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Volunteers use personal recovery stories inside prisons to reach people struggling with addiction
Summary
CPO volunteers who are formerly incarcerated share vivid personal accounts—ranging from chronic alcoholism to relapsing in custody—to normalize disclosure, reduce shame, and model recovery during eight‑week groups inside Massachusetts prisons.
On episode 11 of the Concord Prison Outreach podcast, volunteers described how sharing lived experience helps break secrecy and shame among people in custody.
"There's wisdom in the circle," said Liz Rust, chair of the CPO board, describing the program's peer format. Rust recounted encounters in MCI Framingham where she estimated "I'm gonna say 80 percent of the women there were there because of some drug or alcohol related, situation," and described desperation that led to criminal acts. Her account framed volunteering as a response to seeing addiction as an underlying cause of many incarcerations.
Sam Williams, executive director and a formerly incarcerated volunteer, offered his own history of escalating substance use and a conviction at 19, saying the experience shaped his recovery work. Both hosts emphasized that storytelling serves two purposes: it provides concrete examples of harm (Williams referenced participants waking up on the floor in vomit) and shows pathways out through honesty, group support and practice.
Speakers positioned storytelling and facilitator transparency as an intentional method to encourage engagement, not as a substitute for clinical treatment. They urged volunteers and programs to pair lived‑experience facilitation with appropriate clinical supports for substance‑use disorders.
