Where will I be sleeping tonight?
When was the last time they had to think about that? Where they slept, where and what they ate, what they wore, when they showered, when they were able to go outdoors—all these decisions had been made for them. Now, emerging from the controlled, micromanaged world they had inhabited for years—for decades—they were faced with so very many decisions. But this decision, this question, demanded an immediate answer.
Some had no answer. They would end up on the street that first night. A 2018 Prison Policy Initiative report, the first national snapshot of homelessness and the previously incarcerated, found that people who had served a single prison sentence experienced homelessness at a rate nearly seven times higher than that of the general public. For those who had served repeat sentences, the rate was almost twice as high: thirteen times that of the general public. And then there were the men and women just out of the gate who were not technically homeless that first night because they found a place to sleep at a temporary shelter, environments too often just as or even more risky than pitching a tent under a bridge or sleeping over a sidewalk grate. Some of those released would be mandated by the conditions of their parole to report directly to community corrections centers, transitional facilities that housed offenders in monitored, structured settings, allowing them to leave only for approved activities.
But many of those released would spend at least their first few nights with family. That might mean crashing on a living room couch in their cousin’s apartment. It might mean a spare room at their grandmother’s place. This homecoming might be warm and welcoming; it might be tense and weird. It might be sustainable. It might be healthy. It might be dangerous. For many of the more than 600,000 men and women released every year, finding stable housing—finding any housing—is their first and biggest hurdle. And it is housing, say those who study the lives of those who leave prison, that is the foundation for successful entry.
***
Trevor, emerging from seventeen and a half years inside, was one of the lucky ones. He knew where he would sleep. And he was releasing not just to a physical space that was safe and comfortable—his mother’s home—but to an emotional space that was loving, accepting, and fiercely loyal. Few people, ex-inmates or not, could count on the level of support that Karen, Trevor’s mother, provided. It was unflagging, tireless, and in that way that only a mother’s love can be, ferocious. Back when he was first arrested, Karen had steadfastly believed her boy, her fourteen-year-old, was innocent. It’s not just what he had told her. It is what, as a mother, she had to believe. When she accepted that he was guilty as charged, that he had in fact committed murder, when she was forced to grapple with what that meant to his future, her belief in him never wavered. That belief propelled her out of her old life. She fashioned a new one from the ground up: a new town, a new job, a new career, and a new house, the house that was waiting for Trevor when his parole officer finally dropped him off that first afternoon.
The layout of the house offered privacy and separation of space. Trevor had his own room with his own private bathroom. He didn’t feel wedged in. He didn’t feel as if he were an addendum to someone else’s life. And, although he was living in his mother’s house and had never experienced independence, he did not feel like a kid the way a lot of us do when we come back home as adults. He was a man, thirty-something, who had grown into what it meant to be an adult while behind bars. It helped that his mother encouraged and supported this, that she saw him as the adult he had become. But it also helped, almost as much or perhaps more, that Loraine was waiting for him in the house. She was the young woman who had begun writing to him years earlier, who had visited him regularly, who had established a relationship with Karen, who saw her future with him. That private room in Karen’s house was their room. Trevor was releasing not just to a house but to a new life that had at least the beginning of a structure to it, a foundation.
He was extraordinarily grateful for all this, and he understood how deeply indebted he was to his mother. He wanted to pay her back, and he knew exactly what that meant. The most important thing for her was seeing that he was on his way to a happy and fulfilled life. That meant taking care of himself, being productive, paying his own bills. Ingrained in him from his off-the-grid, backwoods childhood was his father’s attitude that “when you turn eighteen, you’re out of the house.” He was more than a decade past that landmark, but his immediate situation, although seemingly about as ideal as a homecoming could be, was actually quite tenuous. His early release was contentious. He might be reincarcerated at any time. This was not paranoia. The threat was real, and it was with him every day. So, although he wanted to start an independent life, to leave his mother’s house and find an apartment for him and Loraine, he held himself back. If they moved out and he was sent back to prison, he would be saddling Loraine, or his mother, or both of them, with the rent.
