TEN
THE HOPE OF REENTRY
Oftentimes, people view the homegirls as garbage or disposable members of society. This is the space where we eliminate those walls. There is no us and them. It’s just us.
—ERIKA CUELLAR
In 2011, Ivy Navarrete was released after spending two years in state prison on drug distribution charges. After staying a few months in a halfway house, she didn’t have any real plans for the future. Her little boy, Jessie, who’d been a baby when she was locked up, was living with his grandparents—her boyfriend’s father and his girlfriend. They’d reassured Ivy she could come live with them; they’d be a family. Ivy was grateful to them. They’d taken care of Jessie and had never contacted DCFS about gaining permanent custody, but she also worried about leaning on them too much. She felt it was important to be on her own. Other women at the halfway house kept telling her she was lucky—she would have a roof over her head and childcare. None of them knew about any places where women could live with their kids or get the help they needed to restart their lives. Ivy decided she was lucky to have a place to go. Her own mother had died over five years before, and she had no idea where her father was. This was the closest to family she’d ever have.
Ivy knew that living with the people she thought of as her in-laws involved lots of problems, many stemming from the fact that Carlos, their son and Jessie’s father, was locked up, for a long time. But they took Ivy in anyway, and she felt grateful for their love and attention. She wanted to reward them for everything they’d done for her, and she didn’t want to mess up. How would they react if she wanted to go out with friends or with a man? Ivy figured she’d work things out as they came up. Right now she had to stay clean and sober and get a job. Raising Jessie right and staying out of trouble were her priorities. Despite her uncertainty, she decided to say yes to their offer.
Once Ivy got settled in, she reached out to people who’d known her when she was with Carlos and wound up connecting with Janeth Lopez, who was working at the Homegirl Café. Ivy didn’t know her that well but remembered that Janeth had hung around Carlos and his homies. Janeth was young, a cute little homegirl with tattoos wreathing her neck. She had a baby girl, Angelina, and told Ivy that she was living with the baby’s father, Luis, and his family. She also admitted that Luis cheated on her and even beat her sometimes, but she would always take him back. She reminded Ivy of herself—including being in an abusive relationship. As the two women talked, Janeth grew excited, telling Ivy she should apply to work at Homegirl.
Janeth’s endorsement was sincere. She loved working at the Homegirl Café and had grown close to Adela Juarez, who felt protective of her. “I think I saw her as a daughter. She just didn’t know what she wanted,” Adela explained. “I think her having a baby so young was hard. All Janeth ever had was her neighborhood and her baby daddy. And her only family, her baby daddy, was her abuser. There was so much violence around Janeth, all the time. I don’t think she ever realized how traumatized she was.”
Adela and Janeth talked constantly. They drove to work together and had the same shifts. One day, Janeth told Adela about Ivy—that she was just out of prison and needed a job. Adela told her she’d check with Father Greg and ask if they could hire her.
A few weeks later, Janeth brought Ivy to meet Father Greg, who hugged her and, thanks to Adela’s efforts, told her she was hired immediately. She worked hard, and the café directors, Erika Cuellar, Shannon Smith, and Pati Zarate, took to her right away. Erika and Ivy grew especially close, and Erika was drawn to Ivy’s work ethic. “She had chispa—that spark that made me want to learn more about her. I saw that and I always knew that my responsibilities at Homegirl required me to have someone shadow behind me. It just became a natural role for her.”
As they spent more time together, Erika began to realize that Ivy had many talents. “I remember I was in the Homegirl office, sitting at the end of the day at that desk, counting out the money. Ivy approached me and said, ‘I used to be a paralegal. Let me know if you need help.’ That was it. I saw that she had administrative skill, and she started doing the report. It wasn’t hard, but you had to be focused and you had to be someone I could trust—that was when that chispa would be revealed.”
