NINE

HALFWAY IS JUST THAT

Every time I reached out, every time I tried to get some help, all I got were some phone numbers of halfway houses and men’s programs that might let women in. I really didn’t want to go to a halfway house—I’d only heard bad things. And then—it was worse than I expected.

—SHERIWARREN

The experience and trauma of incarceration doesn’t end once a woman finishes serving time. When Clara walked out of federal prison, she didn’t feel relieved or happy. She was terrified. She didn’t know what she was going to do. And she wasn’t alone in feeling that way. More than anything, after incarceration, women experience a sense of dislocation. Several women told me about suddenly becoming dizzy once they were outside the gate; more than one remembered throwing up once she exited jail or prison. “I almost felt seasick,” Angela Washington told me. What’s clear is that few women experience feelings of joy or freedom. And if they do feel any sort of happiness, it is fleeting. The pain of memory is matched by the obstacles these women face in the immediate future.

All the statistics pointed to the reality that after incarceration, most women confront a huge gap between what they need and what is available to them. In one study of incarcerated women who were scheduled for release within two weeks to a month, mental health treatment, healthcare, and social services were listed as their primary reentry needs. Using qualitative methods, researchers wanted to know what barriers women—in this case, 309 of them—experienced in finding services to match these critical needs. The study participants overwhelmingly suffered with complex mental health problems related to trauma. This meant they needed but couldn’t find gender-specific assessment and treatment programs to meet even their most basic requirements.¹ Another study showed that when reentry services were provided, “program participants were convicted on new charges at lower rates than nonparticipants.”² Still another study of women’s lives after incarceration reported how jobs that offer financial security, vocational training, and education all helped reduce the chances that the women would return to the criminal justice system.³

While it’s tempting to sarcastically ask “Really?” these research studies are desperately needed to prove what anyone with common sense already knows: women, as well as men, are much less likely to engage in criminal activity if they have work and can earn a living wage. This reality guided Father Greg Boyle’s earliest mission statement at Homeboy Industries, “Jobs Not Jails.”

But G would now also be quick to add, “And paying attention to trauma.” Father Greg Boyle wasn’t the only one to realize the long-term impacts of trauma. Over time, researchers have consistently found that along with housing and jobs, mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment are crucial to successful reentry. They have concluded that these services represent the deepest hope for ending women’s lawbreaking behavior.⁴ Yet, as Barry Krisberg observes, “These services are often too scarce, a situation exaggerated even more by the explosive growth of the number of women in prison.”⁵ It is maddening that, despite this “explosive growth,” there has been no real reentry system to provide women what they need. And what they need is a place where it is understood that the cycle of trauma is the story of reentry. That they have been traumatized and re-traumatized, trapped in a cycle of pain and incarceration. Where is the place that understands this? Where is the program that truly grasps how women’s reentry into mainstream life is plagued with false starts and unfulfilled dreams?

Formerly incarcerated women need a place to live—ideally with their children—that recognizes the nonlinear nature of their recovery and reentry. Programs for women who’ve encountered intimate partner violence, like the House of Ruth, provide space and programming for women and their children. These programs also understand that it might take a woman several tries to finally separate from her abusive partner and gradually become strong enough to start a new life. In the same way, formerly incarcerated women don’t follow a direct reentry pathway; obstacles and setbacks are part of the process of transformation. What they need to find after incarceration is programs that understand that reality.

Instead, what they find awaiting them can best be understood from examining the language used to describe jails, prisons, and life after incarceration: Corrections. Offenders. Ex-offenders. Probation. Parole. Halfway houses. It’s that last term that offers a sign of things to come. Very little of what awaits women is positive or empowering. The halfway house, the first place a recently released woman often lives, is just that: a partial solution, an incomplete return to life. There are very few options available to a formerly incarcerated population whose size is increasing at a rapid rate. There’s a huge need and simply not enough reentry programs up and running, working for women. There aren’t even enough halfway houses to serve women after incarceration. But despite their limited availability and their problematic philosophy, halfway houses remain the default reentry option, while the number of women exiting prison keeps getting bigger every year.

