If you’re driving through Fremont County, you might pass through the tiny town of Kinnear. Clifford Fewel lives a few turns off the highway and runs a business called Stay Free Forever out of his home office.
He provides cognitive behavioral health courses for adults and young people around Wyoming and Colorado, especially those involved in the justice system. The courses cover a wide range of topics, from DUIs to anger management to vaping awareness.
As part of Stay Free Forever, Fewel hosts a monthly podcast focused on helping people avoid incarceration or re-incarceration through conversation and educational storytelling. He’s also part of the Fremont County Prevention Program and gave a presentation about his courses to the Wyoming Governor’s Council on Impaired Driving earlier this month.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann sat down with Fewel in his backyard to learn more about his work and its impacts.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Habermann: You actually worked in the world of journalism for a long time and then became a corrections officer. What about that experience inspired you to start providing these courses?
Clifford Fewel: I needed health benefits, and I had been let go from a job in Colorado as an ad[vertisement] director. I humbled myself to apply with a state prison because when the economy is tanking like it was in 2008, corrections tend to do very well with hiring.
I was face-to-face with inmates. I didn't have any intrinsic judgment toward them. In fact, I had a lot of empathy for where they were. They really pointed out in the [corrections] academy in Tucson that you're not there to punish these people. You're there to facilitate their incarceration, and that means be decent, be firm, be fair, be consistent. Keep them safe, keep yourself safe, keep the public safe, and that's kind of the end of the story.
HH: I'd love to hear a little bit about where this style of course comes from.
CF: Larry Lloyd founded the American Community Corrections Institute and passed away a few years ago. His son Trevor now runs the company in Provo, [Utah].
Larry was an accountant who had a passion for psychology and he came up with a psychology-based behavioral traffic safety course that he was convinced would help people stop speeding, stop re-offending.
He created this course, and they started offering these courses to people, and lo and behold, they stopped reoffending, and the courts wanted more. He developed a bad check course because back in the '70s, bad checks were still a big deal, and it was really effective.
He started adding on other courses: theft, shoplifting, DUI, domestic violence, sex offender. Some of these courses, like a sex offender course, is not meant to be a standalone therapy, but it's great adjunct therapy. So the courses are really useful for doing that, surfacing issues that people need to think about.
HH: What kind of folks are you working with? How are you getting connected to them? Who is taking these courses?
CF: Most often, it's from the circuit courts in Lander and Colorado. Sometimes it's the prosecuting attorney, sometimes it's the public defender on a pre-trial basis saying, "I want you to take this course so when we go into court, you'll have something to show for yourself," a completion certificate.
I have prevention intervention courses for middle school, junior high, high school, all the way up to these courses that are for the more adult offenders or adult, as my daughter says, “justice-involved individuals.”
Most of the time, I'm dealing with a 20 to 30-year-old male or female who has a DUI or got caught stealing from Walmart or got into a bar fight, got into a fight at home. That’s the core.
HH: Most of these courses take about 11 to 15 hours, and students have about a month to complete them, and they also require a coach. Tell me a little bit about that coaching relationship and how that plays into the program.
CF: The coach aspect is actually the real secret sauce of why these courses work, because you're getting the student out of their own head, talking with someone they know and trust.
In every evaluation, almost, that I get from both coach and student, I read a comment that is something to the effect of, "Wow, this is the first time my mom and I have talked on this level in forever." Or maybe it's their boss or their cousin or their counselor.
It's getting the student talking about this stuff, real stuff, with someone. They're not just completing an online course or writing in a workbook. They're actually having to verbalize it, and I think that's where the synapses start firing, and new connections are made.
HH: In Fremont County, you've been providing these DUI courses since 2018, and you've been tracking the courses and some of the outcomes. How many people have taken this course in Fremont County, and what are some of the results you've seen?
CF: We had 176 people in Fremont County assigned to the DUI workbook course or the e-learning course. Of those, 14.2%, that's 25 total people, in the three years after they completed the course, reoffended with a DUI. That's like an 85% success rate.
It really puts wind in my sails to keep doing what I'm doing because any time you can take 150, 151 people off the practicing DUI list out there, driving while intoxicated, that's good for everybody.
