CORRECTION

A photo caption accompanying an article about prison ethics on Page 1B of the City & State section Monday misspelled the last name of inmate Edward L. Brooks.

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About a dozen inmates are gathered in a classroom in small groups, debating ways to exemplify the attributes of their self-devised ethical code.

The code includes caring, respect, honesty, tolerance, fairness, integrity, loyalty and trustworthiness. At the moment, they are discussing how to act in a respectful manner.

"That means saying 'yes, ma'am' and 'no, sir' when you are talking to people older than you," said Mickey A. Phipps, 42, a murderer doing life at Harnett Correctional Institution.

"Being clean, but maybe that's self-respect," suggests Ronald M. Bullock, 25, serving time for attempted armed robbery.

Edward L. Brooks, 45, convicted of attempted murder, asks whether respect would include collecting money for a sick friend.

"That's caring," Phipps answers. "That's a good ethical value but I don't think it has anything to do with respect."

Such discussions occur twice weekly among about 180 convicted robbers, murderers and other criminals who are voluntarily taking the ethics course at 28 of the state's prisons, officials say.

These classes, which started in the late 1990s, have made the N.C. Department of Correction among the country's first prison systems to educate inmates about ethics. The Institute for Global Ethics, a Maine nonprofit, wrote the 84-page textbook and trained prison employees to teach the class.

C.J. Edwards, a retired North Carolina prison program director who helped implement the course, said it was created with the common aim of every other prison program: to reduce the number of inmates who commit new crimes after their release. The latest recidivism study by the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission shows that 42 percent of the 18,691 prisoners released in fiscal year 1998 were convicted and reincarcerated within four years after release.

"You change people's thinking in order to change people's behavior," said Paula Mirk, a vice president of education at the ethics institute.

The Bible and Frost

In class, the inmates work through the textbook, which requires them to define their own ethical codes, understand right-versus-wrong dilemmas and analyze situations that pit two ethical values against each other. They read poems by Robert Frost and Shel Silverstein and excerpts from the Bible and the West Point honor code. They debate what someone should do if he finds a lost wallet with the owner's identification and $200 cash or whether a couple should drug their toddler to get her to sleep.

Although the state Department of Correction hasn't evaluated the effect of the ethics class, there is evidence that such education improves inmates' ability to evaluate their behavior.

During his dissertation research, E.H. Kropp, who teaches continuing education at the University of Virginia's campus in northern Virginia, used the same ethics textbook with 70 inmates at a jail in Fairfax, Va. He tested the inmates before and after taking the class, and found improvement in five areas: empathy, social responsibility, confidence, reflectiveness and satisfaction with their past behavior.

Kropp said he also found the inmates that he taught willing to acknowledge how unethical they had been.

"They understand more than we give them credit for about their own personal ethical barometer," Kropp said. "They will quickly look you in the face and say, 'I am unethical.' "

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