This isn’t an abstract idea. One look at a map drawn up by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) shows just how big those numbers are.⁶ According to the PPI, there are 81,000 women released from state prisons each year and 1.8 million women released from jails. However, these statistics are misleading for several reasons, having mainly to do with the number of women released from jail.

First, although the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ most recent census of jails was completed in 2019, the “latest data available” used by the PPI actually dates to 2013.⁷ Since that time, as I kept seeing and reading, the numbers of incarcerated women have been rising. Second, the number of women released from jail each year is actually probably larger because not all states collect data on jail releases. Worse yet, even among the states that do collect this information, “a significant portion” don’t include what turns out to be missing data on gender.⁸ Even research was gendered! Barry Krisberg confirmed this when he wrote, “Women have typically been excluded from criminology research, being unspecified and undifferentiated in the collection and analysis of data. The BJS collects a vast amount of data each year . . . but very little of its reporting specifies women and men as distinct groups. Even less of it breaks the gender categories down further by other variables, such as race, ethnicity or socioeconomic class.”⁹ It’s very clear in all of this that women’s reentry isn’t a priority for the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Even when one looks at the dated and incomplete 2013 data available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a deeply troubling picture emerges. Nationally, one out every eight individuals released from state prisons and more than one out of every six people released from jail is a woman. What’s more, in twenty states, at least one out of five individuals released from any sort of incarceration is a woman. When things are broken down state by state, the numbers are even more revealing. Half of the states in the US release at least 1,000 women from prison each year, and among these Texas is the heaviest hitter of all, releasing over 12,000 women a year. Arkansas is a distant second, releasing 4,456. However, the statistics become much more startling when these numbers are combined with the number of women released from local jails. In that case, Texas, with a total of 157,883 women released from both prisons and jails, comes in second to California. The Golden State clocks in with a total of 189,066 women released annually from prisons and jails combined, a staggering figure when it’s compared with the rest of the country. And most of them have nowhere to go.

So just what happened to all these women? Where women ended up was partially determined by their crime, their sentence, and where they served their time—in prison or in jail. Women were more likely than men to wind up in jails instead of prisons, where there are few if any reentry planning programs and literally no opportunities to prepare for what would happen after they were released. That meant if a woman was sentenced to jail for lower-level crimes, such as drug possession and prostitution, no one paid any attention to the issue of reentry. After jail, women were released and, in effect, kicked to the curb. Nothing was required of a woman except that she serve her time and not get in trouble again.

In California, the one exception to this practice was the Proposition 36 sentence, which replaced jail with drug court and community-based programs. A voter-approved initiative passed in 2000, Prop 36 allowed individuals charged with low-level crimes to remain in their community. This was the same Prop 36 that had enabled Denise to reduce at least some of her time in jail. For mothers, this was a godsend—they could stay at home with their children instead of being incarcerated. But, as Denise discovered when she received community-based sentencing courtesy of Prop 36, there was no wiggle room: individuals were required to attend classes and group therapy at approved agencies, check in with probation officers, account for their movements, and never miss a class or meeting. Despite all these requirements, Prop 36 sentences offered a structure for recovery and represented at least a step in the right direction, inadvertently assisting mothers in avoiding further separation from their children. But not every woman qualified for a Prop 36 sentence, which leaves the question still unanswered: Where are the post-incarceration, reentry programs that specially address women’s struggles?

The answer to that question is alarming. Susan Burton’s organization, A New Way of Life, accurately reports that the vast majority of states do not have any sort of gender-responsive programs at a scale to serve even half of women released from prison every year. On top of that, twelve states have absolutely no “women-only” program or can serve less than 10 percent of the women leaving state prison after incarceration. Only five states—Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island—provide services to women released from prison each year, and not all of these programs provide housing.¹⁰ The situation is dire for women emerging into mainstream life after incarceration.¹¹

In what seems like yet another statement of the obvious, research has repeatedly demonstrated the deep need for better links between detention facilities and community-based service providers, along with additional funding for reentry planning and actual transition.¹² Still, despite these findings, throughout California in particular and the US in general, there really is no systematic reentry planning for women. Most women go right back to where they got into trouble in the first place and, without any social supports, immediately reoffend. And if women have been in jail pretrial, waiting for long periods of time to go to court, the innocent face the same obstacles as the guilty. Some women have sat in jail for up to a year only to be found innocent and released. These women fell into the abyss with no options except to continue on the pathway they had started down, a pathway that led back to jail.

