CLIFF course works to keep inmates from returning

Wabash Valley facility one of three offering program

By Lisa Trigg

CARLISLE — Thinking positively for a change is just one of the concepts Turner Corn learned in prison. It helped him turn his life around from a drug addict to a law-abiding businessman.

After three successful years in society, Corn felt it was time to return to the facility where he turned that corner, and share his story with the staff and advisory committee at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Carlisle.

“I just wanted to let you know the program does work,” Corn said of the CLIFF methamphetamine treatment program at the facility.

He was in the first group of graduates of CLIFF, or Clean Lifestyle is Freedom Forever, in 2005. The six- to nine-month program involves group counseling, individual and peer classes, recovery-based groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and other electives such as the faith-based Purpose Driven Life program that offenders can do on their own.

Wabash Valley Correctional Facility is one of three state prisons offering the program. The future plan of the Department of Correction is to move CLIFF from the maximum security facility to the medium security facility at Putnamville, partially because most of the CLIFF offenders are medium security, and partially to free up beds in the maximum facility prison at Carlisle.

Part of the Department of Correction philosophy, said facility Superintendent James Basinger, is for offenders to have meaningful incarceration.

The recidivism for offenders who complete the program is lower than those who do not get any treatment, Baysinger said.

“They’re really successful,” he said of those people released back into society after completing the program.

A good example of that is Corn, who said he first started using drugs around age 16, and is now 42. He did his first prison term in 1990, and his first meth charge came in 2001. By 2003 he was on his way into the Department of Correction for the fourth time, looking at an eight-year sentence.

Many inmates will complete treatment programs to have their sentences reduced, but Corn said he had heard about CLIFF when he was serving time at Westville, and realized this program was a way he could get himself together.

He completed the program in six months, but stayed with it for another eight to nine months to be a mentor to others in the program.

Through CLIFF, Corn said he learned not to trust any of his thoughts. He learned about negative and positive thinking patterns, and learned not to prophecy negative results.

That teaching hit home with him one day as he was sitting at a stoplight in a pickup truck he was buying on contract. Corn said he looked at a bank, and at first thought negatively that he couldn’t get a loan to pay off his truck. But he instead just went inside the bank to ask what it would take for him, as a recovering meth addict whose only bank loan had ended in repossession in 1989, to get a loan for a vehicle.

The loan officer looked at Corn’s truck, and agreed right then to loan him the $2,000 it would take to pay off the truck.

“When that man showed that faith in me, it floored me,” Corn said.

But that positive process continued as he started to buy homes that he now sells on contract, and it also led him to buy a restaurant business that he built up and sold at a profit.

Corn said he has money in the bank, and he has worked three years for an asphalt company on highway projects. He has co-workers who are still using drugs, he said, and he tries to pass along tidbits and phrases from the CLIFF program to help them develop their own rational thinking.

But he also knows that everyone’s sobriety is personalized, and they must come to it of their own desire.

“I’m clean and proud, and I’m happy,” Corn said.



Lisa Trigg can be reached at (812) 231-4254 or lisa.trigg@tribstar.com.