WASHINGTON -- As recently as one year ago, words like “hope” and “opportunity” would have little place in a story about detention centers in Iraq.

But Maj. Gen. Doug Stone, who took responsibility for the detention operation in April 2007, has shifted its focus to the rehabilitation, education and strategic release of detainees. His “full-spectrum” approach incorporates job training, family visits, education, health care and periodic reviews in front of judicial boards rather than focusing mainly on incarceration.

The initiatives, says Col. Michael Stone (no relation to Maj. Gen. Stone), have helped lower the tension levels at the two main facilities, Camp Cropper in Baghdad and the much larger Camp Bucca near Basra in southern Iraq, to which many former inmates of Abu Ghraib were transferred after the prisoner mistreatment scandal there came to light.

According to Col. Stone, deputy commander of the 177th military police brigade in Iraq, the new approach has resulted in a telling decline in violent incidents at detention camps – 75 percent in the past few months, significantly lower recapture rates – down to about 1 percent, and a steady decline in the number of detainees.
“We’re on a definite downward trend,” Col. Stone says. “The number going out the door now exceeds the number coming in two-to-one over the last three months. We are now down to around 23,500.”

Military leaders know that any incident reminiscent of Abu Ghraib could quickly undermine the delicate progress they’ve made. But with the troop surge, the number of suspected insurgents in detention grew drastically, from 16,000 in February 2007 to a peak of nearly 26,000, threatening to expose guards to the same stress from maintaining order in overcrowded conditions that was partially blamed for the Abu Ghraib scandal.

“There were riots, there were detainees who were in control of their segments of centers,” Col. Stone says. “Lots of violence. Maj. Gen. Stone came in during the peak.”

Now, rather than locking up detainees in a single, massive population, prisoners are housed in smaller groups based on their threat levels to thwart extremists’ efforts to recruit less dangerous detainees.

“We were warehousing in the old model,” Col. Stone says. “Now a detainee comes to us at Camp Cropper we do an individual assessment. Does he have a job, is he married, where does he come from? Then we determine his threat level … and we segregate people right off the bat by sect, religious background and so on. We compartmentalize them, and put the moderate population next to juveniles so they’re not exposed to extremists.”

Last fall, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren asked Indiana Department of Corrections Commissioner David Donahue to review detention operations in Iraq.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but once I received that orientation, there was absolutely nothing I wasn’t allowed to observe and involve myself in,” Donahue says.

“I saw so many detainees that were so appreciative. I could sense genuine respect, some powerful things going on. The children in those environments, those are future leaders of Iraq. The work is not just about confining and restricting but providing hope and opportunity, and man, did I see that. I really did.”

The schools for juveniles and family visitation facilities provide particularly meaningful opportunities for soldiers to connect with young Iraqis, Donahue says.

“I saw soldiers at Camp Bucca taking care packages sent to them, removing items that were suitable for children so that when they came to visit their fathers and brothers, soldiers had gifts for them. I saw anxiety being reduced, bright smiles on children’s faces. It was mind blowing for me.”

Many detainees arrive nearly illiterate, with their only knowledge of Islam having come from extremists. Educating moderate detainees is the next logical step in making them less vulnerable to radicalization, officials say.

“[Moderate detainees] learn to read the Koran themselves and see it doesn’t see what they’ve been told it says, and they get mad at the extremists” Col. Stone says. “(Soon) extremists were becoming minorities and moderates started turning on them, getting them rooted out.”

Detainees also have the opportunity to earn money in job programs, primarily making bricks or textiles. It’s an important operation, Col. Stone points out, because many are not motivated by ideological or religious convictions, but are paid by militants to act against coalition forces.

“Those who choose to work then have some money they can give back to their family,” he says. “We’re learning that there are lots of good people who did bad acts not because they are extremists but to take care of their families.”

Still, such an investment in the education, health care and job training of detainees is not necessarily an easy sell.

“Public perceptions of incarceration are complex,” says Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “There’s a large segment of the population who always think prisoners are undeserving, and wonder why are we giving them all these benefits that not everyone has? But if you incarcerate with just concrete and steel, it’s much more expensive. If you give them some hope and keep them busy, it’s much easier to manage them.”

The goal, the military says, is to break the cycle of isolation and resentment that fosters extremism, while positively influencing the image of Americans amongst Iraqis. Because of the tribe-centric nature of Iraqi society, each detainee may have ties of some sort to as many as 100 other Iraqis, all with many links of their own. As such, treatment of detainees has the potential to affect the views of millions of Iraqis.

Efforts to facilitate re-entry into Iraqi society and ease tensions between Iraqis and coalition forces make sense as part of the larger counterinsurgency mission, Wright says.

“If our mission is really to return some stability to Iraq then what they’re doing makes complete sense. If we’re doing it on a military front and on an aid front, it also makes sense to be doing it with incarceration. It fits the overall mission.”

With the foundation in place, the focus has shifted to expanding services with increased involvement on the part of Iraqis.

“What we’re working on is how we can do this with fewer soldiers,” Col. Stone says. “How do we get Iraqis to fund pieces of this so we can reduce the coalition forces’ foot print? We all believe in this, we all know this needs to happen, we know we’ve got to finish this.”

So far, 1,700 Iraqis have been fully trained as corrections officers, but coalition camps must compete with Iraqi prisons for those valuable trainees.

For Col. Stone, helping Iraqis regain control of their lives - starting even in detention centers - is fundamental to bringing stability to the country.

“The measurement of success is when neighborhoods want to take their communities back,” he says. “We’re setting the conditions with these programs for moderates to take back the internment facilities.