Life After Murder

Over time, Eddie and Richie tell me everything: how they adapted to prison and survived the hole, or solitary confinement, lockups and lockdowns; the quirky life skills and unspoken “inmate” rules; the process of parole hearings and denials; and for those lucky enough to get a “date” from the parole board, the agonizing 150-day wait for a fax from the governor notifying them whether they would go home in two days or remain locked up indefinitely. Both of them went into prison imagining that they would leave as young men; both worked hard to make that goal a reality. Their stories help make it easier to comprehend the enormity of what others, such as Don, are still going through.

The next time I see Don, it’s early January 2008, a little more than two months since my visit to his cell inside San Quentin’s North Block. The official purpose for my visit this time is to interview new inductees in the Addiction Recovery Treatment program. But stepping out of the sally port and into the prisoners’ world with Messick, I see Don standing out in front of the chapel, a mug of coffee in one hand, a watermelon-wide smile stretched across his face, his wire-rimmed glasses shading his eyes.

Like a swollen bubble aching to be burst, Don pops with the news. “I got a date from the board!” he says, practically giggling. “The board found me suitable for parole. They said I’m ready to go home, that I’m no longer a threat to society. It means for the first time in twenty-seven years and seven board hearings, I’m not a monster.”

A correctional officer escorted him to the parole board hearing room, just to the right of the sally port. His attorney since his 1981 arrest, Richard Fathy, was sitting on one side of a long table across from two commissioners from the governor-appointed Board of Parole Hearings and the district attorney from Sacramento.

Once the hearing got under way, Don had an opportunity to account for his crime, to show that he fully understood what caused him to commit his offense, to take responsibility for what he had done, and to show he was remorseful—in essence, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt he had fundamentally changed and was no longer “a threat to public safety.”

Don had done his work. He had a flawless discipline record. If he had smoked a cigarette—banned in California prisons since 2005—or refused to sit all the way down at one call of “attention on the yard,” or even been caught smuggling an extra towel to his cell, that infraction could have cost him parole. He hadn’t done anything to get a 115, or disciplinary write-up, but still hadn’t been able to convince the board of his rehabilitation over the six previous hearings.

Don’s voice has grown heavy, and his vowels seem to stretch over tightened vocal chords deep in his throat. “You never really know until they announce their decision. Every time the board denies you parole, they also tell you how long you will have to wait before you can go before them again. My very first denial was for four years. Every denial after that was one year. One year, one year, one year. Then when I went to this hearing . . . . they found me suitable.” The word “suitable” practically jumps out of his mouth.

Don believes the district attorney simply no longer had the energy to keep him in prison. He tells me that despite his triumph, he’s jaded with the whole process. “You go in there and you keep that flame of hope alive always, and you pray about it and you go in there with expectations. You have to sell yourself, and you also have to have the documentation to prove, to back up what you’re saying. So you’re prepared. You have hope. But in the back of your mind, you’ve been denied so many times, and we’re aware of everyone else going. The statistics are very much not in our favor. They are against us.”

He’s not kidding. In all of 2007, out of 6,181 parole board hearings scheduled, just 119 lifers were found suitable for parole. As of 2011, of the more than 17,000 lifers in California prisons serving sentences similar to Don’s, more than 10,000 have served enough of their sentences to meet their minimum eligible parole date. Yet just a tiny fraction of them are being found suitable for parole, let alone released.

This is true despite the fact that California state penal code encourages release. Each inmate serving a life sentence costs taxpayers a minimum of $50,000 a year, so Penal Code Section 3041 says, “One year prior to the inmate’s minimum eligible parole (MEP) release date, a panel of two or more commissioners or deputy commissioners shall meet with the inmate and shall normally set a parole release date as provided in California Penal Code, Section 3041.5.” (Emphasis mine.)

Some quick math reveals that the cash-strapped state could save up to $500 million—that’s not a typo—this year alone by heeding its own law. Of course, not all 10,000 lifers who have met their minimum eligible parole date are ready for release. But think of the money the state (and others) would save by honoring its legal commitment to release truly rehabilitated prisoners.

Initial and subsequent hearings are expensive not just for the taxpayer, but for inmates’ families, too, because like trials themselves, they go a lot better with a great lawyer. Don’s fiancée, Kathleen, got so frustrated with the seemingly boilerplate denials, she shelled out thousands of dollars to, unsuccessfully, challenge the board’s denials in court.

A corrections officer who regularly presides over parole hearings at San Quentin tells me that although inmates are entitled to a state-appointed or private lawyer who will represent them at their parole hearings, a private attorney is generally crucial to the inmate’s victory. “Your attorney has to prepare you for the point at the end of the hearing when they ask you a basic question: ‘Tell me why you’re suitable for parole.’ You should have rehearsed this in your mind about 2,000 times, in front of your mirror, in front of your friends, in front of whomever. It has to be so scripted . . . genuine but rehearsed. You can rehearse genuineness. Some attorneys just don’t prepare their clients for that.”

