Approximately 90 percent of women imprisoned for killing someone close to them had been abused by that person.
In 2010, Tiffany Johnson was the first lifer to be released to A New Way of Life. It used to be that lifers had little to no hope of being released, but with the scaling back of the Three Strikes law and the federal mandate for California to address prison overcrowding, lifers were starting to come home. Of the many restrictions that followed them out of the prison gates, lifers were assigned to a recovery home for a minimum of six months. Despite a decade of trying, A New Way of Life was never designated as that recovery home—no explanation given. Just like there was no explanation when, one day, a call came to expect Tiffany.
Tiffany arrived, quiet and controlled. She had coffee-colored skin, short hair, and a beautiful smile. Her eyes were wide as she took everything in, and she moved and chose her words carefully. But the next morning, I opened the front door and found Tiffany in a chair, rocking and hugging a Bible, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I don’t think I’m able to do this, Ms. Burton,” she said. “I was trying to take a shower, and I didn’t know how to operate it. For so long, I’ve only known the prison showers. It’s degrading. When I came downstairs to ask for help, everyone was gone.” She was in the house alone, after not having been alone in sixteen years. “I have to go to my parole agent,” she continued. “I’m scared. I don’t even have a coat. I thought I was prepared to be free, but I don’t know how I’m gonna make it.”
“I’m here to help you make it,” I reassured her. “This is the process of detoxing from prison. You’ve got to relearn what it means to be treated with dignity and respect. It’s okay to ask for help, and people are going to be there to help.” I showed her how to use the shower—it wasn’t the typical lever, instead you pulled down on the spigot—and then I went back to my house and got her one of my coats. I drove her to the parole office and, after that, we went to the grocery store.
“There’s a lot of choices, a lot of colors, don’t be overwhelmed,” I cautioned, knowing how jolting it could be to go from years of no choices and not being able to make a single decision to navigating a world very different from the one you left.
We needed to find Tiffany a job. In prison, she’d held a unique job status within the Joint Venture Program, where private businesses set up operations inside California prisons and hired inmates for minimum wages. These were coveted positions because they paid dollars an hour, instead of the cents most other prison jobs paid. Tiffany was a good worker, and when a major contract came in from Xtreme, a company that manufactured chassis harnesses, she was quickly recruited to their team. A year and a half later, she was promoted to lead supervisor, though she didn’t want the higher job. She had plenty of work, and it wasn’t worth the 50-cents-an-hour raise, but she was forced to take the promotion. She oversaw twenty-five women on a line, and she became a master solderer.
From her salary, 40 percent was taken off the top—with half of that going to restitution or victim’s services, and the other half to pay for room and board in prison. Federal and state taxes were also deducted, though she didn’t have the right to vote. This seemed a violation—wasn’t one of the founding principles of this country no taxation without representation?
When Tiffany was finally granted release from prison, the Joint Venture Program was sad to lose her. They offered her a job pitching the program to prospective California companies. But it was a pie-in-the-sky offer: you had to have a car, which she didn’t, and they wouldn’t provide one; plus, under regulations of her release, she wasn’t allowed to travel more than fifty miles outside of Los Angeles, which wouldn’t fit the job description anyway.
More practical was to get a job on the outside with Xtreme. Of her eleven years in the Joint Venture Program, she worked nine for Xtreme, implementing many of the systems and processes the company now considered standard. She sent the company a letter along with her résumé and portfolio. But she never got an interview—not even a return call.
I referred Tiffany to the California Department of Rehabilitation, and they found a job posting for a solderer at a family-owned company that made parts for refrigerated trucks. Tiffany set up an interview, though, unbeknownst to her, the human resources person was on vacation, so the company’s typical background check was overlooked. Impressing everyone with a soldering test, Tiffany was offered the job on the spot. By the time the HR person returned and ran a background check, Tiffany had been on the job for two weeks and was proving to be an outstanding employee.
When the boss brought her in to discuss what her background check turned up, she had an opportunity to explain her circumstances. Despite company policy, she was allowed to stay on. Of course, we all knew that if that background check had been run first, it wouldn’t have mattered how good a solderer Tiffany was. What should have been the normal way people were treated, was a rare lucky break.