And so he did chores around the house. He made himself as useful as he could. But he also tried to enjoy his freedom. He and Loraine went for drives, often with no destination in mind, just to be out and about. Sometimes they’d go to a Walmart or Target and just walk the aisles, looking without buying. When he got clearance from his parole officer, they drove west an hour to the beach. He signed up for a motorcycle endorsement class, got his license, bought a bike. Then, six months later, a little more than eleven months after his release, he was rearrested, recharged with the original crime, and sent back to prison. This wasn’t double jeopardy. Due to how his second look hearing had been adjudicated, his indictment was still alive. It would take another four months for the legal haze to lift and for Trevor to once again gain release, this time for good. Less than a month later, he and Loraine signed a lease on a duplex.
***
Stable housing is the doorway to what follows, what has to follow, for reentry to be successful. There is universal agreement about that and about how being housed matters immediately—from the first day out, the first week. It is not just the physical place—although safe indoor shelter is vital—it is that stable housing offers the consistency and control that helps to establish daily routines. It is a way of reducing exposure to what criminologists call “deviant peers.” It is a base for seeking employment and, if needed, treatment. It is a statement of personal growth and independence. As Washington State University criminal justice researcher Faith Lutze put it: “Housing stability serves as a conduit to access and builds the social capital necessary to sustain long-term reintegration into the community.”
Conversely, housing instability has been shown to undermine offenders’ ability to take advantage of whatever support and treatment services might be available in their community or might be mandated by the conditions of their parole. Lack of safe and stable housing is related to poor health. Life on the streets or in temporary shelters is risky, and access to medical support is more challenging and more limited without a permanent address. Compliance, whether that means checking in with a parole officer, going to treatment, securing employment, or staying away from “known associates,” is harder in the absence of stable housing. In fact, reentry studies highlight the link between homelessness and noncompliance. Not surprisingly, lack of stable housing is also linked to recidivism. Those without stable housing are far more likely to return to prison. Lutze’s four-year study in Washington state highlighted this. Another study that focused on former inmates reentering communities in Georgia found that every time a parolee changed addresses the possibility of rearrest increased 25 percent. If stable housing is essential to reentry, if the benefits and the risks associated with stable housing have been extensively researched and are well known, if interrupting the revolving door of recidivism saves many millions of dollars and makes communities safer, then why is it such a challenge for so many of the men and women reentering society to secure a decent place to live?
One obvious, but incomplete, answer is that affordable housing is a problem for everyone in virtually all parts of the country. A Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies report found that the availability of “low rent” (defined as $800 or less a month) apartments in most metro areas declined substantially—in some places sharply—between 2011 and 2017. In the Denver and Portland, Oregon, metro areas, affordable rentals declined more than 60 percent. In Miami, the decline was 40 percent; Chicago, 26; New York metro, 22. In Detroit, an impoverished community that already suffered a shortage of affordable housing, the decline was 15 percent. Lack of affordable housing leaves ex-offenders competing for the same limited inventory as those without criminal records. Even in areas where there might be what is deemed “affordable” rents, most inmates do not leave prison with enough money for the first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and cleaning/damage deposit required by landlords and rental agencies.
But even getting to the point of being asked for this money is a challenge. Many landlords and rental agencies require potential tenants to list past housing and employment references on their applications, thus immediately flagging (without directly asking about) incarceration history. It is true that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 protects a variety of potential tenants from being discriminated against, but “felon” is not a protected class. Even in states or communities that have attempted to ban discrimination against those with a felony record, there are many reasons a rental agency could easily reject a former felon without referencing a past conviction. For those without funds or in need of substantial support, public housing might be an option. Or not.
Federal law bans outright three categories of people from admission to public housing: sex offenders, those convicted on methamphetamine production (in a federal housing project), and people who are currently using illegal drugs. Public housing agencies, under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, have the added discretion to deny applicants who have previously been evicted from public housing for drug-related criminal activities or who have a pattern of disruptive consumption, and a catchall category includes anyone who has engaged in any drug-related criminal activity, any violent criminal activity, or any other criminal activity, if the housing authority deems them a safety risk. Assuming a released inmate qualifies to apply for housing support—a Section 8 voucher to be used to offset rent—the processing of the application can take months. Once accepted, the person is placed on a waiting list. The wait list to get the voucher is one to two years. And then the hunt for a Section 8–approved rental begins.
The increasing challenges of the affordable housing market, the inadequate government funding to support subsidized housing, the released inmate’s lack of funds to cover the initial costs of renting—all this stands in the way of a smooth transition (or sometimes any transition) to stable housing. But what also stands in the way, and cannot be budgeted or legislated out of existence, is the deeply ingrained learned helplessness of a person leaving prison after many years.
