AT HIS LAST high school, Tim had completed an “Interest Profile” that examined what he might have become if he did not have mental illness. According to the profile, he had plenty of options. He could have been a military intelligence officer, a geological technician, a general farm worker, a fire inspector, a nuclear monitoring technologist, a movie camera operator, a physicist, a stone mason, a taxi driver, a private investigator, or a medical lab technician.
When Tim was discharged from the Austin hospital where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia in late January 2003, he was tall and handsome. He was six feet, four inches tall, and more than one person remarked that with his short afro he looked like a young Muhammad Ali. He had distinctive bright-brown eyes, an easy smile, and broad shoulders. And he had a serious, lifelong mental illness.
He had attended high schools for four years but had no diploma to show for it. He wanted to be on his own but could not live independently. He wanted to work but could not hold a job.
The harsh realities of his adult life would soon begin to emerge. He would be assigned to but receive little or no service from a case manager. He would find and lose his first supported living arrangement. He would experience homelessness for the first time. He would break a law and be introduced to the adult judicial system. He would have his first extended stay in jail.
The supported living arrangement we found for Tim was an adult cooperative group home in north Austin operated by the Austin Travis County Mental Health Mental Retardation Center (ATCMHMR). It was in a residential neighborhood, near a supermarket, and on a bus line. If it worked out he could remain there for an extended period of time. But it was not permanent, and so ATCMHMR advised us about the Section 8 voucher program sponsored by the Austin Housing Authority. It was available to people with disabilities and offered a long-term rent subsidy in regular rental housing. The waiting list was two years long, but ATCMHMR was taking new applications on behalf of the Housing Authority in late January. We made sure to file Tim’s application at that time.
At the group home in north Austin the residents ranged in age from approximately twenty to fifty. They managed the home together, providing peer support to one another. They had private bedrooms and shared a kitchen and living room. They divided up chores and cooking and bought their own food. They had daily access to caseworkers and other professionals from ATCMHMR. Some of the residents worked; others went to school. Tim’s rent was approximately $300 a month, and there was a onetime move-in fee of $170.
As long as he lived at the group home, Tim was supposed to receive services from ATCMHMR’s Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team. These included case management, clinical services, and supported employment services. The team was also supposed to help him apply for Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, and food stamps.
He signed a three-month probationary lease and moved in during the first week of February. It was a big ranch house. Tim’s bedroom came furnished with a bed, a dresser, a nightstand, and a few cleaning and grooming supplies. Pam and I gave him a computer, a video game console, a few cooking supplies, some clothes, and toiletries and made sure he had a supply of Zyprexa and trazodone. We paid his rent and also gave him a food allowance of forty dollars a week to hold him over until he was approved for food stamps.
Tim was clinically stable when he moved in and settled into semi-independent living. He rode his bike to the supermarket to buy food. He cooked his meals in the kitchen, sometimes sharing them with other residents. He socialized on occasion but generally kept to himself in his bedroom, playing video games or reading magazines. He took the bus downtown a few times to visit the charter school but confirmed that he did not want to return to school. He also used his bike and the bus to get to the “Drag,” an area near the University of Texas campus, because he enjoyed being around people close to his age. Pam and I saw Tim frequently. I picked him up every Sunday to bring him to our house for dinner.
Tim had one good month at the group home. Soon, though, his housemates were complaining about the messes he left in the kitchen and living room. He was also dirty and wouldn’t shower. Tim argued that they were too critical. And because some of them were twice his age, he thought of them as authority figures and refused to listen to them. He had not yet been assigned an ACT caseworker, so there was no one to run interference for him.
He stopped taking his medications and soon began bringing both drugs and acquaintances into the house. In late March he brought over a particularly disruptive group, and the other residents were afraid of them. They complained to ATCMHMR, and Tim was found to be in violation of his lease. His position in the house suddenly became tenuous.
Pam and I took him out to a sushi buffet as a treat for his eighteenth birthday, but he was tired and depressed. He ate only a few pieces of sushi and declined any desert or after-dinner activities. Because he still did not have a caseworker, I offered to take him to file his SSI, Medicaid, and food stamp applications a few days later so that I would have a reason to see him again soon.
I called ATCMHMR to urge that Tim be assigned a caseworker right away, but it was already too late for Tim to remain in the house. The other residents would not support the renewal of Tim’s lease after April, and so I starting working with ATCMHMR to find other housing for him.
ATCMHMR suggested an efficiency apartment in a small apartment complex in a more central part of Austin; perhaps Tim could live more successfully if he had his own place. Also, because nearly everyone at the complex received services from ATCMHMR, someone’s caseworker was usually around whenever there was a problem.
