The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio, he breaks down the secret: when people own their recovery, it sticks.

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Watch: “Inmate Ownership: Key to Recovery”, Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast, Hoodz Radio.

Father Peter G. Young died on December 9, 2020, at age 90. Kay Bond recorded this conversation with him for The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio.

In His Words

“The thing that made it work was inmate ownership, that they felt then that they were participating. … If you don’t have those three things — I call it the stool of recovery — then you’re in deep trouble.”

Two ideas, one system. First, ownership: the men had to feel the program was theirs. Father Young describes the early days, when he did the call-outs himself and gave hours of lectures on the disease, until the men started to believe in being clean and sober. Then they had to keep the dorm clean and sober themselves. “They want to become a better person,” he says. Second, the stool. You’ve got to get people “from the treatment to the housing and then to a job,” he says. Take away one leg and the whole thing falls.

Inside the Walls at Mt. McGregor

The story starts at Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility, a former TB center turned medium-security prison. Father Young went there as chaplain in 1976. One inmate knew about his work at the state level and kept asking him one question: “What can you do to assist the incarcerated addicts?” The answer became ASAT, the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Treatment program.

He knew from experience that forcing treatment on people doesn’t work. Back in the Albany police court, he recalls, the judge would line the men up and ask, “Do you want to go to Father or jail?” Almost all of them followed him down to the gym. At Mt. McGregor he used the same thinking. He went to the State Parole Board and asked that success in the program count toward earlier release. That made ASAT worth wanting, and the men signed up.

There was a catch. Correctional guidelines say inmates can’t be placed in charge of other inmates. So he set up what he called “inmate ownership with civilian ASAT leadership.” Inmates served as group leaders, clerks and expediters, all supervised by civilian staff. In the first years, those inmate leaders were the program’s only staff.

From the Memoir

He explains exactly why ownership mattered.

“Giving the men duties got them to buy in. They became ‘part of the solution’ and took pride in making the program work.”

From Chapter 21, “MMCF, ASAT and the Meetings,” in his memoir Fifty Years Young.

The rules were simple, four of them: no illicit sex, no stealing, no threats of physical harm and no using drugs. Every other violation was a “pull-up”: inmate staff and a civilian counselor brought the man into a “quiet room” for advice, and if that didn’t work, the whole dorm met to confront him in what they called a “concern meeting.” The same chapter shows what happened when that spirit was lost. After Mt. McGregor closed, participation was made mandatory. “It was no longer a program of attraction,” he writes, and most of it lost the inmates’ cooperation.

In Chapter 26, “Going North: Bolton Landing and the Prison Ministry,” he writes that ASAT began at Mt. McGregor in 1976, and that when he retired in 1990 there were 41,000 DOCS inmates in ASAT across the state.

The stool from the clip is spelled out in Chapter 32, “Recovery Sites and the State Expansion of Services,” where he describes the three-legged stool in the PYHIT logo:

“The seat is recovery, and the legs hold it up: treatment, clean and sober housing, and training for the workplace. The stool can’t stand with any leg missing.”

By his account, a SUNY Albany study followed the men for ten years. Those who had ASAT followed by drug-free housing, treatment and a job had less than a 10 percent re-incarceration rate. When the men couldn’t be placed into those resources, he writes, re-incarceration went up.

Why It Matters Now

The legacy is a simple truth that still gets ignored: you can’t mandate somebody into wanting a better life. You can give them a reason, a role and a stake in it. Father Young calls the men who came through and turned back to help others “wounded healers.” Some went back behind the walls as counselors, carrying the message to the men still inside.

That’s the movement. Reentry isn’t a handoff at the prison gate. It’s treatment, a safe place to live and a paycheck, all three at once, with the people coming home treated as partners instead of cases. As he puts it in Chapter 34, “Vets and Parolees,” parolees need three basics: “safe and sober housing, training for a job and then the job itself, and continued treatment for their disease of addiction.” Build the stool, and let them own it.

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, and follow Hoodz Radio so you don’t miss what’s next. His story gets the full treatment in 50 Years Young, our upcoming 10-part series, so keep an eye out.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.