Tiffany wasn’t used to lucky breaks. When she began telling me about her life, I learned that as a child, she, too, had been sacrificed. Growing up in Oakland, she was the middle child of a single mom. Her fifth birthday is emblazoned on her memory: her mom hadn’t bought her a present. That night, her mom left the house, returning later with presents and also with a new friend, an older white man, who was wealthy. Tiffany’s mom became his secret girlfriend, hidden from his wife and family. Tiffany became his “special” little girl. For five years, he sexually abused Tiffany. The abuse from him stopped when she got her period—but continued from others. “It was like I had a target on my back,” Tiffany said. “Anybody who likes to mess with little girls, come mess with me!” There would be six others during her childhood. And her mother’s boyfriend would remain in their lives for another decade.
The older Tiffany grew, the more she blocked her childhood memories. All she knew was she didn’t like to be around her mother’s boyfriend, but she couldn’t articulate why. Life went on; she became a certified nurse’s assistant, she had children. One evening, she returned from Christmas shopping to all the lights out in her mother’s house, though the kids were there with her mother’s boyfriend babysitting. Tiffany’s young son ran up to her. “Pawpaw said I had to stay in my room.” Her son pointed to a young child who was staying with the family. “And that she had to sleep with him.”
A lock in Tiffany’s mind turned. Images came rushing back. She scooped up the little girl and said they needed to take her to the hospital. For hours they sat in the ER, but everyone else grew tired of waiting, saying the child was fine, Pawpaw wouldn’t do anything. They convinced Tiffany to leave.
But once the memories had started, Tiffany couldn’t make them stop. She felt all alone, swirling in thoughts and confusion. “You know how it is,” Tiffany told me, “you don’t talk to anyone about what happens at home.” Yes, I knew how it was. She turned to drinking and drugs to blur the images from her mind.
Eventually, she mustered up the courage to tell her mother. Heads reeling, they walked to a nearby bar. After a night of heavy drinking, Tiffany grew flirtatious with a man at the bar. Her mother looked at her and said, “No wonder he did what he did with you.”
Tiffany recoiled. “You’re telling me I seduced a man when I was the age of five?” She stormed out. Her mother didn’t go after her. It was her boyfriend who provided for her and the family; she didn’t want Tiffany’s allegations to be true.
Time passed. One night, after some more heavy drinking, Tiffany, her mom, and the boyfriend got to fighting. Tiffany’s grandmother had recently died and among her belongings was an old gun. Her mom picked up the gun, aimed it at her boyfriend.
She pulled the trigger. A bullet missed him and whooshed right by Tiffany’s face. Shaken to the core, Tiffany waited until everyone left, then she slit her wrists. It was the first time she’d ever harmed herself. Her neighbor found her in time.
Some years went by and Tiffany became pregnant, with twins. Unable to afford the babies, she had an abortion. But it wasn’t effective, and she was sent to San Francisco for a more advanced procedure. There, she began hemorrhaging, and wound up hospitalized for a few days. She returned to her mother’s while she recovered, but that night she overheard her mom’s boyfriend make a sexual comment about her youngest sister, who knew him like a dad.
When Tiffany spoke up, he denied having said anything. They began arguing and he kept denying it. Her mom claimed she was finally through with him, and she left the house, leaving him and Tiffany alone.
“Tiffany, nothing I did to you hurt you,” he argued. “So why don’t you just move on with your life? I’ll give you money, get you a car, just move on with your life.”
“You think a bribe can just erase everything?” Tiffany cried.
“Move on,” he shouted. He kept saying it. “Move on, move on, move on.” She was dizzy and weak from the surgery, from the lost blood, but something was happening. She remembered it as if she were watching herself on TV, not as if it were reality. Then, she blacked out.
When her mom came home, she had to slap Tiffany into consciousness. Tiffany woke to her mom screaming, “What have you done?”
Tiffany knew, but didn’t. She was in shock. They took her children to her brother’s, and planned to run. They’d drive to Texas, then figure out what to do next. Highway 5, a blank road, nothing out there. Tiffany sat in the backseat, staring out the window, thinking how she’d just left her children. What was she going to do now, live on the run? They were halfway to Los Angeles when Tiffany said, “Go back, I’ll turn myself in. If I tell the truth, I’ll get punished, but the truth will set me free.”