At first, Tim turned down the apartment because he did not want to leave the group home. But his anxiety level was increasing as he continued to argue with the other residents, and he finally left and headed to the Drag, where he became homeless for the first time. He spent a few days on the streets. I was panicked because I didn’t think he could survive out there. But he quickly ran out of money, and this forced him to consider his limited options.
Tim was too imposing a figure to panhandle successfully, but he and another young man discovered that they could make some money by returning empty beer kegs to a liquor store near the college campus. The difficulty was getting the beer kegs. One day, they noticed some empty kegs in an alley outside a restaurant, so they helped themselves. The restaurant owner saw them and called the police.
Tim was charged with a felony count of burglary. It was his first serious offense, and if he was convicted it could result in a state prison sentence of up to a year. He would also have to disclose the felony conviction on housing and employment applications, further diminishing his chances of finding either one. All at once, we were faced with the possibility that at the age of eighteen Tim could become a convicted felon, unemployable, and homeless.
Tim was sent to the Travis County Del Valle Correctional Complex to await his court date. He asked Pam and me if we would post bail for him. We told him no, repeating what we had said many times: His actions had consequences, and he needed to understand this. Going to jail was the consequence of what he had done. From the day we signed his behavior contract with him almost two years before we had been clear that we were not going to bail him out if he landed in jail. It was much easier to say this than to carry it out in practice, however. But I believed that if I did not follow through, I would just reinforce his belief that someone would always be there to get him out of a tough situation.
What made it a little easier was that Pam had a good friend who worked at the jail. We knew from her that the jail was safer than the streets. Tim would be off drugs, and he would be housed and fed. We also knew that a majority of people in the jail had some form of mental illness and that personnel were experienced in interacting with people like Tim. A few weeks in jail also would buy us some time to work out a more permanent housing plan with ATCMHMR.
Tim’s weeks at Del Valle were still not easy for any of us. There were many rules by which we had to abide, some of which seemed designed to isolate Tim from us. Tim could not receive any phone calls. If I wrote to him, I could send only a letter, with no cash, money orders, or anything else in the envelope. When Pam tried to send him a stamped envelope so he could write back to us, the envelope was confiscated and the mail returned to us as undeliverable. If we wanted to send reading materials they had to come straight from the publisher, and never more than two at a time. He also could not have any personal belongings. He could make purchases at the jail commissary, but we couldn’t send money directly to him. Instead, we had to send a money order or cashier’s check to the Inmate Trust Fund.
Tim was also limited to two twenty-minute, noncontact visits per week. These were on the jail’s schedule, not ours; on specified days and at set times; and could change without notice if Tim was transferred to a different unit. Signing up to see Tim was also challenging. I had to present a photo ID and have my name checked against a list of approved visitors provided by Tim. I was not allowed to bring my watch, wallet, loose change, or cell phone into the visiting room. And I had to be patient—the wait could be as long as two hours before I got into the visiting room.
We visited through a glass window using telephones. Tim was in good spirits the first time I saw him at Del Valle. He said he was being treated well but admitted he was bored. He felt safe even though he was housed in a barracks-style unit. The food was fine, but he wanted some money deposited in his account so he could buy some soups from the commissary.
He told me that he had decided it wouldn’t be worth it to post bail; he would be credited with two days served for each day he stayed in jail while he awaited trial and sentencing. He figured he would be in jail for two to three months before then. If he then pleaded guilty, he’d probably be sentenced to no more than six months, get time served, and be released. I was worried about a felony conviction, but Tim said not to be. He was certain that the felony charge would be reduced to a misdemeanor, and he told me to contact his public defender to tell him that Tim wanted to talk to him about this. In the meantime, he said, “I’ve got a roof over my head,” and he left smiling.
I met with Tim’s public defender, who said that Tim was correct about how his time served would be calculated. But he didn’t see how the charge could be reduced to a misdemeanor.
He said that the judge would be ordering a mental health evaluation when Tim returned to court on May 27 and would want Tim to have a permanent residence when he was released—not for his own good but so his probation officer could find him. I conveyed all of this to Tim the next time I visited. He took it all in but was still anxious to see his lawyer, who had not yet conferred with Tim. He also stood his ground that the charge would be reduced to a misdemeanor and believed this could affect his sentence. I told him that in either case he would have to have a place to live when he was released, so he reconsidered and gave me permission to arrange for the ATCMHMR apartment for him. He seemed especially tired, so I asked him how he was doing. He told me that his fatigue was just a product of the boredom of his routine. He got up and had breakfast around five-thirty each day, went back to sleep, got up and went to kitchen duty at around eleven-thirty, worked there until around six-thirty, then went back to his bunk and read until ten. He said that he had read and enjoyed Red Dragon, the first Hannibal Lecter book. But he was not getting much exercise.