HH: What do you think contributed to these low recidivism rates, in addition to this course?
CF: We are blessed to have a really active group in Fremont County that's called the Fremont County DUI Task Force. It's part of the overall Fremont County Prevention Program, that's headed up by a remarkable woman named Tauna Groomsmith.
That flows from what began in 2011 in Wyoming, the Governor's Council on Impaired Driving, which was the result of a tragic accident that most people are aware of in 2001 when eight members of the UW (University of Wyoming) cross country team were killed by a drunk driver.
For a long time, Wyoming was the United States’ leader in drunk driving, and Fremont County was the Wyoming leader. So I moved into a county that was at the epicenter of focus on “what do we do?”
They've come up with SafeRide programs that's growing every month and giving people the option to get a bus instead of driving their own car to public events. They do media, they target it toward all the holidays: July 4th, Super Bowl.
There's a lot of people much smarter than me who have been at this a lot longer, putting their all into solving this problem. I had the good fortune to move in and become a part of the solution, but by no means the only solution.
HH: You've also got a podcast called the Stay Free Forever podcast. Tell me a little bit about that, and who you bring on the show, and what your goal is.
CF: If I see someone do really stellar work on their online course or in their workbook, I will invite them. I say, "Hey, would you like to do a podcast interview and talk about how you came to redirect your life?"
There's some great episodes. I've done 18 so far. But there's also people like a judge, like a former Wyoming highway patrolman, the guy who's the president of the American Community Corrections Institute.
Anyone who has something to contribute or someone who needs help, who needs direction on how to turn their life around, they can tune in, download it for free, and get 40 minutes to an hour's worth of been-there, done-that from someone.
I think that's really good, kind of like free therapy, although I'm not a therapist.
HH: You've obviously spent a lot of time interacting with the justice system in Wyoming and on the Wind River Reservation. Are there changes that you think could take place that could help those systems improve, that could help support the people who are in those systems?
CF: I'll use the Wind River Tribal Court as an example of something that changed for the better.
My courses cost $110. People can make two payments of $57.50, so they're an extra five bucks for the privilege. At the Wind River Tribal Court, they allow me to say to the student, "Hey, once you pay for this course and complete it, they will knock $110 off your fines."
That would be something that I think could be looked at, because fines can be overdone. If there's a willingness to let people know that, “Hey, complete this course, show us your certificate, and we'll drop your fines by the cost of the course,” I thought that was a really civil thing to do.
HH: You provide this course for a lot of people in Wyoming, where there's a lot of talk about the cowboy mentality, people having a hard time asking for help, or being really individualistic. Do you see that come up in your course responses, and how do you respond to that?
CF: People come in with their walls and bridges up, and once they realize that there's a human being on the other end of the phone who's interested in representing them well to the court system, and that this is a path forward and that all it requires is thought and effort, they generally settle down and do a really good job.
HH: What do you hope these courses look like in five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road?
CF: I hope they're in many more languages. Right now, they're in English and Spanish. Every one of my courses is available online in Spanish. I have six of the workbooks that are available in Spanish, and that covers a lot. But we have such a vast number of people for whom English is not their first language, who get in trouble and who need help, just like anyone else does, who need to reassess their risky thinking and behavior. So other languages would be a big deal.
HH: Anything else you would like to add that we haven't touched on?
CF: The main thing I would pass along as free advice to anyone out there who’s in the system or has someone they know or love in the system, is communication is your friend.
Stuff happens. People forget. Emergencies happen. It's always, always, always in your best interest to notify the person who's expecting something and to keep track of what you say you're going to do, even if it's just to make a phone call next Wednesday. Use a Post-it note, use your calendar, use your phone to set reminders.
Because the people who communicate, whether you're on probation, parole, pre-trial, the people who communicate and let the court or the system know what's going on are the people who get the grace.
The people who go silent out of fear, and it's a terrible gnawing fear when you're in trouble, but the people who go silent are the ones who invite more scrutiny. It's kind of ironic, but that's the way it works. And so I always say, text, call, keep in touch.
