In the U.S., up to 100 million people have a criminal record—that’s one in three Americans.
“Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
—Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Sitting at LAX waiting on a plane, I made a call to my brother Melvin, but he didn’t answer. The next morning, I got a call that an aneurysm had taken him with no warning. The time of his death had been the time of my call.
I’d made that vow to myself about grief, about not allowing the devastation to overtake me; nevertheless I was devastated. I’d again be devastated some time later, when I learned the truth. Melvin and Beverly’s daughter, Michelle, then in her mid-twenties, came to me with his death certificate. “I thought you said my daddy died of an aneurysm.”
Confused, I saw the cause of death was recorded as acute cocaine toxicity. My head spun.
My own brother.
Sobriety wasn’t just about abstaining. It called for a certain level of humility and a change inside. Melvin could get there partially, but he couldn’t get there and sustain it. Once I was able to get my hurt, anger, and disappointment in check, I was engulfed by a profound sadness. Melvin had been able to help me, but not himself. And here I was, helping all these other people, but in the end I couldn’t save my good brother.
Drugs are insidious. A social ill for some folks, a criminal ill for others. Just like me, Melvin had served time, but what good had that done? Taxpayers pay up to $60,000 per year to incarcerate a person. For the same fee as tuition at an elite university, I sat behind bars with no hope of a long-term plan, and I came out, each time, angry, demoralized, and primed to reoffend. To think what a different world we’d live in if someone like me, someone like Melvin, could have been sent down a productive path instead of to the Department of Corrections.
In 2015, I stood before Yale Law students to speak about women and mass incarceration. Thinking of the exorbitant price tags that both prison and higher education carry, I asked, “Why couldn’t I have gone to Yale instead of jail?” The crowd of future influencers roared. “Yale not jail!” sparked across social media.
Jail had done nothing to stop my addiction. Education, hard work, dedication, a support system, and knowing there were opportunities for me and that my life had value: these were what had made all the difference. For the past twenty years of my sobriety, I deployed each of these facets, every day. I kept up with my Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, every Wednesday in Watts was my women’s Stag meeting, and every Sunday was my “Tired of Being Dogged Out” meeting. And from the crack of dawn until I couldn’t keep my eyes open my life was pure knuckle and grit and nonstop work. Turning pain into power, turning despair into hope. But, just like dealing with addiction, if there’s one thing I’ve learned without a doubt: a system doesn’t work just because it’s there. You have to make it work. And, when it comes to government systems, we have to make it work.
We have to call and write, and we have to show up. It can’t just be a handful of big mouths like myself; it has to be a community. The community is the ears, eyes, and mouths required to keep the system functioning for the good of the people. We all must speak up, we all must step up.
I wanted to tell my story as a call for mobilization. Together, we can end discrimination. Together, we can push our government to remove barriers and open up doors for people who are qualified in the here and now. People who should not be held stagnant. People who should not forever be kept in the place when they were at their lowest. Together, we can make these changes. And we must.
It often seemed our government could gear up real quick to punish, but not so when it came to restoration. It took ages to address bad policy. Though these incremental changes made me cross-eyed with frustration, I still could look in most every direction and spot some positive movement. In 2010, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation to reduce the gap in sentencing for possession of crack cocaine versus powered cocaine—where the disparity used to be 100 to 1, it’s now 18 to 1. (A step in the right direction to reduce racial discrimination, but why was there any disparity for drugs that were pharmacologically the same? Even President Obama believed the gap should have been closed entirely.)
In 2014, Senate Bill 260, Justice for Juveniles with Adult Sentences, became law in California, offering a second chance to prisoners who were under the age of eighteen at the time of their crime, but who were tried and sentenced as adults. This was in response to a growing body of scientific research on brain development showing that the judgment and decision-making centers of the brain did not fully develop until one’s twenties—and that the law didn’t take into account an adolescent’s ability for dramatic growth, maturity, and rehabilitation.