Adela watched out for her as well. “Ivy was good, she was responsible. I did a couple of caterings with her at the café. But it’s never easy when you’ve been locked up so long. She was traumatized and she was institutionalized. She wanted to get over being in prison. She wanted to change. It was gonna be hard, she’d gone through so much.” Adela told Ivy that she’d been in prison, too, but now she was beginning to deal with what had happened when she was locked up. Ivy reached out to her for support almost every day, and Adela reassured her that just like other women in the café who’d been in prison, she’d get the support at Homegirl to deal with her trauma and adjust to how life had changed at home, in her family.
Ivy tried hard, but the years of untreated trauma that had started with her childhood clearly affected her. As the women at the café learned, her parents had been addicts, her mother had been a sex worker, and her first boyfriend had abused her for years and then died. For a long time, the gang was her only constant. Adela understood how “Ivy was still drawn into hanging out with the homeboys and the lifestyle. She was so abused and so traumatized, she really thought it was all she deserved. I think that’s how she ended up with Pedro. She had such low self-esteem, she thought no one else would love her. And he was brutal.” Most of the women in the café worried about her relationship with Pedro from the start.
“Ivy could see a better life for herself—I think she really wanted it,” Erika remembered. As she talked about how promising Ivy’s life was, Erika’s voice started to shake.
“She worked so hard, but temptation came around . . . Temptation . . .,” she said. “Homegirl got six tickets to the live filming of Jamie Oliver’s cooking show. Somewhere there’s a photo that was taken, and she was there with this dude. A lot of us were confused—we were like, ‘Ivy, who’s this dude? You haven’t told us about him.’ He was this rough-around-the-edges guy; he had just gotten out of prison. It was only a few weeks from that day to when the incident happened—the killing of the deacon. She was still working with us then. I remember she had just not shown up for a few days. It was so unlike her not to be there. Then when the details started coming in, word in the café quickly spread, and it all had to do with Pedro, that somehow that guy had been involved. For a long time, I had wished she had not met that guy.”
Erika was heartbroken. When she first found out that Ivy was on the run, she was in denial, hoping the rumors weren’t true. “I remember reaching out to Ivy and of course not getting through to her. I just didn’t understand what happened.”
Adela understood much more than Erika. “Ivy really didn’t know where to go, what to do,” Adele said sadly. “She just didn’t know where she belonged. She wanted to try to change, but that old life was just so familiar . . .”
Ivy’s uncertainty and her attraction to her old life isn’t unusual. As they work through reentry, many women feel the pull of the past and the need for some sort of network of friendships and a sense of belonging. A handful, like Adela, have family to turn to who can help them. But Adela was an exception: many women come from families struggling with poverty, fear, and marginalization; their families want to help but they’re already overburdened and worn down. Then there are women who don’t seek any family support because, like Rosa, their family is where they experienced trauma or they were involved in criminal activity. Some women think about returning to abusive partners or their last relationship, though unhealthy. They might be tempted because this is all they’ve known—yet, they can’t go back or they’ll be doomed.
Denise’s journey into mainstream life was DOA, devoid of any reentry services. For years, she seemed destined to revolve in and out of jail in a familiar pattern. “It was drugs, jail, rinse, repeat,” she told me, and this continued until she was arrested with enough drugs on her to sell, not simply use. “When I caught the last case, it was bad. I didn’t qualify for Prop 36. I was really in trouble.” Denise went straight to jail, and once she got there, she was unprepared for what happened, beginning with the fact that for the first time, bail was set. It didn’t matter that it was a “low-level” bail of $10,000—it could have been a million dollars—Denise didn’t have any money. So, she was locked up in October of 2006 with no trial date set. As time passed, Denise worried. “All that time, I was waiting—and I didn’t have a good feeling. It wasn’t like all the other times I was locked up. It felt different this time. And I had no idea what the judge was gonna decide.”
What happened next paints a striking picture of the justice system’s ineptitude. Over the days, then weeks, then months, then more than a year that Denise was locked up, she kept appearing in court. She started the case with a court-appointed attorney who barely knew her. But surprisingly, at her first court appearance there was another person who knew her well, who stood alongside Denise and her lawyer facing the judge: her mother, Celeste. As her case unfolded, Celeste was in court for the entire fifteen months of Denise’s court appearances and even developed what looked like a relationship with the judge, another woman, around the same age. “I love my mother for being there,” Denise told me. “I think she was really trying to make up for what happened when I was younger.”