More than once I sat outside LA County’s jail for women in Lynwood waiting to pick up someone after release. I watched the flow of women just leaving lockup and getting picked up by their mothers, their boyfriends, their friends, or, as one woman told me, “I’m just waiting for my pimp.” I wondered what would happen to each of them and who’d be returning to jail, not because they wanted to but because no one had even asked if they had a reentry plan, no one had given them a phone number to call or the name of someone who could help.

Once you move beyond the jail system, there are glimmerings of preparation for women facing life after incarceration, particularly in state and federal prisons. Often, more serious crimes often lead to longer sentences in these settings and—ironically—actual reentry planning. Yet even after serving their sentences in state prison, women face no set pathway and have access to very limited resources. Often, the attention each woman receives depends on the type of crime she’s been convicted of and how much time she’s served. In most cases, women were headed for “community correctional facilities” or—as they were better known—halfway houses.

There are certain prison systems that allow women to serve the final months of their sentence in halfway houses. In California, both of the women’s prisons offer something called the Alternative Custody Program (ACP), which was established in 2011. Women who qualify for ACP are released to a private residence, transitional care facility, or residential drug or other treatment program, and are required to wear an ankle monitor.¹³ However, few women are eligible for this “opportunity.” Those who don’t are still required to spend a certain amount of time in a halfway house even after they’ve served their sentences as a condition of their parole. And still others are released from prison with nothing but “gate money,” a small amount of cash given to men and women as they exit the prison gates. Others receive nothing.¹⁴ I was confused about who might have to go to a halfway house and who was left to make their own reentry arrangements.

As always, the homie lawyer Elie Miller explained things to me. “Because of prison overcrowding, they’re offering certain women—maybe the ones who’ve had a first offense and don’t have a criminal history—the ACP program. They’re not trying to be kind. They’re dealing with the fact there’re too many women sentenced to incarceration and not enough beds for them in the facilities. And, for most women, if you get a life sentence or you’re doing a chunk of time or you’re in federal prison, corrections is going to require that you show where you’re going to live once you’ve finish serving your sentence. They require you live in that halfway house for three to six months, and of course, there’s going to be a parole or probation officer following you. They also require that a halfway house or transitional care facility indicate that they’ve accepted you.”

So, a woman who’s been found guilty of killing her abusive spouse and has served twenty-four years in a state prison is required to find an acceptable placement, then present letters from residential reentry programs licensed and certified by the state stating that she has secured placement with their program and verifying how long she will live there and what program services she’ll receive. There are case managers who assist women scheduled for release, helping them identify suitable sites and prepare their paperwork. But more often, while incarcerated, women turn to one another for information and recommendations for where they should go, what they should avoid, and how to gain admission to an acceptable site.

Beyond getting to the right place, there is little discussion about what really happens inside these transitional living facilities, although no one uses that official terminology. Everyone from judges to lawyers to formerly incarcerated women—even officials in the facilities themselves—invariably refers to such places as halfway houses. Ideally, halfway houses are supposed to help women transition from incarceration to the community. In reality, the word “halfway” turned out to more accurately describe their overall ineffectiveness. “‘Half-assed’ is more like it,” Angela Washington told me when she described her reentry experiences.

In general, very little is known about halfway houses—there’s barely any data available, and there’s not even much clarity about what defines a halfway house. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, it’s an umbrella term that can refer to anything from a sober-living home to a community-based correctional facility.¹⁵ Some of these places serve more than one function, although the vast majority are, in fact, just another form of incarceration, and many women live there because it’s required. But other women wind up in halfway houses because they simply have no other place to go—they’re desperate, and often halfway house operators take advantage of that. There’s no oversight and no accountability for anyone who sets up a halfway house.