A private attorney named Johanna Hoffman confirms this statement. She tells me that state-appointed lawyers just don’t have the time to advocate effectively for their clients. She began her legal career working for the state but quickly realized that wasn’t the best way to represent prisoners’ needs. The state “gives you sixteen parole board cases to handle in one week at one prison, and you’re there from eight thirty in the morning until whatever at night. When each day’s four hearings are over, you have to be back at the prison at seven thirty the following morning. The BPH [Board of Parole Hearings] pays $30 an hour with a maximum of eight hours per hearing, so you’re capped at $240 to represent one lifer at one parole hearing. You can make $240 times four hearings a day for a total of $960 a day. But that eight-hour cap per life hearing includes not just the two hours for the hearing, which is often longer. It also includes your interview with your client, a review of the lifer’s central file, travel to and from the prison, a review of the hearing packet that the BPH mails to you, and any research or any follow-up work you have to do. So you do the whole week. You’re doing all sixteen people beginning Monday at one and three. Then Tuesday it’s eight thirty, ten thirty, one thirty, three thirty. But often they don’t finish the ten thirty until four, and we would be there until midnight and then have to come back at seven thirty the following morning, with a repeat on Thursday.”

Hoffman quit this frustrating work so she could represent fewer clients at a time and win more victories. But that means she has to charge a lot of money. She charges $5,000 on average for a subsequent (rather than an initial) parole hearing, then $2,500 for a hearing after a one-year denial of parole. She tells me that inmates’ families generally foot the bill—yet another expensive proposition in the course of caring for an incarcerated loved one.

“I look to see if they’re serious about it. One of the things I tell people when I meet them is I won’t work harder than they do. If somebody doesn’t get that, if somebody thinks they’re hiring me and I’m their golden ticket and I’m going to get them out, that’s crazy. I tell them, ‘You’ve struggled, suffered, done programs. You’ve been preparing yourself for twenty years. I’m just stepping in at the last minute to try and pull all that together to help you make a good presentation.’ When people get that, then we work well together.”

“That they’re human, fundamentally. They made mistakes. They got themselves into situations that I would say any one of us could find ourselves in. They’re bizarre circumstantial scenarios that probably in each person’s wildest dreams never would have happened. But they did. They happened a long time ago, and whatever caused them either to spend time with the people they were spending time with, to be in that environment, to normalize some of the things they were doing, it is very different today.”

Unfortunately, that’s not something that voters in California and across the nation understand. Most laws that have been passed about prisoners and parolees make parole hearings more, not less, doctrinaire, and less attentive to the details of an individual inmate’s progress. Most new laws carry the name of a victim of some well-known crime, reflecting that the public’s perception of its safety—and therefore its preferences for tough penal codes—continues to be shaped by high-profile tragedies, but also by anger and revenge.

Named after Marsy Nicholas, a woman stalked and murdered by a boyfriend, Marsy’s Law increases victims’ rights to participate in prisoners’ parole hearings. It also dramatically increases the time a prisoner must wait for a subsequent hearing after a board denial. Before the law was passed, prisoners could be required to wait up to five years between hearings, but usually waited one to two years between their parole hearings. Now the minimum denial is three years and the new maximum wait between hearings is fifteen years. So before, it was most common to wait one to two years but now it’s common for a life inmate to wait five to seven years between hearings.

Laurie Saunders, a state-appointed lawyer for inmates at parole hearings, thinks this is hugely unfair. “A fifteen-year denial is often more than a second sentence,” she says. “Many of these people, their original sentences were seven to life. Now they’re getting fifteen to life after they’ve done thirty years.”

Saunders says that parole hearings are “an extremely difficult emotional experience” for an inmate, no matter how often the prisoner goes before the board. “It’s a huge, huge moment for them, even under the old system, before Marsy’s Law, when they went up before the board every year. It was always a huge emotional experience for them.

“One of the main things people don’t know is how difficult it is for somebody to actually get rehabilitated or get credit for being rehabilitated. A lot of the people I see went into prison on their life sentence when they were sixteen or seventeen years old. So by the time I see them, when they’re coming up on their parole dates, they’re forty and obviously they’re a completely different person. Who isn’t a completely different person? They’ve made amends, and they really would be able to function fine, but nobody understands that.”

It’s the parole board’s job to look past public hysteria about crime and criminals and evaluate the true nature of the inmates who come before them. In California, twelve commissioners sit on the state’s Adult Board of Parole Hearings. Composed mostly of retired district attorneys, corrections officers, sheriffs, victims’ rights advocates, and probation officers, the board pays people salaries of $100,000 to travel to prisons throughout the state, sleep in hotel rooms, and conduct parole hearings that often start before nine in the morning and sometimes last until well into the evening.

Parole hearings are not to decide guilt or innocence. The BPH accepts as fact the guilty verdict imposed by the courts. In general, some of the factors considered by the panel and which are discussed in the hearing include : Counseling reports and psychological evaluations; Behavior in prison (i.e., disciplinary notices or laudatory accomplishments); Vocational and educational accomplishments in prison; Involvement in self-help therapy programs that can range from anti-addiction programs for drugs and alcohol to anger management; and Parole plans, including where an inmate would live and support themselves if they were released. The purpose of the parole hearing is to determine if or when an inmate can be returned to society.