Patricia McKernan, a social worker and past president of the Reentry Coalition of New Jersey relates the story of Darryl, released from thirty years behind bars and instructed by prison social workers to head to a shelter. Prisoners know from other prisoners how dangerous these places can be. In Beyond Bars: Rejoining Society After Prison, Stephen Richards, a former drug offender who spent nine years in federal prisons and is now a professor of criminal justice, writes about the experience of spending time in a temporary shelter. It is not just that homeless shelters are often located in high-crime areas; and it is not just that many are seedy; and it is not just that a person’s belongings are often not safe in such a place. It is, Richards writes, that an ex-con is often earmarked upon arrival, a target for, as he puts it, “folks slinging dope or women in miniskirts.”
Darryl did not head to a temporary shelter. Maybe he had heard the cautionary tales from inmates who’d cycled in and out. He had released without a plan, without post-prison supervision, and without funds. Maybe he just didn’t know where to go. He roamed the streets and slept in doorways. There was a snowstorm. He took refuge in a bus station. He had left the world that for half of his life had told him exactly what to do and when to do it. Released to a community he did not remember, where he had no one, where he had to take initiative to make something happen, he was at a loss.
***
Arnoldo’s story could not be more different. During his almost two decades inside, and especially his long stints in the hole, he had thought hard about the kind of man he wanted to be on the outside, and he had methodically researched the challenges of reentry by questioning men who’d been released, hadn’t made it, and were back again. He was prepared. And his smooth release to a welcoming household paved the way for successful reentry. But, as with anything that relates to family, there were issues. For some who leave prison to stay with family, the issue is the financial burden they place on their relatives. For others, the household they are joining is already crowded and their added presence is a physical burden. If the family lives in public housing, the issue may be that the ex-offender’s presence is a violation of the lease. It might be the family itself contributed to the life led and the choices made by the person now emerging from prison: alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, abuse. The list goes on: Are there guns in the household? Is anyone living there also an ex-offender, perhaps on parole? The reasons a release to family can’t or won’t work are numerous.
For Arnoldo, the challenges were more subtle. Both his mother and his stepfather were employed. Money was not an issue, and neither was space. Like Trevor, Arnoldo had his own room in a safe, quiet, law-abiding home. He was, during those first few days and weeks, buoyant and energized, “all juiced up,” as he put it. He was free. Everything was cool. Every day was great. He was on his best behavior, and so was his family. The last time he had lived with family was when he was fifteen, and the tendency now might be to treat him as the kid he was then and not the adult he had become. But that’s not what happened. He was not confronted with rules, with curfew, with a list of chores. It was not anything they said or did; it was just being there. It was their home, not his. On the one hand, his days were gloriously his own. On the other hand, he felt pressured—from himself, not his family—to contribute. They didn’t need financial help. But his mother, who worked full time at an exhausting job and, it soon became clear to him, shouldered the burden of virtually all the domestic chores on top of that, could use his help. Because he needed to keep busy, because he needed to create structure to his days, and because he needed to actively contribute to the household, Arnoldo spent most of his first month out of prison doing chores, cleaning and caring for the house, and doing neglected upkeep on the property.
As he settled into that rhythm, as the days and weeks went by, he began to see his family more clearly. He had changed during the almost two decades he was gone, and so had they. His little sister, eight years old when he went to prison, had written him letters all the time, signing off with smiley faces. They had developed a strong relationship during his time behind bars. Now they were both adults. She had her own life, and it was a complicated one. They got into an argument. She said some hurtful things, this smiley-faced little girl. It was hard to reconcile, hard to move forward.
Living in a household with his stepfather also became increasingly difficult. This was the man his mother had married back when Arnoldo was nine. There had been issues then, more between the stepfather and Arnoldo’s younger brother than between Arnoldo and his mother’s new husband. But Arnoldo felt the tension. And there was residual trauma in that household reaching back to his early childhood, from the years spent with his biological father, an alcoholic, a mercurial, sometimes solicitous, sometimes violent man. As a child, as a teen in juvie, as a gangbanger in prison, Arnoldo had, at first, repressed those feelings, then given into rage, and then finally, after years of reflection and hard work, gotten to a place of forgiveness, for both his fathers. It was not because he thought what they had done was okay. It was because he needed to forgive to move forward. But now, sharing the home with his stepfather, in his presence every day, there were just too many memories. He would have to leave. The soft landing was not as soft as he thought it would be.