After the visit, I talked again with Tim’s lawyer. He was pleased to hear about the apartment but still thought that Tim was minimizing the significance of the felony conviction he was likely to receive. Then he finally went to see Tim. The lawyer came away from that meeting acknowledging that Tim was right about the charge because he did not go into the restaurant to take the kegs, just into the alley behind it. If he had entered the building, the crime would have been burglary. However, because the kegs were outside the building, the crime was theft—a misdemeanor. And the restaurant owner, who was the witness, had not seen Tim inside the building. Tim had reasoned all this out before the lawyers did by comparing notes with other inmates.
While we waited for Tim’s trial, I put a deposit down on the $450-per-month efficiency apartment for Tim. A week later, I met with an ATCMHMR staff member who told me that Tim was now being assigned to the ANEW program. ANEW would be more appropriate because it was for people with mental illness who were in the judicial system, and it offered a more intensive level of services.
Tim’s charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, and he pleaded guilty. He received a sentence of two years of probation in lieu of one year in prison (which he would have to finish serving if he violated his probation) and eighty hours of community service. Tim was ordered to report to his probation officer once a month, receive services from ATCMHMR, and take his medications. His new caseworker from ANEW was supposed to pick him up at the jail the day he was released, take him to a one-night overnight program, take him to his first meeting with his probation officer the next day, and then bring him to his new apartment. But Tim’s release did not go according to plan.
I first realized that there was a problem when I did not hear from anyone by two-thirty in the afternoon. That was plenty of time for Del Valle to have processed Tim out. I called the jail to find out why Tim was still there. It turned out that Tim’s release order wasn’t in the computer because his release card had been misplaced. It took three more calls, to the clerk, central booking, and Del Valle, to confirm that Tim’s release was moving forward. If I hadn’t made those calls, Tim would have stayed in jail until someone finally noticed that he wasn’t supposed to be there.
It was five o’clock when the mix-up was finally cleared up, and I was told it would take between two and six more hours to complete Tim’s release. I called his ANEW caseworker, who explained that he did not work nights and that there were no night staff on duty who could handle the pick-up. There was a second problem: not only was there no one to pick Tim up, but the program to which Tim was supposed to go for the night might not hold the bed for him if he did not arrive early. And if Tim didn’t make it to the overnight program, the caseworker did not know how he would find Tim the next morning to take him to meet with his probation officer. So I agreed to do it if he could arrange for the bed to be held.
The caseworker called me back to tell me that Tim would be released by ten-twenty-five that night. (I remember being amazed by the precision of the presumed release time after the problems of the day.) He also told me that the overnight program had agreed to hold Tim’s bed and that when I picked him up I should bring him directly to the program. The caseworker promised to take over in the morning to make sure Tim made his probation appointment, signed his apartment lease, and completed the ANEW paperwork.
It was close to eleven when the jail door was finally unlocked and Tim walked out. It had been a long day. Tim wanted to make it even longer by going to the Drag. I told him no and bought him some food instead. Then I dropped him off at the overnight program and waited until he went into the building.
He saw his probation officer and signed his apartment lease the next morning. Pam and I gave him a bed, a dresser, a couch, another television, and some more dishes and kitchenware. The newly renovated efficiency apartment consisted of a combination living room/bedroom, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. It had new paint and a new floor. It looked clean and nice, and Tim smiled when he saw it. The morning Tim moved in, however, he promptly locked himself out and lost his key. His ANEW worker wasn’t available, so I spent the rest of the day tracking down a master key. He never found his lost key, so he asked his caseworker to help him get the locks changed.
Tim had a number of tasks to complete that week. He needed to get a new photo ID because he had lost his old one, buy a new bike and bike lock because he had lost his old ones, apply for food stamps, arrange to get a phone installed, open a checking account so we could deposit money into it for him, and make an appointment with a doctor and get new prescriptions for his medications. The ANEW team was supposed to help him do all these things.
But none of this happened, because less than a week after he was discharged from jail, Tim went back to the Drag and purchased some marijuana. The police caught him, charged him with possession, revoked his probation, and took him directly to jail.
I called Tim’s public defender and told him about Tim’s new arrest. He listened politely and then explained that he was no longer representing Tim. Because of its heavy caseload, the Travis County Public Defender’s Office contracted cases out to private attorneys. There were many attorneys in the rotation. Under the Public Defender’s Office rotation system, the lawyer at the top of the list got the next client’s case—even if a different lawyer had represented that client in the past. He told me that a different lawyer had been assigned to Tim for this offense. I had to give the new lawyer Tim’s background information, but I did not know who it was. Tim wasn’t able to tell me, either. He forgot to put me on his new visitors list, so I was not allowed to see him.