Ultimately, her mother was more reliable than her attorney, who “fell off,” Denise said. “I didn’t have a consistent lawyer the whole time. Every time I showed up in court, I had a new lawyer.” One day, no lawyer showed up for her hearing, and the judge recognized that the unreliable representation was costing both the court and Denise too much time. It would soon be sixteen months that she’d been locked up, pretrial, unable to make bail and unable to resolve her case. The judge offered her the opportunity to speak on her own behalf rather than wait for yet another lawyer. Denise quickly agreed. Speaking directly to the court, Denise asked that she be released for time served or at least that her time be reduced. The judge turned her down but asked Celeste what she wanted for her daughter. “My mom asked my judge for a drug treatment program, and I managed to bargain my sentence down to two and a half years, which could be fulfilled by being in drug rehab and then on probation,” said Denise.
I wasn’t surprised—Denise could negotiate tirelessly. I’d seen her in action: on campus, she was always arguing about something, primarily systemic racism or the need for more Black students to be admitted. And she often accompanied other students who came to see me, coaching them in how to argue with me for a higher grade. I’m sure she was just as convincing in front of the judge. But her brain was not the problem—her addiction was.
While the judge had been more than fair, she also warned Denise that if she didn’t comply, she would go to prison for five years. “That was our deal,” Denise said. “If you don’t complete this program now that your mom has advocated for you—if you fuck this up—I’m going to give you all your time back. Although she said it in a nice way.”
Whatever the terms used, the judge’s meaning was clear: she would show no mercy if Denise didn’t stick to rehab. And this really was Denise’s first rodeo—she’d never been to a residential rehab program before. The body of research on addiction points to the idea that she might not have been a promising candidate for a permanent recovery.
Beyond the statistics, there is a deeper problem that drug rehab doesn’t address: trauma. Fourteen years ago, when Denise went into rehab, the idea of trauma-informed care had not entered into mainstream discussion. Residential and outpatient rehab programs both had their hands full just treating the intertwined problems of addiction and dependence. This meant the chances of it all working for Denise this first time out were slim. Nevertheless, at the end of 2007, Denise checked into a residential treatment program at the Alcoholism Center for Women in LA.
ACW has been in operation since 1974 with a mission “to provide a safe and supportive sober environment in which women and youth can repair, restore and reclaim their lives, strengthen families and communities by making new choices for positive futures.” The words sounded great, but there’s no real record of its effectiveness. However, by the time Denise went there, ACW was well known in Los Angeles as the first place that offered a residential program only for women.
Located at Eleventh and Alvarado, “kinda, sorta downtown,” as Denise described it, to this day ACW provides both residential and outpatient programs for women. It definitely isn’t Betty Ford or Promises Malibu or the CLARE Foundation, where Susan Burton’s recovery began. Instead, ACW works directly with LA County Health Services to provide substance abuse programs to women who don’t have private insurance and need public support for their treatment. Women in their residential program live in a thirty-two-bed facility consisting of two large, reconfigured frame houses. These are euphemistically described as “historic homes,” but in LA, anything older than fifty years is historic. “Ha! Historic? More like rundown, honey,” a woman who’d been treated at ACW told me.
Denise was assigned to their residential program, which would house and treat her for at least six months. After that, the court would decide if she needed to stay longer or go to prison. Right after she was admitted, Denise told staff she was determined to change. She was allowed to go out after two weeks, once she detoxed and adjusted to living on-site. Things went well. Her forays into the world were uneventful, and she would return at the end of each day out, safe and sober.
“It was all going along fine. I really thought I was on my way. I was in the program three months and I got my usual day pass. I’d been going out before then and it had been all good. But on this particular day, I’d gone out and ended up taking a hit. I relapsed. I came back to the program that night and I told them what I’d done.” The immediate reaction to her relapse was well intentioned and based on teaching Denise the consequences of her actions. There was no discussion of trauma or triggers. Instead, staff told Denise to “take the opportunity” to go in front of a judge the next day. That was the bottom line: she could spend the night at ACW; then in the morning, she had to report to the court that she’d violated the agreement.
