Sixty-five million Americans with a criminal record face a total of 45,000 collateral consequences that restrict everything from employment, professional licensing, child custody rights, housing, student aid, voting, and even the ability to visit an incarcerated loved one. Many of these restrictions are permanent, forever preventing those who’ve already served their time from reaching their potential in the workforce, as parents, and as productive citizens.
“The result is that these collateral consequences become a life sentence harsher than whatever sentence a court actually imposed upon conviction.” —American Bar Association president William C. Hubbard
The more women who came through A New Way of Life, the more I saw the same story played out again and again. I watched women being excluded from public housing; I watched them being denied private housing, unable to rent an apartment when faced with the box indicating a felony conviction. I waded with them through the paperwork and bureaucracy of the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services as they tried to reunite with their kids. I saw them, morning after morning, iron their sole business outfit, and then I dropped them off and picked them up from job interview after job interview, the outcome of rejection almost always the same, despite their capabilities. Capabilities didn’t matter; neither did skills, past experience, or aptitude. The sum of everything else was blotted out by a criminal conviction.
No surprise, the parole office wasn’t giving people any type of real assistance. Out of desperation, some women tried to get Social Security disability benefits, pointing to how they’d been heavily medicated in prison so they must have a mental health issue, right? To me, this was no solution. These were people with abilities. To have them strung along on a meager payout was basically relegating them to a life of poverty and uselessness. Naïvely, I had thought that if I could provide shelter and a nurturing environment, everything else would fall into place. But many days it felt like A New Way of Life was base camp at Mt. Everest.
For so many years, I, too, had come up against these seemingly insurmountable barriers. But I’d done a good job of convincing myself that my failing was personal, that it was all on my shoulders. Now, a larger picture was emerging: if you got locked up, you get locked out. It didn’t matter that you’d paid your debt to society. Nor did it matter how hard you were trying to get your life back together. A criminal history was like a credit card with interest—so what if you paid off the balance, the interest still kept accruing. And accruing and accruing and accruing.
Yet I remained determined. All over the city, I drove women looking for jobs, or tracking copies of their birth certificates, or filing for Social Security cards. With all this running around, gas and upkeep on my old Ford Escort was expensive, and I soon began doling out bus fare. Which led to a bigger issue: I was running out of money.
When Stan from HOP told me that the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Central gave bus tokens, I showed up there right away. But before issuing me tokens, they asked if A New Way of Life was a 501c3.
I paused. “What’s a 501c3?”
They explained it was a nonprofit organization, and that they could only issue bus tokens to nonprofits.
I went home and began making phone calls to figure out how to become a nonprofit. Eventually, I found my way to Mr. Malone, who worked with a religious-based recovery home in South L.A. If Mr. Malone had a job title, it was lost on me back then—to me, we were all like-minded people struggling to improve the community. He knew how to become a 501c3, and he graciously helped me through the application process so that I could file without having to pay out.
In record time, state nonprofit status for A New Way of Life was approved. But all that meant, really, was I then had to fumble through the federal filings. Back and forth I went with the IRS until, finally, my application was ready to be submitted. And then, I waited.
During this time, I was invited to speak at CLARE’s annual fundraising dinner. I had no idea I’d be speaking to a roomful of some of the biggest power players in Los Angeles. I stood at the podium, looking out over tables of people dressed in the most beautiful clothes. But I was wearing fine clothes too—fine clothes from the CLARE thrift store. I probably had on the discarded dress of somebody sitting in the audience.
I spoke about my past, comparing what life had been like to what my life was now. I expressed gratitude for the help I received. “If there’d been a CLARE in my community,” I said, “I could have found intervention and a different outcome sooner.” I described my dream of creating a safe place for women getting out of prison, and the creation of A New Way of Life. And I explained how my current goal was to obtain nonprofit status so we could get bus fare for the women’s commutes to their jobs.
