ON "60 MINUTES": A CONNECTICUT MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISON EXPERIMENTS WITH GERMAN-STYLE CORRECTIONS AND PRODUCES A COLLEGE BASKETBALL STAR

After Reporting on Germany's Prison System in 2016, "60 Minutes" Goes Inside a U.S. Prison Program Inspired by the German Approach

Shyquinn Dix is getting a second chance at life thanks to a groundbreaking experiment at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison near Hartford, Conn., where he served time. Last summer, Dix was halfway through a four-year sentence for felony check fraud. Today, he is a dean's list student at the University of Maine at Presque Isle and the star player on the basketball team. Dix says he would still be in prison had it not been for the Cheshire program, which emphasizes personal and emotional growth. It is modeled on prisons in Germany, where the main focus is rehabilitation, not retribution, and human dignity is paramount. On the next edition of 60 MINUTES, Sunday, March 31 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT), Bill Whitaker goes behind Cheshire's walls to see how German-style incarceration is being tried in America.

The Connecticut program is called T.R.U.E., short for Truthful, Respectful, Understanding and Elevating. When Dix first entered T.R.U.E, he was skeptical. "I thought it was some B.S. because of just the stuff they were saying," Dix tells Whitaker. "Like, 'Oh, the correctional officers and staff here care about you. You get a second chance at life if you take it serious.'" But a corrections officer in the program did care about Dix and helped him earn an early release.

T.R.U.E. focuses on 18- to 25-year-old inmates who live in their own cellblock separate from the general population. Whitaker toured the unit with Warden Scott Erfe, who pointed out elements that make T.R.U.E unique. "You wouldn't have correctional officers playing board games with the inmates. That's just not done in general population," Erfe says. "Everybody here, you can tell, is just totally relaxed." T.R.U.E. prisoners receive intensive counseling and learn personal responsibility from an incentive system administered by staff and older prisoners brought in to help.

Warden Erfe wasn't sure the German approach would work in Cheshire. Now, two years in, he sees T.R.U.E. as a model for prison rehabilitation programs nationwide. But the union that represents Cheshire's correctional officers remains dubious, telling 60 MINUTES the program is too lenient and exposes officers to undue risk. Warden Erfe is encouraged by the results he has seen so far: "Numbers don't lie. Our incident rate is a lot lower in T.R.U.E than it is in general population."

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