Object: Rehabilitation (Episode 3)

“I don’t know myself how it happened,” Mr. Demetrious says, “I’m no kid.”

He goes on to tell the audience about the four thousand dollars he stole from his company’s welfare fund. The only explanation he can give? His own loneliness.

Mr. Demetrious is a radio play character, but he is (somewhat loosely) based on a real inmate who was brought to Rikers Island back in the 1946.

His story was one of many featured on Toward Return to Society.

TRtS was a series of radio programs that the New York Department of Corrections produced with WNYC about the city prison system. Each episode begins with a criminal and his life story, dramatized for radio. A boy from a broken home turns to a life of crime. (Several boys, actually.) A man goes mad for his paramour and becomes an embezzler. An accountant becomes a larcenist to deal with his feelings of inadequacy.

But the show doesn’t end when these unlucky men reach prison. Instead, their case is brought before the classification board; a group of prison officials, medical and psychiatric experts, religious figures, and educators. Together, these men come up with a plan for the prisoner’s term.

“The object?” the announcer declares at the beginning of each show, “Rehabilitation!  The subject is regarded as a person in need of readjustment to a useful niche in society. No steps in this direction are overlooked.”

And the members of this radio-reenactment of a classification board certainly do consider a wide range of options—everything from pig farming to plastic surgery.

We’ve sampled some of those options in the episode above, along with some quality 1940s psychobabble.

We’ve also, though, collected some material that might sound a little more familiar. The most interesting thing about Toward Return to Society might not be that it shows how much our prison systems have changed. It might be, instead, that it shows how much they have remained the same. 

This piece is the third episode of Backtrack, a summer mini-series from the WNYC Archives. The rest of the episodes can be found here.