Changing Lives from the Inside

Just 26 years old and the mother of three young children, Rhonda Leland found herself behind bars serving a life sentence at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla. It would be 32 years before she was even eligible for a parole hearing. Staring into the abyss of endless days in a prison cell, she realized that whatever she had been doing wasn’t working, and she needed a new strategy for just living life. She knew she had to start with her own self-esteem and anger, and as she looked around her, she understood that her fellow convicts faced the same dark shadows. 

She found the names of psychologists in self-help books from the prison library, and she began writing to people she thought might be able to help.

One of those letters landed on the desk of Dr. David Paul, who along with his wife, Bonnie Paul, were graduate faculty in Psychology. The duo ventured to Chowchilla and gave their first workshop on communication skills, understanding oneself, and boosting self-esteem. “Many of the women had never felt truly heard or valued before,” Leland remembers. “The simple act of having a conversation where someone listened to them made a significant difference in their lives.”

The Pauls started to make regular visits to Chowchilla. Eventually, in 2010, the Freedom to Choose Project was born, an organization whose mission, “transforming lives from the inside,” is not only literal and metaphorical, but effective, impactful, and statistically successful. Over the years, the program evolved to include every state prison in the State of California, and the Santa Barbara County jails. . 

The name of the organization was developed from the work of Viktor Frankl, much of it codified during his imprisonment in a concentration camp. “It focuses on the ability to choose one’s response regardless of circumstances,” state Drs. Paul, drawing the connection between a concentration camp and a prison. 

“If you’d asked me if I wanted to do service work in a prison, I would have said, ‘Forget it, not me. I cannot do that. I’m not qualified. I’m too scared,’” Dr. Bonnie Paul recalls. “I overcame all of that. It’s taught us that in order to do the skills we teach, we have to use them.”

A pilot study further highlighted the Freedom to Choose Project’s impact, revealing that women who completed five or more workshops experienced a recidivism rate of under 5%. This stands in stark contrast to the average recidivism rate of 49% for women in California during that period. 

But the anecdotal successes are perhaps the most convincing, and none more so than Rhonda Leland, whose initial impulse to break the cycle and free herself sparked the entire endeavor. Hers is one of thousands of stories of healing, redemption, and transformation. After 28 years of working on herself through the Freedom to Choose workshops and curriculum, she was granted a parole hearing before her initially scheduled time. She is now not only living a life of freedom on the outside, but is working as the Education and Project Coordinator for the organization she helped found, the Freedom to Choose Project.