A New Way of Life had been a major advocate of the bill and, after it passed, we were deluged with letters from incarcerated women now eligible to go before the Board of Prison Terms, seeking release. We responded to every letter with proof of acceptance to A New Way of Life. But we knew that, despite SB260’s existence, it was still a long road for these women. If they were found suitable by the prison board, they’d then get in line for approval from California’s governor. We have yet to receive a single woman released under SB260, but we continue to wait with open arms.
In 2015, buoyed by a RAND Corporation study estimating that for every dollar invested in education behind bars, four to five dollars would be saved on re-incarceration costs, the Obama administration’s Department of Education launched the Second Chance Pell Pilot program. The following year, sixty-seven colleges and universities partnered with a hundred federal and state penal institutions to offer Pell Grants and education for inmates. Pell Grants were what we’d been fighting for, and now, 12,000 inmates were also students, pursuing degrees. It was a beautiful start—but still a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people released annually.
In 2016, the Department of Justice announced the end of funding for privately operated prisons, deeming the facilities unsafe, ineffective, and costly. Good riddance—but this only applied to thirteen prisons and affected a mere 11 percent of federal inmates. There was no change for the majority of inmates housed in state prisons—including privately funded state prisons.
Turning my sights closer to home, the picture was warmer. A New Way of Life was serving as a vital springboard for women, for advocates, for community organizations, and for public interest attorneys. Our re-entry legal clinic, held monthly in both Watts and Long Beach, annually filed over nine hundred expungement petitions and over three hundred Prop 47 petitions. We also added legal assistance to help reduce compounded fines on traffic citations, resulting in the reduction of hundreds of thousands of dollars in court-ordered debt. Continuing to screen clients, our attorneys litigated around a dozen employment rights cases annually.
With grant funding, we tracked the success rate of the women of A New Way of Life, noting improvement year after year. In 2015, we saw a mere 4 percent recidivism rate, which meant that 96 percent of the women of A New Way of Life stayed out of prison. Couple this with the fact that our services were provided for less than half the cost of incarceration.
In addition to the recidivism stats, I looked to other benchmarks that, to me, more broadly defined successful re-entry: maintenance of sobriety, securing safe and stable housing, compliance with probation or parole, accessing physical and mental health services, gaining employment, or enrolling in school. On average, eight out of every ten of our women met these annual benchmarks. Surrounding me was a growing community of women who were getting their lives together and staying healthy and productive.
In the office, a call came through from a counselor in the women’s prison. Usually, when a counselor called me, it was regarding a hard-to-place woman, someone with severe medical or mental health issues.
“We have a sixty-five-year-old woman who wants to come to your home,” the counselor began. I waited for a list of issues, but instead she said, “She’s sitting here with me. Would you like to talk with her?”
I could hear the phone being shuffled to someone else.
“Sue?” a voice said. It was instantly familiar. My mind darted to the only other bit of information I had: a sixty-five-year-old woman. I knew for certain—we were the same age—that it was Beverly. It had been nearly a decade since we’d last talked, and I’d long ago stopped looking to her kids for updates, a prickly topic.
“Sue,” Beverly said. “I’m tired. And I need help.” I could hear tears in her voice.
To call me, of all people? I thought of the humility it must have taken for her to make this call, and I got choked up too. All our houses were completely full, but I said, “Beverly, I’ll have a bed for you. But . . . are you sure? We have rules.”
“I’m sure,” she said. “I don’t want to come back here.”
I sat for a while after we hung up, staring into the distance. I thought of the people Beverly and I had been, together, and then how we diverged. I thought of our hopefulness as we founded A New Way of Life, and our disappointment and resentment when things fractured. But Beverly was family. Especially now that we no longer had Melvin. Despite our struggles, I felt an immense sadness for her. While I was beginning to set my sights on retirement, she would be starting over to create a life. I knew that to put aside her hurt feelings toward me and, more so, to put aside her pride, meant she fully respected that the community of A New Way of Life was her very best shot. And Beverly, like Melvin, always did like the best.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought she and I would come round this circle—never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I’d come round so many circles.
I smiled to myself, and then got to work to make sure Beverly had a bed waiting for her.