According to PPI, “Conditions in halfway houses often involve violence, abuse and neglect.” Far too often, women find themselves in settings that actually continue what they experienced in jails and prisons, with rules and regulations that mirror those in institutional facilities. There are curfews and check-ins, and parole and probation officers are on speed-dial to intervene if a woman acts out. Several women at the Homegirl Café, as well as other women I’ve interviewed, described the identical experience. Halfway houses were like being locked up, with one exception: the women are able to leave the residence during specific hours to go to work. This isn’t true for every single halfway house in Los Angeles County; some sites offer supportive services. Still, the truth is that many function as work-release sites.

What reinforces the institutional aspect of these homes is the fact that most of them are partially or totally funded by federal parole, state corrections, or local probation departments. Any public money that a halfway house receives has strings attached: they have to fulfill specific requirements and report any and all misdeeds to probation or parole. The specific requirements are punitive. Women are required to be home by a certain time for “the count.” They are then restricted to staying on-site, locked in, until the next day. After obtaining jobs, they are required to give 20 to 30 percent of their gross earnings to the halfway house. Any woman who fails to abide by the rules and restrictions is reported to her PO, who can then declare that she violated probation, inevitably sending her back to jail or prison for three months to one year or longer. And forget about any sort of gender-specific programming. The majority of halfway houses are co-ed, with some (not all) including residents who have served time for violent crimes against women. Women don’t choose to go to halfway houses because they want to; they choose halfway houses because there are no alternatives.

“You have to understand how bad the halfway houses are,” Adela Juarez told me. “Near the end of my sentence, they told me I could serve the last three months in a halfway house. I gave my sister’s address as the place I would be living when I got out. So, I had to go to the halfway house that was close to her home. It wasn’t what I wanted. But I didn’t have any other choice.”

I’ve known Adela for over a decade and have always admired her strength and stability, raising a son and daughter alone while their two fathers were serving twenty-five years to life as semipermanent guests of the California state prison system. When we first started talking, she was a calm, dignified staff member and “lead” at the Homegirl Café. She always came to work early and was neatly dressed and immaculately groomed. Adela was physically beautiful; the symmetry of her facial features reminded me of Jennifer Lopez. She wore slacks and blouses that were pressed and complemented her small, compact body. Her carefully maintained appearance was completed by softly wavy hair, often swept up in a bun. Throughout our conversations, her language was gentle and her voice soft. I kept trying to figure out how she fit in, what her story was. I assumed she’d experienced substance abuse issues, like so many of the women at Homegirl. I knew she’d been locked up in federal prison. But I didn’t know a lot beyond that. Still, there was something about Adela and the way she carried herself. The other women in the café respected her and depended on her. She was just . . . different.

I gradually learned her story, and it was nothing like what I’d expected. What she’d experienced was a book unto itself, which I promised to help her write when she was ready. She’d grown up gang-involved and had always liked organizing, whether it was coordinating “ditch days” and skipping school or helping her father with his illegal drug distribution business. From early on, she knew she was smart; she graduated high school with a strong GPA and trained to be a dental assistant. Years later, as a single mother raising two children and working in a dentist’s office, she began supplementing her meager salary with some minor drug deals. As time passed, she became more deeply involved in criminal activity, which matched what was going on within her extended family. Her father had always lived “off the books,” and some of his children followed in his footsteps. Not all of Adela’s siblings were involved in illegal activities—oddly enough, one of her sisters was a corrections officer. Still, there were other family members who couldn’t resist the lure of easy money. Almost everyone was cautious not to attract attention to their “enterprises.” Then, one of Adela’s brothers went too far, was accused of multiple homicides, and wound up as one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives. This brought Adela to the attention of the US Department of Justice. The feds followed her for over a year, and when she was finally arrested, she faced charges that numbered in the double digits and involved cross-border drug trafficking and weapons distribution, among other things. But what the feds really wanted were her brother’s whereabouts. “After I bailed out, I hired a lawyer,” she told me, “and I told him I had no information for the cops.”

