PROFILE Hugh MacMillan ’64 Program rebuilds prisoners’ lives
In the program Hugh MacMillan ’64
helped to found, prisoners learn to control anger, improve their family relationships,
and work on job skills.
Working with the Florida Department of Corrections in the 1990s, Hugh MacMillan ’64
saw too many prisoners lose any sense of hope in their lives. When he learned
about Kairos Prison Ministry, a weekend spiritual retreat for inmates led by
a team of community volunteers, he wondered whether it would be possible to extend
the length of the retreat into a residential self-help program where the focus
was less on evangelism and more on practical issues such as family and employment. “Most
of the people in prison would do almost anything to fix their broken lives,”
says MacMillan.
To help inmates do just that, in 1999 MacMillan helped create Horizon
Communities in Prisons (www.horizoncommunities.org), a nonprofit interfaith prison
ministry that brings volunteers from the local community into prisons to teach
inmates to manage their anger, resolve conflicts, maintain and improve their
family relations, and hone job skills. Prisoners volunteer to live for one year
in a special dorm where both the physical layout and the schedule of activities
help to create a community that prepares them to live responsibly with others
in mutual trust and respect. Essentially, they learn how “to live on the
outside,” says MacMillan, who served as chairman of Horizon’s board
for three years. Horizon began as a pilot program at Tomoka Correctional Institution
in Daytona Beach, Fla., and has since brought its program to Wakulla Correctional
Institution near Tallahassee, Fla., and to prisons in Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma.
Today MacMillan works part-time for Horizon, building the volunteer
base and developing programs for the Wakulla facility, where the Horizon faith-based
approach has been applied to the entire 1,800-bed prison as a “faith-and
character-based institution” (www.wakullacivolunteers.org). MacMillan and
his wife, Carol, own a Tallahassee public-interest government relations and marketing
business, MacMillan Co. A religion major at Princeton with a lifelong interest
in justice and politics, MacMillan says he is confident that many states will
follow the path taken in Florida.
Of the approximately 1,000 Horizon participants to date (not including
the Wakulla facility), about 30 percent have been released and 30 percent were
to be released in 2006. Studies show that, on average, graduates of the program
have far fewer disciplinary incidents within prisons, pay significantly greater
portions of their child support once released, and stay out of jail. MacMillan
adds that, with time, the program should save tax dollars — with reduced
recidivism, more former inmates would be functioning in society rather than being
supported in prison.
“The present prison system treats every inmate as hard to help
and dangerous,” says MacMillan. But he doesn’t see most prisoners
that way. In Horizon dorms, he says, “people learn how to talk and listen
to each other,” and they learn the skills to help them rebuild their lives.