While Tim was in jail, I learned that he had been denied SSI a month earlier because he had failed to respond to a request from the Social Security Administration for additional information. I was surprised by this because I had filled out the application with him in March. The ATCMHMR worker who had helped us said she would keep an eye on it, and she had not reported any problem. I discovered that the request had been sent to his old group home address. He hadn’t received it because ATCMHMR had not updated his contact information on the application it was managing for him. Tim had the right to appeal the denial, but the ATCMHMR eligibility worker told me that she didn’t plan to file the appeal because she believed that Tim might be in jail for some time, and he wouldn’t be eligible for SSI benefits while he was there.
I figured that Tim wasn’t going to be in jail forever, so I decided to handle the appeal myself. I was more motivated than the eligibility worker anyway because I was paying Tim’s rent and food bills. I made a call to the local Legal Aid office for advice. I learned that the next round of SSI appeal hearings for Austin would probably not take place until six months later. If Tim won the appeal, he would receive payments retroactive to his application date, but he would receive nothing in the meantime.
I next turned my attention to Tim’s apartment. I called the ATCMHMR housing specialist to find out if the apartment lock had ever been changed as Tim had requested and if the apartment was secure while Tim was in jail. Tim’s caseworker had not arranged for the lock to be changed, and the apartment had been overtaken by squatters. The caseworker called the housing specialist to have them evicted. But the housing specialist said she assumed that the people in the apartment must have been there with Tim’s permission. And she wanted me to know that they had broken a window, so Tim would have to pay $83.50 to have it replaced.
The judge decided to release Tim from Del Valle on July 18, after Tim, his lawyer, and ATCMHMR all agreed that he was stable enough to go back to his apartment. The probation officer disagreed, wanting to enroll Tim in a program called Cornerstone. (ATCMHMR pointed out that the Cornerstone program had closed down eight years earlier.) The judge toyed with the idea of sending Tim to an alternative incarceration center for people with schizophrenia but instead ordered him to attend a six-week outpatient program at a northern Travis County facility. The order was a hollow one as Tim had no transportation to get there.
Tim stopped by our house during the first week in August while I was visiting the other children in Connecticut to celebrate Ben’s thirteenth birthday. He brought Pam up to date on his living situation: He was settled in his apartment but was not attending his program in the northern part of the county, was not seeing his probation officer, and had no contact with ATCMHMR. She drove him back to his apartment, and when they got there a man she didn’t recognize offered her some marijuana. Tim was embarrassed. “That’s my stepmother,” he said, wincing.
Three weeks later, Tim was charged with possession of marijuana and destruction of evidence, a felony, after someone complained about the activities going on in his apartment. He returned to Del Valle for his third incarceration in five months. He was assigned a third public defender to represent him on the two charges.
The next day, I talked to his lawyer, who explained that Tim’s felony charge was going to be scheduled for a fast-track system called the “rocket docket” on September 4. This would result in a plea agreement for Tim to consider.
Tim remembered to put me on his visitors list this time. When I saw him, I learned that he was feeling right at home at Del Valle. He joined the night cleanup crew and was assigned to the jail “honors” program, which gave him more time credits for good behavior. He was also running the clock on the one-year sentence he had received on June 16 for stealing the beer kegs and keeping close track of his days in jail. He calculated that at his current rate of three days credited for every day he served, he would have enough time served by the time he went back to court to fully satisfy that sentence. Tim also seemed to be aware of what was going on at his apartment. He said that he had a friend who was keeping an eye on things. I also spoke with the jail’s mental health counselor, who had been seeing Tim weekly. (Tim had signed a release so she could talk with me.) He had reported to her that he was hearing voices again. He was not on any medications, and she did not recommend that he see a psychiatrist right away. She wanted to continue to monitor him. Unfortunately, I knew that none of her work would follow Tim out into the community when he was released because the care he received in the jail was not integrated with the care he received in the community.