She didn’t appear in front of her original judge, who wasn’t hearing cases. This was where bureaucratic confusion came into play. The new judge told Denise to report back to the drug and alcohol rehab program in thirty days. When she first told me the story, I asked Denise to repeat that little piece of judicial decision-making two more times, just to make sure I’d heard it right. The judge also set a new court date for her: three months from those thirty days. So basically, Denise didn’t have to report back to court for four months, because she had an additional month allowing her to take her time before returning to a rehab program. I asked Denise if I had this right, and she laughed. “Yes, ma’am. I felt like I had a pass—I would have a little fun and then go back to rehab at the end of the first month. By the time the thirty days had passed, I was homeless and I was using everything—there was nothing you could hand me that I wasn’t gonna smoke.”
Denise’s downward spiral began with ACW’s initial response to her relapse. This wasn’t unusual. The consequences for drug use have always been severe, including programs that clearly state their mission to support formerly incarcerated women and treat their problems. Most programs like ACW maintain a “zero tolerance” policy in which anyone using drugs is asked to leave the program; in residential programs like Denise’s that also means they must give up their housing. And no one was asking about trauma; no one was asking about the wounds of jail and incarceration. Instead, the focus was on consequences—and that was it.
Treatment programs weren’t the only ones to respond to relapse with extreme consequences. Women trying to reunite with their children also faced drug testing mandated by DCFS. Any sign of drug use derailed their attempts to regain custody of their children and reunify their families. In the end, relapsing into drug abuse represented the greatest threat to their successfully reentering and living in mainstream society, even greater than the threat of returning to criminal activity. The women I knew and others like them were not at high risk of recidivism. What they were at risk of was relapsing; it was their drug-related behaviors and activities that got them back in trouble with the criminal justice system. In her memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, Susan Burton recounted the cycle of drug use, incarceration, release, and drug use that arose from the pain of loss in her own life; this same cycle capsizes the lives of many other women. It was, as Susan so aptly describes, the criminalization of trauma and, by association, the drug abuse that stems from it.
But just as Susan Burton was intent on naming the problem, she was also intent on changing it. Even after meeting her at the philanthropists’ field trip to visit the women’s jail, I still didn’t understand this. What I did understand was that the women I was spending time with, particularly those at the Homegirl Café and others in the community, all talked about how after they exited jail or prison it was difficult if not impossible to find a place that addressed their needs and struggles. Denise and Adela had to make do while they were meeting criminal justice system requirements, entering a substance abuse program or a halfway house. For Clara, on her own and faced with homelessness, it was a battered women’s shelter. And their choices were not unusual. It is clear that often the only places where women can find rehabilitative programs that at least touch on their issues of trauma, pain, and self-medication are in alcohol and drug treatment programs or in programs for battered women.
Most of the women I know ultimately found that their needs were at least partially met in substance abuse treatment programs. Yet those settings, while well intentioned and filled with thoughtful staff, aren’t always the best option for women trying to get used to life “on the outs.” So many women suffer with more than substance abuse; they also face “co-occurring disorders” or “dual diagnoses,” often resulting from trauma, which requires intense and sensitive treatment.
This leads to a conundrum: substance abuse programs traditionally try to stay away from uncovering trauma, the rationale being that individuals need to be sober and in recovery first. In turn, mental health programs don’t want to treat women who are dealing with substance abuse issues.1 Over the past decade, there’s been a gradual increase in programs that treat both, but there’s still not a well-developed model for how to actually do this.
Denise ran into that void head-on in her experience at ACW The program wasn’t dealing with the trauma she’d experienced as a girl nor with the ongoing trauma of multiple incarcerations. What was out there for the women who’d been locked up? I knew there were places outside of LA where such help existed: Crossroads in Claremont and A Place for Us in San Bernardino. What was working for women in the city of Los Angeles?
In the midst of all these interviews and the issues they raised, I received a call that would help answer my questions and also deeply impact my life. There was a name on my cell-phone screen: Susan Burton.
