About the Author

After growing up in New York City, going to good schools, and being ordained as an Episcopal priest, Stephen Chinlund started working inside as a volunteer. He created groups of people inside with the plan that they could help each other more effectively than he could help them by preaching or even counseling them directly himself. The groups developed into small communities inside the prisons. Chinlund also recognized the need to help the men and women after they were released and developed counseling and job training on the outside. Parole, at the time, provided none of that.

Chinlund became a consultant to the Narcotic Addiction Control Commission, helping new treatment facilities in the city get started, using his experience helping individuals who were locked up. He was then recruited, in 1968, to be the director of the Manhattan Rehabilitation Center, confining three hundred female heroin addicts.

Chinlund had had success at the Manhattan Rehabilitation Center, so he moved on, in 1973, to become superintendent of the first work-release prison in New York State, giving reality to an important policy improvement.

Governor Hugh Carey then asked him to become chairman of the Commission of Correction, where he was able to confirm the improvements that were being made. As important, he was able in 1979 to start the Network program, a more formal and extensive implementation of the old groups inside. Funded with federal money initially, it grew to be a force for good in twenty-six prisons, at its maximum size.

Declining Carey’s request to serve another term, Chinlund moved on to a parish and then to be the executive director of the Episcopal Social Services, where he has continued the Network program and continued to advocate for progress in the correctional world. He continues that work after his retirement in 2005.