The truth didn’t set her free. The justice system didn’t work that way. Justice didn’t see her as a victim. She couldn’t afford a lawyer, so she had a public defender. “I thought I could trust him,” she told me. “But he didn’t work for me. He did the same thing everyone else had done in my life: he abused my trust.”
The day of jury selection, Tiffany was offered a plea bargain of fifteen to life. “Don’t worry about it,” the public defender told her. “It’s just a title, you’ll only do seven, seven and a half years, and you’ll get out and your kids will be young enough, and you can start your life again.” She took it.
When she arrived at prison and started talking to the other inmates, they laughed in her face. “Seven years? You have an ‘L’ behind your number. They don’t let lifers out.”
Desperate, Tiffany went to the main yard to find some lifers. The advice she was after was how to get out, but the advice they gave her was how to live within: “You’re in a whole new world now, and you can’t live in this world and still try to live in your old life too. Whoever you have as caretaker for your kids, you need to let them raise your kids, and you need to become friends to your children instead of trying to parent them from in here.” This turned out to be sage advice, and Tiffany managed to at least create a bond with her kids.
In prison, Tiffany saw a flyer for A New Way of Life. She wrote me, saying she was a lifer and if or when she could go before the Board of Prison Terms, could she get a letter saying we’d accept her to live there? I wrote back saying we’d have a bed waiting.
Two years later, she was allowed to go before the board, but was denied. Six years later, she was allowed to go again. This time, with the money she’d earned from the Joint Venture Program, she hired an attorney to instruct her how to prepare. I wrote her an updated letter, saying a bed was waiting. She was found suitable, and the board’s recommendation went before the governor.
For four months she waited. Finally, Governor Schwarzenegger approved her release.
By now, Tiffany’s children were grown and all living in the Bay Area. Not that it mattered: lifers weren’t allowed to have family or friends pick them up, and the board had mandated she not be near her mother. Her parole agent picked her up from the prison gates and drove her straight to A New Way of Life. She hadn’t been in a moving vehicle in well over a decade and got car sick several times along the long drive. But it gave her time to process that she was outside of those prison walls. “I was scared, excited, confused, anxious, terrified,” she described. “Still in disbelief that I’m walking into a house. I hadn’t walked up stairs in sixteen years. I couldn’t wait to sleep in a bed that didn’t have a metal frame, but a real mattress and box spring. I was so excited to shut the bathroom door.”
Tiffany had been living with us for a couple of months when I brought her up to A New Way of Life’s board of directors. It was important to me to have a resident sit on our board, something I’d started after I moved out of the house, since no policy decisions should be made without the input of those directly affected. The board approved Tiffany to be our resident member.
At Tiffany’s first board meeting, she sat quietly, taking it all in. Later, when the board wrote checks to the organization, Tiffany took out a checkbook too. She wrote a check for $40. I knew she had a $15-an-hour job, so this wasn’t chump change. At the next board meeting, two months later, Tiffany again took out her checkbook. I said she should only give what she could afford. She replied that she took seriously the responsibility of being a board member, and she wrote another check for $40.
Tiffany became active in many facets of A New Way of Life and, when she complained to me that she didn’t see much chance of ever advancing above a line solderer at the small, family-run company where she worked, I offered her a community organizer position with us.
In addition to her role, Tiffany was quick to spot where else I needed help. She did whatever was necessary for the organization, and I came to rely on her as my right-hand woman. I was now in my early sixties, and for the past fifteen years I had morphed so fully into my work I could no longer tell what was me or what was A New Way of Life. The organization dictated to me what it needed, and I heeded its every call, seven days a week, all hours. For the first time, I began to look up and realize I was exhausted. Though I wasn’t yet ready to retire, I needed to think seriously about what would happen when that day came.
I looked over at Tiffany, working away at her desk. Front and center she had an engraved plaque that said, “Imagine Life’s Possibilities.” I knew A New Way of Life would be in good hands.