It may as well have said “God calling,” because I felt compelled to immediately drop whatever I was doing and talk to Susan. A year later, at the annual fundraiser for A New Way of Life, LA County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said, “Even if I didn’t want to answer the call from Susan, I knew I had to answer the call from Susan.” The audience laughed in appreciation, and many of us, in recognition. Dr. Bob Ross, the president and CEO of the California Endowment, confirmed this when he later told me, “Whenever Susan calls, I know I have to answer the phone and I know I have to say yes.”
That reassurance didn’t come until later. I didn’t know if anyone else reacted the way I did the first time Susan called. When I heard her voice on the phone, I was scared. She was tough and she was direct. She’d found out that the California Endowment was funding me to conduct a case study of A New Way of Life, whose study design was to follow the lives of the program’s participants and describe how it worked. She wanted to meet and find out just what this was going to be about because—and my heart dropped—she wasn’t sure she wanted me to do that.
What I learned when I showed up at the offices of A New Way of Life in Watts a week later was that Susan’s priority was the women who’d come to heal and succeed, drawing upon the services and support of ANWOL. She didn’t want research that was going to be intrusive; she didn’t want anyone poking around, “mining the data,” or entering these women’s lives in ways that would be exploitive or hurtful. “They’ve been through enough,” she told me. What she didn’t know at the time was that we shared identical values. I’d seen too much research going on in the name of science that didn’t take its “subjects” into consideration. This wasn’t what I wanted to do. What I wanted was to help Susan document her model, show how it worked, and strengthen her case to obtain the funding that she needed.
I had no desire to publish any research studies. There was already enough research that examined the issue of what women needed; too little had actually been done to actually address those needs. On top of that, by that time, I had managed to thrive for twenty-eight years as an adjunct professor at UCLA, a position that meant I had no job security but also no expectations of publication of my work in peer-reviewed journals. But I was lucky. UCLA had provided a home for me where I could teach and conduct community-based, deeply participatory research. Once we realized how strongly we were aligned around the meaning and conduct of research, Susan was ready to collaborate. “All right, missy,” she said with a laugh. “Let’s get to work.”
With the promised funding from the California Endowment, along with the support and help of two women I worked with, Karrah Lompa and Stephanie Benson, I spent over a year at A New Way of Life, talking with Susan and her staff, listening to the stories of pain, strength, and redemption that characterized every woman who lived in one of the program houses. I was also learning the nuts and bolts of ANWOL. Susan had steered clear of the research process, and she was gratified with the case study we produced, having it bound and printed for distribution at the ANWOL fundraiser. She also asked me to assist her as she moved forward with creating a strategic plan for her organization.2 The research was fascinating, and I was committed to doing whatever I could to help. But more than that, I was learning even more about what a compassionate reentry program consisted of and how it could fulfill women’s needs, contributing to their recovery as well as building their leadership skills and advocacy efforts.
What was immediately apparent to me was that everything Adela and so many others had told me was true: the people running the halfway houses had absolutely no idea what an effective reentry program should look like. A halfway house should foster healing from trauma, help build identity, and move women toward success instead of ignoring their needs and adding to their trauma. Whether this happened depended on understanding the experience of incarceration. Susan Burton knew it. She had lived it. Her trauma, incarceration, and recovery were part of the DNA of the organization whose mission statement could be found in its name: creating a new way of life. By emphasizing housing and healing while offering mental health and substance use treatment, job placement, legal services, and organizing and advocacy-skill building, ANWOL helped women find individual empowerment and add their efforts to systemic change.
By 2018, Susan Burton’s organization was overseeing seven homes with fifty-five beds for women returning from jail or prison. Once they were ready to live more independently, there was transitional housing to further ease women into the mainstream. ANWOL placed no time limit on how long a woman stayed in residence—a marked difference from most basic community services, which often had expiration dates. No one at ANWOL was told, “You have six counseling sessions and you’re done” or “You must move on after three months.” Instead, any woman who became part of ANWOL received a huge range of supportive services to nurture and develop personal growth through every aspect of the reentry process, with no expiration date.
