CHAPTER 6
MARLENA AND JAMES
June 2013
In 2013, I became the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. Ella Baker (1903–1986) was a hero from the civil rights movement who fought to end racial segregation in the United States. She helped organize young people to fight against “whites only” facilities that were prevalent throughout the South. She fought to realize black people’s right to vote and for the ability of their children to attend desegregated schools.
The Ella Baker Center has been around since 1996. For most of our history, we fought the worst “dumb-on-crime” ideas, which at the time were described as “tough-on-crime” ideas. We held up signs that said “books not bars” and “jobs not jails,” but admittedly, most of our limited resources were spent on fighting against prisons, rather than building out the alternatives. We were mostly focused on the “not jails” and “not bars” part, because that was the best we could do. Today, the Ella Baker Center works to move resources away from the nation’s prison system and toward investment in education, employment, and healthcare. We’re focusing on shifting resources from punishment approaches to public-health responses to what are largely public-health issues.
It was shortly after taking the helm of the Ella Baker Center that I heard Marlena Henderson and her family’s story, which, perhaps better than any other, illustrates the urgency of focusing on health and healing.
In 2013, Marlena’s worst nightmare came true. One beautiful day in June, she walked into her Santa Cruz house to find her home phone ringing off the hook. She had been at a yoga retreat and was feeling relaxed and renewed. That lasted until she picked up the phone. It was her aunt calling. Marlena knew just from her aunt’s tone of voice what had happened, she didn’t even need to hear the words: “Get your kids and get out of your house. You are not safe. There’s been a terrible tragedy. Go now.” Marlena called out to her two young sons and rushed them into the car.
It was the call that she had always anticipated, and the one she hoped she would never receive. Her parents had been murdered. And they had been murdered by their own son, Marlena’s brother James.
Marlena and James grew up in East San Jose, in one of the most diverse sections of the city. Their father was African American, from the poorest of the poor part of Mobile, Alabama. Their mother was white, born in San Luis Obispo, California. The couple met in California: Dad worked for the city of San Jose in the engineering department, and Mom worked in tech at IBM, NASA, Sun Microsystems, and other notable Silicon Valley companies. Being a mixed-race couple, they found most of San Jose inaccessible to them as would-be homeowners. Yet it was a good place for Marlena and James, who attended their local public school.
“We had teachers who looked like us and could relate to us,” Marlena told me. “My brother was an extremely intelligent kid, but he could not sit at a desk. He was impulsive. People weren’t being diagnosed with ADHD at that time. My brother was what we called ‘hyper.’ But the Latina and African American teachers in East San Jose were really good with James and were able to hold space for him.”1
James thrived outdoors. He played soccer and baseball. On weekends the family often went camping or hiking, or to the beach. Their neighborhood had a strong sense of community: families took turns caring for each other’s children. James was happy and relatively well adjusted.
Things began to change when they left East San Jose. Following better employment opportunities, the parents moved the family to Aptos, California. There, Marlena and James were usually the only children of color in their classes. James had a difficult time in public school so his parents sent him to a small private school in Santa Cruz, where he received a great deal of attention and guidance. However, that school only went through fifth grade. He was then enrolled at the local public school, which wasn’t such a good fit for him. It was in junior high that James started getting kicked out of school. In addition to being incredibly impulsive, he had started smoking weed. Soon there were repeated suspensions, then expulsions. As a young teenager, he started getting locked up for possession of marijuana (“meaning a joint or two,” specifies Marlena) and petty theft. Eventually, James was taken away from his family and put in the CYA youth prison system.
In that moment, James’s life took a sharp turn downhill. It was as though he were caught in a revolving door between freedom and incarceration. For periods of time, he was living with his family, going to school, working, and enjoying time with his girlfriend, then he would be hit with a petty theft or marijuana possession charge, and he was right back in the system. He was no longer able to hold jobs or maintain consistent relationships. Spending so much time on the inside made it difficult for him to retain friendships. Marlena imagines that the stigma associated with incarceration also caused James a lot of shame, and possibly contributed to his insecurity and inability to develop appropriate social skills.
