Jaycees in Prison

Remember the Jaycees, those youngish strivers with Middle American enthusiasm for beauty pageants, Mother's Day corsages and business success? Well, these days one chapter president is serving ten years on a rape conviction and another is doing 20 years for assault and robbery. In all, some 9,000 members of the organization are in prison, and another 8,000 dues-paying boosters are ex-cons.

The reason is not that the community pillars have suddenly gone wrong en masse. On the contrary, the Jaycees have never been more responsible or achievement-oriented. In fact, a keen awareness of civic duty has led the organization to focus on new causes. In Philadelphia last month, Jaycees met with Black Panthers to rap on drugs and a sickle-cell anemia testing program; a group in Seattle is hoping to help set up halfway houses for parolees. The most important new approach centers on an aggressive drive to attract members in the nation's prisons. There are now 130 prison chapters, all formed for the same reason as chapters on the outside: to provide community-development and leadership training. While only a tiny minority of convicts participate, those who do bring the fervor of new converts to the organization. Says Luther Gosby, 22, who is serving 20 years for attempted robbery in Washington State Reformatory at Monroe: "I'll never forget what I got from the Jaycees; they taught me that I can better myself by being responsible to others."

Trees and Fire Trucks. With new goals, confidence and valuable contacts with the outside world, inmate Jaycees fight their old self-image. They organize blood drives for leukemia victims, send money to children in underdeveloped countries and plant trees in prison courtyards. One chapter even raised $2,500 to buy a used fire truck for an impoverished Indian reservation in Nebraska. An Illinois chapter has developed a highly successful ex-offenders employment service. In North Carolina, Jaycee convicts have toured nearby schools to warn students of the dangers of drugs, and inmate Jaycees in Washington State and Maryland have helped push prison-reform bills through the state legislatures.

The prison program's main booster is Gary Hill, 31, a Lincoln, Neb., metals-company executive, who took command five years ago, after the first prison chapter was established in West Virginia in 1962. Hill got hooked on the concept after he noticed that ex-convicts, long hired for his family business, made exceptionally good workers. He organized a Jaycee prison chapter and set up a referral service for convicts that now spans the country and guarantees ex-cons assistance with jobs, housing and counseling. Says Hill: "The Jaycees allow inmates, who historically have had all their individuality taken away from them, to look around and make changes instead of bitching."

FBI List. Many convicts who have known only the underside of society most of their lives would greet Hill's statement with instant skepticism. Malcolm Christensen, 35, formerly on the FBI's most-wanted list for crimes in eight states that ranged from kidnaping to assault, had his doubts when he entered the Jaycees. Now he is the president of the chapter in Maryland's maximum-security prison and goes about unguarded on his Jaycee business outside the prison walls. Christensen admits that he first became interested in the program three years ago, "just to get out of the cell and drink coffee and have cookies." He soon got serious, and the Jaycees recently awarded him the organization's highest individual honor, an "international senatorship."

Christensen linked up with David Gibbs, 34, a convict who has also been on the FBI's most-wanted list, to push a youth-counseling program outside the prison. Among more than 100 projects that Christensen's chapter has started is a crime seminar inside the prison that brings together inmates, state legislators and university professors. In such gatherings, Christensen and Gibbs discovered, they are accepted as equals. "I even call judges and other prominent men by their first names," says Christensen.

From Prison to Politics. For some convicts, the average $12 annual dues (the same as on the outside) can buy a ticket to a new life. A prime example is Gary Ihly, 27, who was active in the Happydale Jaycees while serving time for second-degree assault in Washington State's corrections center at Shelton. After his release, Ihly joined the Olympia Jaycees (he is now vice president of the chapter) and worked hard for passage of prison-reform bills that established a convicts' furlough program and increased inmates' pay. For his legislative efforts, Ihly was invited to Governor Dan Evans' office for the bill-signing ceremony. Now a programmer for the state's department of social and health services, Ihly hopes that he will be the first ex-convict elected to the Washington house of representatives. "After all," he says, "when you have gone from prison to the Governor's office in 20 months, anything seems possible." Jaycee involvement often helps in getting a parole--and staying free thereafter. Jaycees estimate that their ex-cons have only a 10% recidivism rate, compared with the more than 50% for alumni of federal prisons.

Frequently, of course, the Jaycees in prison pay a high price for their hard-sought status. They are sometimes considered turncoats by cellmates, fakes by old-line prison officials and hardened criminals by outside community groups. Gibbs' best friend and former accomplice would not speak to him for three months after his induction into the Jaycees. "You have 'to give up your friends and the prison subculture," says Christensen. "That's tough, and some can't do it." For a black Jaycee like Charles Ivery, 30, president of the chapter at Maryland's correctional center at Jessup, there are added headaches. "You have to convince the whites that we're not trying to create a Black Power situation and convince the blacks that the Jaycees are not a Ku Klux Klan white organization." To do that, and then persuade convicts to ante up the money to join, is no easy job, but the Jaycee record in prisons shows that it can be done.

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