The women who participated in the case study described how important their experience of acceptance and support was. And they all talked about how they now felt in charge of their own lives, many for the first time. ANWOL homes were not run like halfway houses. Instead, women moved freely. They set their own hours. There was no count, and no one was going to report them to their probation officer. The houses did have requirements, but these all had to do with women determining the course of their recovery, including a personal commitment to complying with the conditions of their probation. No one was going to do it for them—they were in control. They were also expected to participate in the services offered, look for work, and engage in the community of women in the household.
Working on the case study, I found that the key to ANWOL’s deep impact was that it gave these women more than the structure of the household. It provided each woman a sense of community with other women who knew what it was like to be released from prison with only the clothes on their back and $200 in gate money. It offered each woman leadership and mentorship that inspired them. Lee, a Black woman who’d been incarcerated for many years and exuded energy and beauty in our every interaction, told me, “Whenever I look at Susan, I feel like I can do it too. She went through terrible things. She lost her little boy—can you imagine that? Then she recovered and she helped people. I can recover and help people.” Seeing this—and receiving treatment that was trauma informed and community-based—helped these women to heal.
One of the other factors that really made ANWOL successful was that Susan Burton didn’t twist any part of her program to meet funding requirements. She rejected the limits that would have been imposed by some of the grants dangled in front of her. Despite the attraction of multiyear awards from government agencies, she was courageous enough to sometimes refuse funding, even when it was needed to help the houses function. “There’s always funding out there,” she told me. “We’ve just got to find it.” She turned down money from the LA County Probation Department because “there were just too many strings.” Instead, she continued to insist that any woman at ANWOL make her own decisions; self-determination was not a concept, it was a guiding reality. “I don’t want to have to lock them up at six at night,” she told me. “They know what they’ve got to do.” Susan also addressed the problem of substance abuse and relapse on a case-by-case basis—there was no rigidity in her approach. From the beginning of my research, it was clear that there were rules at ANWOL, but they were not arbitrarily imposed; instead, they were designed to foster women’s growth.
Women’s development was always paramount for ANWOL. One day, as I sat in her office discussing the next phase of research, Susan warned me not to call her between January 4 and 11, explaining that she’d be on silent retreat. I was shocked but also impressed that she took the time to be mindful, intentional, thoughtful—all the adjectives fit.
These same practices inform everything that occurs at the ANWOL houses. Before they can come to ANWOL, women are asked to first write a letter from jail or prison in which they share their stories and their desire to come to one of the houses. Susan is determined to never turn down any request and always tries to find space for any woman who contacts her. Once they arrive, for the first thirty days they’re in residence, women aren’t allowed to schedule any outside visits unless there’s a specific reason: for medical care, to obtain a social security card or an identification card, to file for an entitlement. There’s no requirement that they work, no demand that they see family or friends. Instead, they are asked to focus on beginning to adjust to life after incarceration.
Beyond their emphasis on healing, ANWOL and Susan Burton are engaged in something crucial that is not readily noted in any of the research on women’s reentry: the relationships that are built between the women who live there. Halfway houses and even other well-intentioned facilities often overlook what women need, individually and collectively: trusting relationships. They all place various emphases on having a place to live, a job to earn a living wage, and a way to reunite with their children and families. Still, weaving through this is a less recognized need, one that has to do with the attachments, the connections women make.
I would hear about these attachments over and over again. It came out during the interviews I completed at ANWOL that were part of the case study. But ANWOL wasn’t the only place where I heard women talking about attachment. I also heard it when I sat in their kitchens or living rooms, when we worked side by side at the Homegirl Café, when we played with their children in parks or at neighborhood gardens; women who’d been incarcerated talked endlessly about their personal relationships. It dominated most of our discussions. And what emerged so clearly was that what women needed, when they exited incarceration, were relationships with other women who understood what they’d been through because they have been through it themselves. They need a place to belong and the knowledge that they belong to one another.