Even that brief account shows why Adela was different. No public defender for her—she had enough money for bail and a private attorney. While the charges against her were serious they also represented—at the age of thirty-five—her first offense. Her lawyer dug in, and there were extensive negotiations. The feds said she would walk if she told them where her brother was. She insisted she didn’t know where he was living. In the end, they offered a plea bargain of two to five years in federal prison. Adela and her lawyer asked for probation and presented the court with literally hundreds of letters from people she’d known throughout her life. The judge ultimately told her, “I’ve read everything. You know you already have a history of getting caught at the border more than ten times—”

Adela was taken aback and blurted out, “Damn, ten times? I guess you think I did a lot of business.” The judge laughed, then continued, “I’m sure by all the letters that I received from your family and the community, that you’re a good person. But I feel if you don’t get a sentence, you won’t change.” Adela remembers, “I went mute; I just went blank. All I heard was ‘federal penitentiary.’ . . . I didn’t even hear the rest. My attorney bumped me to accept the deal.” Afterward, she had to ask her attorney what had happened.

Adela was sentenced to two years in federal prison and five years’ probation. Because of this, she was subject to the rules and regulations of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which has the authority to allow “good inmates” to end their sentences in halfway houses. Or, as the BOP refers to them, “residential reentry centers.” Once again, the name change is purely cosmetic. These federally subsidized halfway houses are supposed to support the individual’s transition back to mainstream life, enabling them to look for work and housing and to rebuild their family and community ties. Adela qualified for this early release, only to discover it was no blessing. She actually preferred being locked up. “In some ways, the halfway houses were worse than being locked up. In prison, you had programs, you had education, and you got a job—you could make money. I worked in the call center; I was an information operator—I did something. Not here. Before I even got to the halfway house, they told me if I was late, they’d consider it a violation and I could go back to prison. So right from the start, you knew it was gonna be bad.”

The residents are required to look for work, but they never receive any referrals. “You had to find the jobs by yourself—maybe look at ads,” Adela said. “And if you did work, you had to be back before count at four o’clock. On top of that, they took thirty percent of your paycheck.” As part of her sentence, Adela had to pay restitution for her crimes. She was outraged that the halfway house could take part of the money she earned, money she needed to pay down her restitution debt. “There was no way you could ever climb out of the trap of debt they put you in.” In the end, she pretended to look for jobs. She never went to work. “I had my family, I had support, so I knew I would be okay,” she told me. “The other women there, they were just lost, and the halfway house wasn’t doing anything to help them. They had so many other problems—they should have had therapy; they should have had help. Instead, all they got was more punishment.”

Adela resigned herself to doing what was expected of her—yet there were problems. “I tried to do everything they asked me. How come they wouldn’t do what they were supposed to?” The people running the halfway house threatened her, she said, and told her, “‘If you don’t get a job by next month, we’re going to send you back to Dublin [prison].’ I told them, ‘So send me back to Dublin—I would rather finish my time there, than pay you guys money.’ Then I found out they were making money both ways—they got funding from the state and they took the residents’ pay. That’s when I decided I wasn’t getting a job until after I got out. They couldn’t keep me there after my sentence was over. I wasn’t afraid. They were mad because I left without paying them anything—without getting a job.” To this day, Adela remembers her experience at the halfway house as worse than prison. “At least in prison, you knew what they were doing. At the halfway house, they promised to help but they set you up to fail.”

What Adela had faced wasn’t unusual. Lydia Sherman, a woman I’d met through one of the men at Project Fatherhood, described what she encountered after being released from prison on ACP. She was required to spend the remaining six months of her five-year sentence in a halfway house. “You’d think I was gonna be happy, getting out of prison. It was better in prison! I hated that place, that halfway house—it was a halfway prison. It was all confined. You’re treated like an animal. They literally close the gate on you. Having my grandchildren visit me there—they had to get ‘buzzed in’—was the worst thing in my life. I even told them to their faces that they were abusive. You have chore day, you have double scrub day—it’s insane. It wasn’t a program; it was a slave house. You feel like an inmate, not a resident. The food was horrible. They had us cooking things in lard; it wasn’t healthy. And they were getting a lot of funding from the state and the federal government. They weren’t spending the money on the women—they were spending the money on themselves. I just barely held on. No one should have to go through that.”