***
Catherine had created a fantasy around her release to her family, a Hallmark movie version of her homecoming. She had never had a relationship with her mother, a near stranger who had left her and her brother when she fled her marriage. Now, Catherine would have that opportunity. This is what she told herself. This is what she planned for. Instead of releasing to Florida and to her father’s house, she petitioned to have her parole transferred to Kansas, where her mother lived. Releasing to her father’s home would have been traumatic anyway. The crime she and her brother had committed had been against her father’s girlfriend. A few months before the murder, child welfare officers had found signs that the two children were being sexually and physically abused by their uncle, their father’s brother. How could she make a new life while immersed in the environment that led to her crime? And how could the state of Florida have sanctioned this arrangement anyway? The state apparently did. Catherine’s younger brother, her codefendant, released to that home.
The other alternative had its own challenges. Her mother had exited Catherine’s life when she was four. During those years before her arrest at age thirteen, and during those seventeen years in prison, the mother-daughter relationship had not flourished. Now, as an adult, a woman of thirty embarking on a new chapter in her life, Catherine felt compelled to reach out. Maybe it was because of her prison relationship with “Ma Betty” from Fresh Start Ministries. Betty and her husband, Pastor (Papa) Charles, had come into the prison to teach and preach, and after getting to know and love Catherine, they had declared her their child, the “product of a spiritual birth.” Ma Betty was a substitute mother. Perhaps that connection fueled her desire to unite with her biological mother. Maybe reaching out to her estranged mother was a step on the path of forgiveness that Catherine was determined to travel. Maybe it was just that every daughter longs for a loving mother. Whatever the motivation, Catherine wanted to live with her mother.
A day after her release in Florida, she and her mother were on a plane to the Midwest. The dream of a rekindled relationship died less than a month later. They were mother and daughter, but in truth, they were strangers. Catherine felt like a guest in someone’s home. Actually, she felt more like she was living in a motel. It didn’t help that her mother related to her—and treated her—like an adolescent. She was too old to have a curfew. Too old to have decisions made for her. Maybe if they had been able to talk it through, things would have gotten better. But they had no foundation for that. A few weeks after moving in, Catherine moved out. It should have been hard for her to find an apartment, almost impossible, in fact. She was an ex-con, a violent offender with no rental history. Her employment “history” included the job she had just landed at a fast food chain. Had she gone through a rental agency, she never would have found a place to live.
But Catherine was both resourceful and lucky. She had found a job. It was a menial one, but she poured energy into it. She showed herself to be an enthusiastic and reliable worker. Her supervisor loved her, and her supervisor knew someone who had an apartment to rent. The rent was affordable. She put in a good word for Catherine. And that was that. She had her own space for the first time in her life. Her mother gave her a bed. She would acquire the rest when she could. In the meantime, she was both overjoyed and overwhelmed. She shopped at the Dollar Store. She almost settled in.
But Catherine also had much bigger dreams for herself than working a minimum-wage, burger-slinging job in a small town. In prison she had earned an associate’s degree, as well as paralegal and computer support certifications. Through her work with Fresh Start Ministries she had discovered a talent for teaching and public speaking. She wanted to be living that life or at least pursuing it. She had met a guy at the fast-food place, a fellow worker who had his own prison history and was in recovery from addiction. Together they imagined a new life together, a fresh start as far away as they could get. They saw “the West” as the promised land, like the pioneers of old. They decided to move to Oregon, and it was this move that exposed her to the real estate realities she had avoided in Kansas.
To change her parole again, this time from Kansas to Oregon, Catherine would have to show that she had a permanent address in the new state. She knew no one in Oregon, had no connections. She applied for a travel permit—her Kansas parole restrictions did not allow her to travel outside the county without permission—and flew to Oregon to look for an apartment. But she was in the system as a violent offender, the same database used to track sex offenders. When her name popped up, no one would rent to her. She returned to Kansas, put in more hours at work, saved up money for a second trip, got another travel permit, and flew out again to make the rounds looking for a place to rent. This time, owing to some combination of fierce determination, faith, luck, and her vibrant personality, she found an apartment. The paperwork involved in the permanent move, in getting all her files transferred, and in reestablishing relationships with another parole officer took close to three months. During that time, in order to obey the conditions of her parole and satisfy the requirements of two states, she had to scrounge the funds to pay rent on the apartments in both Kansas and Oregon. But it was worth it. Now, finally, she thought, my life can begin.