Two commissioners generally attend each hearing. If for some reason two aren’t available, one of seventy civil-service deputy commissioners sits in on the hearing and casts one of the two controlling votes. In addition, victims and their families are welcome to come. According to the handbook, “The victim, or if the victim has died, family members may attend and speak at the hearing. Victims and their families may choose to designate a representative to speak on their behalf.”

Not all scheduled parole hearings even take place. In 2007, of the 6,181 parole suitability hearings scheduled in the state, only 3,118 lifer parole hearings, or 50 percent, were actually conducted. The other 50 percent were either canceled, postponed, “waived” (meaning the lifer didn’t want to proceed with the hearing), or “stipulated,” meaning the lifer formally agreed with the board that he wasn’t ready for parole.

“Our responsibility is to assess the risk of dangerousness to society,” Kane tells me. “We take that responsibility very seriously. I lose sleep at night wondering if my decisions are going to put somebody else at risk. So I’m going to be as sure as I can, if I make that decision, that the possibility they are a risk is minimized by certain factors. It could be their age, if they’ve matured. It could be the fact that they’ve showed from being incarcerated they’ve been disciplinary-free their whole incarceration so their potential for violence is now gone away because they got it, they know how to get along with people. I’ve had men who have come before me that came in with no high school education, and they leave with a master’s, leave with double-A [associate of arts] degrees. They have job offers already waiting for them with high salaries because they got it. That makes them less of a potential threat, because they don’t need to go back to crime. We take our job seriously because we’re protecting the public.”

Gillingham’s standard for suitability is both simple and ironclad: “You could have them next door to you and you’re comfortable with that, because you’re not speaking for yourself here. You’re speaking for the community and you have to feel comfortable with thinking about this inmate living next door to you. You certainly don’t want to put them in somebody else’s neighborhood, ’cause your job is to protect everybody. So wherever he’s gonna go, you pretend like you’re his next-door neighbor.”

It isn’t easy to prove rehabilitation to people like Gillingham and Kane. They’ve heard it all before, and they want absolute proof of everything. It takes more than attending a couple of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings inside the prison to convince commissioners a lifer has changed. If you haven’t done some programs, you’re out of luck. If the state hasn’t provided those programs to you—and if you’re in California, the state isn’t required to do so—you’re probably out of luck, too.

Fortunately, after ten years of trying, Don is finally in luck. “By the time I got back to the room, my lawyer was already sitting in his chair, across the table from the commissioners. I couldn’t read anything on his face—nothing,” he tells me. “Then one of the commissioners reached over and turned the recorder back on.

“There’s a format that they follow. It’s all recorded, and while the woman commissioner is speaking, she’s making sure what she’s saying is all on tape. She’s reading from a piece of paper in front of her, ‘We find the inmate, Don Cronk, suitable for parole.’ And she keeps talking. I didn’t know she said it ’cause I’m so used to . . . That’s where they usually say ‘not suitable.’ My first thought is, ‘I have to call Kathleen. I have to call home and tell them the bad news.’ And the woman is reading on and on and no indication.

“I’m thinking, did she just say I was suitable? I look at my attorney to see if he’s thumbs-up, smiling. No change on his face. I couldn’t get any indication from him. I looked back at the commissioners. The woman went on to read for several minutes, and when she got done with that part, she went on to speak about my suitability, what was going to happen next. She was saying my documents would be sent to the parole board in Sacramento to be reviewed for the next 120 days by the board. Then my file would be sent to the governor for thirty days to review my parole suitability.

“And that’s when it hit me. I didn’t hear anything else she said. I began crying, sobbing like a baby. I couldn’t stop. The commissioner reached up and grabbed a tissue from a box on the table and handed it to me. They’d seen it before. It was uncontrollable. I didn’t know I would be so not in control of my emotions. Not that I was trying to fight it, but it had never happened before. You wait almost twenty-seven years. I had been waiting for this and when it finally hit me that it had happened, it’s just an emotional release. It’s kind of unbelievable. I was in shock essentially. They had found me suitable for parole. They said I was no longer a threat to the public. They believed me. And then it was over. I was leaving. I was walking out the door, almost a free man.”

Within minutes of Don’s finding out he had been found suitable for release, word spread throughout the prison with the speed of an uncontrolled burn. Out in the chapel courtyard, down the blacktop passage to North Block and across the lower yard, men in blues called out to one another, “Cronk got a date,” followed by high fives, cheers, and questions. Even before Don walked out of the parole board hearing room and back out in the prison population, lifers were pressing for details: “Who were his commissioners?” “How long did the hearing last?” “How long did they make him wait before they told him?”

Not Kathleen, or Don, or his buddies on the North Block dared talk about the alternative, because—thanks to Prop 89—there was still an alternative, a real glitch in planning a welcome-home party. Don’s hard-won suitability ruling was a ticket not to freedom, but to limbo. Now he had to wait four months for the Board of Parole Hearings inside the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in Sacramento to review the commissioners’ decision . . . . and then it would be time to hear what Governor Schwarzenegger thought. On April 11, 2008, they would find out, one way or another, whether the board’s decision was a first critical step to Don’s freedom or just another mirage along the way.