I visited with Tim about a week later. As had been the case in the spring, Tim was well versed on his legal status. This was no small accomplishment. His relationship to the justice system had become very confusing to me over the past few months. He had been arrested in April, June, and August and had accumulated a number of charges related to one or more of his arrests, including violation of probation, marijuana possession, and destruction of evidence. Time-served clocks were running on some or all of these as he awaited his next court date and sentencing. He patiently explained to me how each one would be resolved. The felony charge for destruction of evidence had already been reduced during the court’s “rocket docket” to a Class B misdemeanor charge for possession of marijuana. Tim pleaded guilty to this and was sentenced to six months in jail, which translated to a minimum of two actual months, taking into account the good behavior credits he was earning in the Del Valle Honors program. At sentencing, the judge also credited him with twenty-one days served, meaning that Tim had to serve a minimum of five more weeks in jail, beginning on August 24, the day he was incarcerated. As a result, his earliest possible release date on that misdemeanor conviction was September 27. Tim also calculated that he would be credited with additional time served dating from his incarceration in April. When his probation was revoked in June, his sentence for the April misdemeanor conviction had been reduced from one year to six months, and the sentences for the April beer keg theft and the June marijuana possession were to be served concurrently. Since he earned six weeks’ credit for the three weeks he was in jail in June and July, these weeks would be credited to both sentences, and so he was just about clear of his April sentence.
The only time that Tim couldn’t get credited to the possession charge in June was the time he had served before he actually committed that crime. This turned out to be another small matter because the computer showed that he had already served that full sentence while awaiting his September court date. As a result, the good news was that based on the computer information, he had completed his sentences resulting from his arrests in both April and June, and these were now behind him.
There was only one additional charge from August that was unresolved. At the time he was charged with destruction of evidence (the felony), he was also charged with misdemeanor possession of marijuana. The original misdemeanor possession charge was pending before the county court, not the district court, which handled the felony destruction of evidence charge on the “rocket docket.” However, once the destruction of evidence charge was reduced to the Class B possession misdemeanor and Tim pleaded guilty, he had effectively already been tried and sentenced on that charge. So he couldn’t be tried on it again in the county court. I had no idea how he could keep all of this straight.
After the visit I talked with a couple of the guards, who looked up Tim’s case and confirmed everything Tim had explained to me. I later spoke with an associate of Tim’s attorney, who also confirmed that Tim was correct. The final possession charge was dismissed the next day.
Tim was discharged from Del Valle in late September, on what turned out to be a very good day for us. Not only was he free of the criminal justice system with no felony conviction on his record, but we learned that he was being approved for SSI.
This approval hadn’t come easily. After learning about how long we would have to wait to schedule an appeal, I called a friend of mine who worked for Senator Chris Dodd to ask for help. Less than three weeks later, Senator Dodd’s office called to say they had been notified that Tim was being recommended for approval for his SSI by the Disability Determination Services of the Texas Rehabilitation Commission. We would not need to file our formal appeal after all—but it took a call to a senator’s office to achieve this. How many people are able to do that?
I was hopeful that we were on track after an exhausting summer. But it was not to be. Tim’s apartment, used by so many other people during the past few weeks, had been turned into a filthy, smelly, unsafe pigsty. And Tim’s anxiety levels were clearly increasing as the weeks passed.
Tim’s housing specialist seemed to be the only service provider who took any real interest in him, and that was mostly to complain to me about the damage to the apartment. In late October, she told me about another broken window. This time they found a “friend” living in a storage closet where Tim was allowed to keep his bike. They cleaned the friend and his possessions out of the closet and piled up everything on the balcony outside Tim’s apartment door. They changed the lock on the storage room door and presented Tim with a bill.
Tim barely knew who his ANEW caseworker was. He wasn’t taking his medications and couldn’t handle the chaos of his living arrangement. He rejected overtures of help from ATCMHMR and became increasingly fearful of the people who dropped in and out of his apartment. His symptoms of psychosis intensified. He started calling Pam and me at least twice a day, telling us he was afraid to go in his apartment. I saw him toward the end of November, and he told me that he was afraid the people in his apartment were trying to kill him because he could “see it in their eyes.” He said gravely that he was “ready to die.”
I was very worried but tried using a little black humor to lift his spirits. When Tim was younger I would tease him about all the help he needed from me, saying, “I’m taking care of you now, but you’ll have to take care of me when I’m old and decrepit.”
“Dad,” he would reply with a devilish grin, “I’m gonna put you in a home.” I reminded him of this, then said with gravitas equal to his own, “If you die, Tim, who’s going to put me in the home?” He smiled.
I called Tim’s rehabilitation therapist at ATCMHMR, who agreed to see Tim and try to persuade him to go back on his medication. She also said that she wanted to refer Tim to the supported housing director to determine whether they had another housing option that could offer Tim more intensive services.
Tim received an early Christmas present when he was notified officially that his SSI payments would begin in January. But despite this and the efforts of family, friends, and service providers, he would soon become trapped in the revolving door of incarceration, hospitalization, and homelessness.