***
Vicki returned to familiar surroundings: the town that was home to the “street family” that had been part of her life since she was a teen; the house Steve owned that she lived in every time she was released from prison, this being the fifth; her estranged children who coped or did not cope with her revolving-door-repeat-offender lifestyle. Familiarity blunted the jolt of reentry, but it created its own problems. There were triggers everywhere—in the house, in conversations with Steve, on the street—reminders of the life she was, this time, determined not to repeat. It had been about a year since the last time she had been released to this town, this house, her family. That stretch of freedom—from prison, from her own addictions—had lasted only a few months before she was rearrested on drug charges. Now she was back out, again. But this time she hadn’t gone straight from prison to home. She had spent close to three months in a women’s residential drug facility several hundred miles from home. It was there that we became mentor and mentee. Now, back home, surrounded by her old life, she was determined to learn how to live it, as she put in, “unloaded.”
Steve’s house was dirty. That’s the first thing she noticed when she walked through the front door. She was angry. But she was also, simultaneously, ashamed of herself. Steve had been the constant in her wildly fluctuating life. He was steadily employed, kept up the mortgage payments, waited for her over the years, welcomed her home. It was, she told herself, ungrateful to feel anything other than grateful. But she looked around, and the carpet was littered with dog toys, there were dishes in the sink, and the kitchen table and countertops were buried under clutter. The bathroom was filthy. There were clothes all over the bedroom floor.
She spent her first few days cleaning. It was cathartic—the physical effort itself, the literal “wiping the slate clean,” the reestablishing of her presence in the house. She played music as she worked, alternately hugging and sidestepping Ziggy, her little dog. He was a papillon, a toy spaniel with big, tufted ears. She had missed him terribly. He was, as dogs are, loyal and forgiving. Her two adult children were another story. She was careful not to try to jump back into their lives too quickly. She had done that before, promising that this time would be different, then disappearing behind bars again. They had learned not to believe her. She would try to change that, to repair and rebuild those relationships. But not now, not right away. Instead, she cleaned, she cooked, she spent hours on the phone negotiating the world of health insurance, arranging doctor’s appointments and clinic sessions, getting the prescriptions she needed to stay clean. Like the reentry simulation participants who were faced with tasks like this, she was often frustrated and harried. She made her way through phone trees, told strangers the same story over and over again, waited for callbacks, tried to access forms on her phone. She calmed herself by playing with Ziggy. She spent long afternoons in the crammed second bedroom of the house going through her rock collection. There was almost no room to maneuver, no open floor space. She had thousands and thousands of unsorted rocks stored in buckets and cardboard boxes, on shelves, in piles on the floor. She might do something with them, but she didn’t know what. They reminded her of days walking on the banks of rivers. She was high then. She was always high. Her memories were all filtered through drugs, through heroin, through meth. She would have to make new memories. It was going to be hard.
***
Dave, master planner, inveterate list maker, had begun thinking about where he would sleep that first night more than a year before his release. He knew he would, by law, be sent back to the county where he was convicted. He would get a bus ticket to that now bustling upscale little city—a sleepy working-class town when he left more than three decades before—and he would know almost no one. He had no family there, and even if he had, he would not have found a place with them. His crime was against his own family. If he were remembered in that town, he would be remembered for this. He began researching his housing options. There was a faith-based agency in his hometown that offered temporary housing, but reading between the lines in correspondence with them, he thought his sexual orientation might be a problem. He found out that the state had an agreement with a low-end motel on the north side of town. He could be housed there. But he would be released in February. The weather would be cold. There would be snow on the ground. He determined that there was no bus service on that side of town. How would he get to his parole appointments? How could he go job hunting? Dave was an overthinker, and this time it worked in his favor. Had he not thought this through, had he not researched his options, he would have had a rocky start.
