Juan Rios became a gang member when he was 11 years old. He started his first prison sentence at 19. Years later, after being released, he kept gang-banging. Then, at age 24, he shot three people during a robbery and was sentenced to life.
In 2010, during his current prison sentence, guards placed Rios in solitary confinement for being drunk. When he woke up, something clicked. He felt he had to change. He dropped out of the gang, took an ass whooping to do so, and began a new journey.
Most recently, Rios has dedicated himself to an innovative restorative justice program at the Idaho State Correctional Institution, in Boise. Called Restoring Promise, the program grew out of a trip administrative staff from seven different state prison systems, including Idaho’s, took to visit prisons in northern Europe. The U.S. prison officials learned a lot about how these countries think about rehabilitation and correction.
In general, U.S. prisons fail at these aims and in some ways harden the criminal mindset. For many people I have encountered inside Idaho prisons, required classes provided by the prison administration are often seen as hurdles to overcome in order to get parole, rather than life-changing events that could lead toward a positive beginning.
Restoring Promise, on the other hand, seeks to change the culture of prison from one of idolizing the criminal mentality to one focused on community and rehabilitation.
How? By changing the environment to feel more like a college dorm.
It started with a unit in our prison called Cornerstone Village and was designed to serve young people between the ages of 18 and 25. The unit and its dayroom were stripped of most of its institutional-style furniture, including metal tables and stools. Walls were painted a creamy sage green, a welcome change from the eggshell white that is common in Idaho prisons. Bookcases and couches were added to the dayroom, along with wooden tables and standalone chairs. Plants were brought to the tier. Fluorescent lights with covers that made the lighting a dingy yellow were replaced with vibrant LED lights. The prison provided refrigerators for people to store food and air fryers to cook with.
In Cornerstone Village, dayroom access is extended until midnight, instead of the 10:30 p.m. cutoff in all other units. Count, whereby prisoners stop all movement while staff take roll call, happens quicker in the dayroom, in 10 to 20 minutes, rather than the 30 to 90 minutes it takes in the general population. People in Cornerstone Village also have near-24/7 access to phones, an important part of the program.
The program currently serves 28 participants, nine of whom are mentors. People were chosen after filling out a questionnaire and indicating their desire to change their behavior for the better. Rios was chosen for his positive behavior and personality.
As a mentor in the program, Rios wants to guide people down a path like the one he has found for himself.
“If something I do or say … changes one thing in the minds of the kids in the unit so they don’t come back to prison, then it will all be worth it,” he said.
In December 2024, I attended a meeting with Cornerstone Village participants as a journalist to learn more about the program. And then in March, families of the mentors and mentees visited Cornerstone Village for a meet-and-greet. I didn’t attend that meet and greet, but reported on it afterward.
As part of the Restoring Promise ethos, the families were permitted much more intimate access to their loved ones’ lives than is typical. One mentor described to me that his father sitting on his bed was a life-changing event, one that helped his dad better understand what it was like to be in prison.
“The realization of what I go through day in and day out showed in my dad’s eyes,” he said. “It may have been only a glimpse, but somehow his understanding made me feel like I wasn’t alone anymore.”
During the December event, Deputy Warden Dago Martinez said Restoring Promise is “a change of culture in prison, one unit at a time.”
Martinez described the change as going from a penalty-based system to a decision making-based system, “where mentors, staff and eventually family members are involved in helping a resident understand why he’s making those decisions and how they affect that resident’s life and the lives of the people impacted by those decisions.”
I spoke to several participants who felt like getting out of the normal prison environment was key to improving their lives.
“It’s a prison without all the noise,” a young man named Jordan said, “and I’m not talkin’ about auditory noise.” He meant both the loud sounds and the chaos of prison.
After the December event, I ran into a lieutenant in our medical building and asked him about Restoring Promise. He said the normal prison environment doesn’t work.
“You can’t expect someone to change if you put them in an environment surrounded by people who don’t want to change,” he said.
If Idaho’s entire prison system became like the Restoring Promise program, it would help change lives, the lieutenant said.
Rios and Nate Thompson, another incarcerated mentor, have had similar life paths. Both men have been in prison for about 20 years, and their sons have also been incarcerated. Thompson’s son spent time in a juvenile detention center, while Rios’ son is at a different prison in Idaho.
Rios and Thompson partly blame their life choices for their sons’ current situations. They wished there was a program like Restoring Promise when they first came to prison — and Rios hopes his son can join at some point.
In spring 2025, all 28 participants were given a drug test; all but one passed, according to multiple mentors in the program I spoke with. Violence is basically nonexistent on the tier, I’m told. When there’s tension, mentors encourage cooldowns and dialogue.
“It’s not that arguments don’t happen,” Rios said. “It’s just that nobody is pressuring these guys into settling their disputes by trying to beat each other up.”
A few incarcerated people I spoke to about the program were initially skeptical.
One man said he would have liked the Restoring Promise funds to be used to renovate the prison’s large ballfields in the recreation yard, which are in a state of disrepair. Others said they would have liked the funds to be used for more prison staffing. And still others said they felt it was unfair for the program to be restricted to younger people.
Every day in Cornerstone Village there are two mandatory meetings, which Rios said helps maintain a stable atmosphere. In the morning meeting, guys set goals and encourage positive growth. They each answer a question of the day from a book with 4,000 questions in it. They check in on how people are doing on a scale of 1 to 10, and there’s a presentation from a mentor about their unit or something related to the program, followed by an open forum.
In the evening, people again share how they’re doing, discuss the day’s setbacks and accomplishments, and listen to another mentor presentation before talking among themselves in an open forum. The gatherings harbor a safe place, Rios said.
“It’s easy to feel alone in [prison],” mentee Christian Gebhard said. “At the meetings, I see that other people are dealing with their own problems. It’s like we are in this together.”
