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| Branden Staples has made more blankets than anyone else. He's serving time for attempted murder and will be released on Thanksgiving
Day, aided in his readjustment by the Blanket Project. Mary Knox Merrill - staff   Incarcerated Crochet |
Juvenile offenders start life over with a crochet hook
At a facility in Maine, Brendan Staples and other teenagers make blankets in a program that teaches valuable skills and life lessons.
from the November 21, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"It helps the kids build those skills they've not been exposed to at all, or have had no opportunity to practice," says Dan Reardon, a consultant and former CEO of the Bass shoe company who has volunteered 20 hours a week here as a mentor for more than a decade. "To create something from beginning to end, being able to give to their families and communities, talking for hours and hours – those are all social skills that will help make them successful outside. That's restorative justice – to make everybody whole."
The blankets – dozens of them crocheted, dozens more cut-and-tied fleece – are largely given back to the communities in which crimes were committed. They go to homeless shelters, day-care centers, and retirement homes.
"Jail doesn't make anybody better," says Mr. Reardon, echoing the corrections conundrum that has forever vexed policymakers. "But [the Blanket Project] brings them closer to reconciliation with the community."
There's no direct measure of how the project or other "risk intervention" programs like it at Long Creek contribute to keeping kids on the straight and narrow. But this facility, says superintendent Rod Bouffard, has a low rate of recidivism – 15 percent. About 85 percent of those youths released from Long Creek in the past year and a half have not been recommitted to any correctional facility, he says, compared with a national average of just over 50 percent.
Tomorrow begins one boy's test of his Blanket Project mettle. Branden Staples, a veteran from Long Creek's "high risk" unit, turns 20 on Thanksgiving Day and will walk free after spending most of his teen years here for an attempted murder in a drunken brawl and assaults on a probation officer and policeman.
To look into his wholesome face – chiseled like Ben Affleck's – is to see the all-American kid down the street. The kid destined to charm and succeed. To see his eyes well up with emotion about the smiles his blankets have brought a needy elderly man and a toddler in a day-care center is to witness genuine tenderness.
But charm, tenderness, and Blanket Project notwithstanding, to hear the strapping teen recount, in his soft Maine accent, the complex and violent story of where he's been is to worry a bit about where he's going.
Branden calls himself "the backbone" of his family of seven children, who grew up behind the bar that his single mother owned in down-and-out Lewiston, Maine. As a self-appointed protector of underdogs and women, he explains that he has had trouble containing himself when he sees someone being dissed. He learned, he says, at the feet of bar patrons: "We lived right behind the bar, so seeing fights and arguments or drunk people ... it wasn't anything different.... I grew up with the wrong crowd, I guess."
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