He found out about Sponsors, the reentry services nonprofit, from fellow inmates. The agency provided three months of transitional housing, but this and all the other services were meant for men and women released to Lane County, not the county Dave would be released to. He wrote a long letter to the agency explaining his situation and managed to get an exception based on his years behind bars. With housing secured—at least for the first ninety days—he was allowed to change the location of his parole. And so he spent his first night and the next three months in room in a men’s dorm on Sponsors’ main campus. The facility was attractive, with two-story dorms, a resource center, an administration and meeting building, and other structures facing a landscaped courtyard. The dorms were clean and plain and institutional—eight motel-style rooms with a shared living-dining-kitchen space. It wasn’t homey. But it wasn’t prison. Dave was kept busy all day with the nitty-gritty of reentry: getting IDs, signing up for insurance and food benefits, attempting to learn basic computer and internet search skills, writing a résumé. He had help, and that made all the difference. He was required to meet with a case manager, submit to random urine tests, and attend a behavioral therapy class. But most important, he was required to look for work. To stay in Sponsors’ transitional housing for ninety days, you had to prove you were looking for work or applying to school. Dave was doing both.
And being a planner, he was planning. Where would he sleep, where he would call home after the ninety days in the dorm? He wanted to be independent and self-sufficient as soon as possible. Sponsors offered a class that fast-tracked the process for receiving a Section 8 voucher. The rental assistance he might get from that program could make it possible for him to afford his own apartment. He did successfully apply. The fast-track class worked. He was quickly approved. But the voucher was for only $400. He had sporadic jobs—selling food at sporting events, cutting hair—but his focus was taking community college classes so that he could become a citizen of the digital world, a necessity for decent employment, he believed. His income was so low that, even with the $400 voucher, there was nothing he could remotely afford. He thought about sharing the rent with someone. But the only people he knew were ex-cons with their own issues.
Then he heard about an opening at The Quads, a satellite facility owned by Sponsors. This was not temporary housing. It was not a case-managed life. The Quads was a twenty-eight-unit apartment building in a middle-class residential neighborhood. The tenants were, supposedly, all employed, drug-free ex-offenders. It was not exactly like having your own place. The seven “quads” in the building included four bedrooms, each with its own half bath, as well as a shared kitchen and eating area and full bathroom. It was how a lot of college students lived. The rent was an extraordinarily affordable (highly subsidized) $350 a month, including utilities. Dave moved in the day after his ninety days were up in the dorm. It wasn’t the answer to his housing needs. He didn’t want to live like a college student or an ex-con. But this was a clean, safe, inexpensive place that would buy him some time. For now, he would work. He would save money. And he would plan for his next move.
***
If housing-first, wraparound services agencies like Sponsors were common in cities and towns across the country, the reentry path would look a lot different—and be a lot smoother—for the tens of thousands of those released without a safe place to land. But what is common instead is a patchwork of programs that struggle for funding and often serve only a small percent of those who need help. What is common are stopgap measures like homeless shelters or well-meaning initiatives and pilot programs that focus solely on housing and do not offer any of the other support services that go along with successful reentry.
Sponsors, which began with a nun giving an ex-con a ride home from prison almost fifty years ago, has grown into a constellation of services and a far-flung support network including a warehouse stacked with free furniture, a clothing store where every item is free, an organic garden, a bike giveaway and repair shop, a computer lab, an employment resource center, the mentorship program I am a part of, monthly support groups, weekly classes, and housing facilities in seven different locations, from transitional dorms to a cluster of tiny homes to fully furnished two-bedroom garden apartments. The staff has grown from that single nun to forty men and women, almost two-thirds of whom have incarceration histories. Their stories of recovery, reentry, and successful reintegration fuel the organization and help make believers out of those struggling to make new lives.
At the head of Sponsors is a man whose own story could be the plot of a noir novel. A lean, wiry guy who looks at least a decade younger than his fifty-plus years, Paul Solomon grew up working class in a socially conscious family in a yet-to-be-gentrified urban neighborhood. He started shooting heroin, as he dates it, “shortly after my Bar Mitzvah.” His first prison sentence, two and a half years, was for drug dealing, robbery, and forgery. Six months after his release, he was busted for bank robbery. This time the sentence was for five years. He heard the verdict standing in the Gus J. Solomon U.S. Courthouse in downtown Portland, a building named after his grandfather, a highly respected and celebrated federal judge. Gus J. Solomon, appointed by Harry Truman, served as the court’s chief justice from the late 1950s until his death in 1971. Paul was just a toddler. In the late 1990s, Paul had one last foray into the system, another drug charge. There was no “aha” moment that transformed him, no flipping of the switch. It was, for him, a long series of lessons, a slow climb. Maybe this was why he was so good at his job.
Paul was the one who bent the rules to give Dave a home.