[ LETTER NOT SENT ]

                      June 17, 1996

Bob Gaydos, Editorial Page Editor
The Times Herald Record
Middletown, New York

    Suggested caption: Recovery spiritual, not religious

Editor:

    The recent court ruling barring corrections agencies 
from welcoming volunteers from 12-step programs like 
Alcoholics Anonymous into prisons to meet with inmates 
(THR, June 12) defies common sense. It seems more based in 
fuzzy reasoning than in the First Amendment.
    I am familiar with the 12-step model as a mental 
health clinician, family therapist, former probation
officer, and as a teacher in area prisons. The self-help 
support received by those recovering in AA is one of the 
few interventions which actually work, increasing the 
chance that an alcoholic or addict will remain sober and 
live a healthy, productive life.
    The Court of Appeals has blurred the difference 
between spirituality and religion. The former involves a 
personal inner transformation, irrespective of one's 
exercise or affiliation with any establishment of 
religion. It has to do with coming to personal terms with 
the ground of being, not joining a church. Existence 
without spirituality -- with or without religion -- is a 
shallow experience, causing many people to seek chemically 
induced intoxication (and crime) to escape despair.
     Alternative recovery organizations, like the 
California-based Secular Organization for Sobriety (SOS), 
modeled on 12-step ideas but without the explicit 
reference to a "higher power," do not exist locally that I 
know of. So the taxpayers must now foot the bill for 
professionals to do prison work which has been done 
admirably by volunteers for decades?
     There are better ways to expend our thin resources.

                        Sincerely,



                        Thomas Rue