As part of their life after incarceration, women need to replace one community—of gangs, of drugs, of crime, of trauma—that has so deeply impacted their lives with a positive community. Their need is not geographic; it isn’t based on moving away to a different location. Every one of the women I talked with described how when they were exiting jail or prison, the only people who really understood what they’d experienced were other women who’d been through the system. As they struggled to survive and to reenter, many women intuitively sought a network of women who knew how they felt. “You don’t want to be a member of this club,” said Shayna Welcher, a lively Black woman, born and raised in South LA, whom I’d known for ten years. “We all know what it took for us to get here. We all know who belongs.” It was in these communities of women that I learned about and began to understand the daily realities of the reentry process.
The Homegirl Café stood out as a place where women who’d been locked up could find a community. “I love Homegirl; it’s such an important part of my life,” Shayna explained. “You need to understand what we all loved about Homegirl. As women, we come from all parts of LA. Then, when we get to the Homegirl Café, we become one person, one bond.” Long before the term “safe space” crept into popular usage, that was what Homegirl offered up, along with the dishes on the menu all named after its waitresses. Within the larger structure of Homeboy Industries, the Homegirl Café was a sanctuary for women. It was housed in Homeboy headquarters, but it was a separate and authentically safe space. That had always been the vision of the woman who created it, Pati Zarate, and the two women who helped her run it, Erika Cuellar and Shannon Smith.3 The women at Homegirl shared resources, took care of one another’s children, and counseled each other whether they were dealing with relationships, money, or court appearances. Homeboy Industries and Father Greg Boyle were so deeply embedded in the public’s mind as the place where there is “no us and them, just us,” that it was hard to remember the unique mission of the Homegirl Café. When it first quietly began operating a few doors away from the original Homeboy headquarters in Boyle Heights, the café represented a ground-breaking idea: that girls and women who’d been gang involved and incarcerated needed a place of their own. Slowly and intentionally, the Homegirl Café grew into an innovative program dedicated to addressing women’s needs after incarceration, creating a beloved community where they could not simply work but also help one another to heal the traumas they’d encountered.
Both Ivy and Janeth flourished at Homegirl. Janeth responded to Adela’s love and caring, trying hard to grow up. She didn’t have a car or a driver’s license, so Adela would pick her up to make sure she got to the café on time. Ivy didn’t need a mother figure, relating more to the women her own age. These were the sisters she’d needed and never had growing up. She grew close with Shayna, appearing in a TED talk with her. Both women talked about their fight to overcome trauma, drugs, and incarceration. Homegirl had changed their lives—they’d found somewhere they felt safe and other women who understood exactly what they’d experienced. They helped one another negotiate life after being locked up. “We have each other’s backs,” Ivy enthused.
I heard the same words at A New Way of Life. The women who lived in the houses or sought services at the main office all told me the same thing, that this was the first place they felt they really “belonged to one another.” I witnessed firsthand how these women looked out for and took care of one another, comforting each other about relationships with their children, sharing their clothes and their resources. One staff member even gave a resident her car when she needed it. It was inspiring but also troubling, because it gave rise to the question that had no answer: Why was A New Way of Life unusual? Why wasn’t there a program like this on every corner? The same questions haunted me at Homegirl. Why weren’t there enough reentry programs across the country that addressed the specific issues formerly incarcerated women faced? And why did so much that was actually offered turn out to be just the opposite of what was required?
I didn’t have answers to these questions, but A New Way of Life was giving me hope. I was thinking about all of this as I got ready to leave ANWOL one afternoon. It was pouring rain and I stood in the reception area looking out helplessly—I had forgotten my umbrella and my jacket. Susan’s right hand and the organization’s co-director, Pamela Marshall, sprang up from her desk and quickly fashioned a poncho for me out of a plastic garbage bag. Laughing, she solved the problem in the most immediate, practical way. The gesture represented the essence of ANWOL, a place where everyone focused on helping women and resolving their issues as swiftly and pragmatically as possible. But I also knew another element was at work here: no one wanted to destroy another person’s dignity. That was the intangible in the air: respect. While Pamela was creating my poncho, I overheard a woman waiting to see Susan say, “I came here because Susan Burton cares about us—she gives us respect and hope. And your poncho looks great.”