When I was done, chairs screeched against the floor as people rose to their feet. Never before had I experienced anything like this. A standing ovation? For me? In that moment, I flashed back to when I’d first walked through the doors at CLARE, the condition I was in—pain to the point of incapacitation, despair, sorrow, grief, addiction—and how restoration seemed all but impossible. At once, the image seemed both alarmingly stark and like an old, brittle photograph. It was me, and it wasn’t. It was where I’d been, and why I was here. I put the lid on the shoebox in my mind. And returned to the beauty of the moment before me.
After dinner, a silver-haired man approached me. I didn’t know who he was, but he had a commanding presence. He said he wanted to learn more about A New Way of Life and that he’d be in touch. A few days later, I received a call from the office of Theodore Forstmann, instructing me to make a list of things A New Way of Life needed. I still didn’t know anything about this man, but I knew we needed a lot of things. We needed cleaning items and toilet paper and, of course, bus tokens. When Leslie saw the list I was making, she looked me square in the face.
“Susan, ask for what you need.”
“We need toilet paper and bus fare,” I said.
“You need a washer and dryer,” Leslie countered. “You need a van to drive the women around.”
“I can’t ask for things like that,” I balked. “I don’t even know this man.” And wasn’t that the truth—I had no idea Mr. Forstmann was a billionaire, with companies like Gulfstream and Dr Pepper to his name.
“Susan, you need to think big,” Leslie said. “He can always say no.” Following her advice, I took toilet paper off the list and replaced it with a van.
Even though we didn’t have 501c3 status yet, Mr. Forstmann bought us that van.
Ever since I’d conducted the twelve-step panels in juvenile hall, I wanted to continue working with young people, and Mr. Forstmann provided funding for me to work with Youth Opportunities Unlimited, a high school in South L.A. for at-risk kids. I talked with the students about my own path, describing how, if I’d known at their age what I knew now, I’d have done a lot of things differently, I’d have planned for my life. I gave each student a leather-bound daily planner, plus a T-shirt that said, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” I watched them excitedly write in their planners, and I hoped, in some small way, that I was helping to break the school-to-prison pipeline.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, 2000, I went to the mailbox and there was the certificate of our federal nonprofit status. I mailed Mr. Forstmann a copy, and he mailed back a $10,000 check with a note that said, “Keep up the good work.” His encouragement meant as much if not more than the money. For the next decade, until his death from a brain tumor, Mr. Forstmann quietly and steadily supported us.
I was still on parole when I returned for my monthly check-in with Ms. B and handed her a flyer about my nonprofit organization. She looked intrigued. But our meeting went as it typically did: she filled out paperwork, I peed in a cup, she watched, I left. In 2001, I showed up for my check-in and Ms. B handed me a discharge card. I hadn’t known to expect it—your date of discharge depended on the slow wheels of government, so there was no predicting the week, the month, sometimes even the year. When I left the parole building that day, it was the first time in two decades that I was no longer in the clutches of the U.S. justice system.
One day, Ms. B dropped by the house. The only other time I’d seen her outside the parole office was when, decades earlier, she’d visited my mother’s house to verify I was living at the address I’d provided. We sat in the living room. I still referred to her as Ms., though I hoped she’d tell me to call her by her first name, a gesture acknowledging that the past was finally behind us and we were now peers. But that didn’t happen.
She looked around, noticing the women coming and going. I could tell she was impressed, but she soon changed the topic to complaining how she wanted to retire but still had kids in college. I thought about our women’s kids, most in the custody of relatives or relegated to foster care; some, permanently lost, having been adopted out. Each time one of our women attended a custody hearing or spoke on the phone with the children she couldn’t be with, my heart broke. I wondered if Ms. B thought about any of this, if she ever stopped to consider how far the inefficient and punitive parole system had strayed from the original intent of successfully reintegrating people back into society. Did she, I wondered, ever allow herself to feel others’ pain? Or would that make it too difficult to do her job?
To my surprise, Ms. B referred a few women to A New Way of Life. Some years later, I would see her again. I was at an Erykah Badu concert and the odor of weed was wafting from the group in front of me. I looked over, and there was Ms. B. I watched her notice me. Then I wondered how many people she’d sent back to prison for marijuana offenses. After the lights came up, she turned to me and said, “Don’t mention this.”