What was their alternative? Some women told me the only person they could turn to for help was a parole or probation officer. After Ivy served two years in prison, her parole officer was actually the person who steered her toward living at a rehabilitation center, approving it as a place she could stay after she was released. While she was living at the rehab center and searching for work, another resident recommended going to Homeboy Industries. For once, Ivy was lucky; her PO was “one of the good ones.” POs responsible for women might help with housing or job placement. Or they might not. It depends on the mindset of the PO—it’s all random, and once again, there is no accountability. There are women like Ivy whose probation or parole officers have truly helped them, both during juvenile detention and in adulthood, after incarceration. Others described to me POs who were negative and cynical. Once Angela moved out of the halfway house, her PO sadistically announced, “I’m gonna test you. Let’s see if you can just stay out of trouble for a few months. I won’t call you or bother you—I’ll just check the inmate locator at county jail. I need a break from you.” The man showed up at her house two days later saying, “I just wanted to see what you’d do if you thought I wasn’t around.” She laughed when she recalled his duplicity. “I knew he was trying to trick me. And I wasn’t gonna let him win.”

These problems weren’t unique to the women I knew. In a study of sixty formerly incarcerated women living in a southern state, the women clearly recognized that parole was a way for them to be held accountable for their daily decisions and choices; they were told their parole officers would serve as a resource. After incarceration, the women faced multiple obstacles involving housing, transportation, paying monthly fees for restitution and supervision, random drug testing, staying clean, and keeping up a positive rapport with their parole officers. Instead of serving as case managers, their POs created another obstacle, waiting for them to fail instead of helping them navigate the thicket of expectations. These women felt overwhelmed. In frustration and panic, they violated parole or engaged in more criminal behavior.¹⁶

It was all too clear that this patchwork of “supervision” and halfway houses wasn’t going to address women’s needs in reentry. Instead of helping them to heal, what women encountered reinforced the trauma they’d already experienced. Women needed something more than “halfway.” Whatever their race, age, or state, most women needed housing, financial support, case management, and services when they exited prison or jail—this was the key to starting anew and succeeding. But they weren’t getting this from the current system.

These needs are easily prioritized. First, research continues to show that for women, housing is consistently listed as a primary need, along with child custody assistance and childcare services.¹⁷ Housing and family reunification are strongly intertwined: anything women face in relation to their children becomes even harder to handle when housing is uncertain. One study specifically pinpointed affordable housing for women and their children as critical to prevent both homelessness and recidivism.¹⁸ But how many times must researchers point out the need for stable housing that would allow women to live in a safe, drug-free environment where they can focus on reuniting with their children and finding a job? When were philanthropists and public policymakers going to listen to what women like Angela, Rosa, Adela, Clara, and Denise had told me?

This need for a secure home didn’t just pop up unexpectedly in adulthood. Rosa, Clara, and Denise had all needed and wanted a safe place to live since they were girls. I kept thinking about the work of Laura Abrams and Diane Fields, who’d written about the need to provide housing assistance for juveniles. In 2013 these two researchers had observed, “Given the potential instability in their home environments it may be important for policy makers and practitioners to design services for young female offenders aimed at preparing them to live on their own, such as independent living skills classes and transitional housing.”¹⁹ It was now a decade later, and little had changed. How much could housing like this have helped Denise when she was young and alone on the streets? Or Rosa, trying to escape a life of being trafficked? Housing and support services could help keep women—whether juvenile or adult—from falling back into the cycle of suffering and incarceration so many were stuck in for too many years. I was seeing this firsthand, and research was reinforcing everything I was learning from the women themselves.

It is clear that the halfway-house model isn’t going to serve the needs of formerly incarcerated women, not even in the most basic ways. With rigidly enforced requirements and benchmarks, this model is frequently designed more to punish than to help; there is no category for healing in its operating instructions. All around me, there was ongoing attention to the #MeToo movement and the issue of sexual harassment and abuse. The brutal death of George Floyd had brought about a national outcry for the end of systemic racism and the need for anti-racist reforms in all mainstream institutions and personal behaviors. Even then, a telephone call from Denise was haunting me. “I’m a Black woman and I care about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. What about me? Who’s gonna help someone like me? I need racism to end. But I need a home and I need money. Where do I fit in?”