“Prisons are by definition confined spaces and therefore were not a good place for James,” says Marlena. She believes that being there worsened his mental health condition. She is pretty sure that he was beaten up. Perhaps even raped. “I can only imagine that what was done to him inside the youth prisons made matters much worse,” Marlena tells me. “Every time he came home from a facility, he was a little bit worse—more impulsive, more anxious, less connected, less social, more angry.” Marlena found herself bracing for his return and the stress on the family that came with it. The experience of being the primary support for formerly incarcerated loved ones after their release is shared by two-thirds of families, who must fill the gaps left by diminishing resources for reentry services.2
As James evolved out of the juvenile system and into the adult correctional system, the family spent many weekends and holidays making the long multi-hour road trips to his prison. Marlena describes:
The routine became familiar. Awake before sunrise. Make the long drive in silent trepidation. Arrive several hours before visiting hours actually begin in case there were delays. There were always delays. Long delays. Bring several changes of clothes, in case the guards would not let you in wearing that color, that style, that fit, that particular zipper or button that they believed could be converted into a weapon, or whatever else may have been banned on that particular day. It seemed random.
Marlena recalls mothers and grandmothers at the facilities crying because they had driven over five hours one way and were told (for one reason or another) that they could not visit their loved one that day. She recalls a sign on the window of one California prison that read, “No visiting Mexicans today. All Mexicans on lockdown.” Sometimes James was behind glass and they took turns talking to him on the phone. If they were lucky, they could talk to him in the visiting room and buy popcorn from the vending machines. They spent many Christmases in prisons, eating popcorn from the machine, talking to James with armed guards standing by, making sure they didn’t kiss or embrace him.
Later, James was sentenced to several years at California’s first super-max prison, Pelican Bay State Prison, which has been ranked as one of the worst prisons in America. No phone calls are allowed, and on the rare occasion a visitor is permitted, there can be no physical contact.3 Pelican Bay’s solitary unit, or security housing unit (SHU) as they call it, is particularly notorious. “More than 500 Pelican Bay prisoners have lived in the SHU in excess of a decade, nearly 80 have been there for more than two decades, and one prisoner recently marked his 40th year in solitary,” reported Mother Jones magazine in 2013.4
James spent nearly a decade moving between solitary confinement and mental health wards. None of that helped to rehabilitate him, or gave him any skills that could help him to live successfully on the outside. He was constantly sentenced and released. Each time he deteriorated a little more. “Prior to Pelican Bay, even though he had all of these issues, he was often able to demonstrate himself as a loving, concerned, compassionate person. But after that it was as though his mind had permanently changed,” Marlena says. When I hear this, I am reminded of Bessel van der Kolk’s words: “[The behaviors of traumatized people] are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain.”5
“From that point, things took a nosedive. He became unpredictable, unable to care for himself, unable to live by himself or with anybody else because of his extreme behaviors. My parents tried many times to let him live with them, but he would destroy their house by smashing things, breaking things, burning things, stealing things, and using various drugs.” The more unpredictable he became, the more Marlena began to fear for her own safety and the safety of her children when he was around. Eventually, one day, he killed their parents’ cat.
After the incident with the cat, the parents checked James into a locked mental health facility, but he managed to escape, and they were never able to get him to go back. His violent behaviors and threats escalated. He began threatening to kill their parents and acting out in other extremely disturbing ways. That’s when Marlena first called the local sheriff’s office to get help. She had watched and witnessed his behaviors most of his life, she knew the patterns, she feared what would come next. She knew he would eventually try to kill one or all of them. The threats were real and the patterns were clear.
Yet she was told, “There is nothing we can do unless he commits a crime.”
James went on to murder his seventy-one-year-old father and his sixty-eight-year-old mother.
By the time the first responders arrived, Marlena’s parents were both dead. James was apprehended hiding in a neighbor’s yard. At that point, law enforcement got involved. But of course, at that point, it was way too late.
When Marlena and I meet so she can tell me the whole story, almost five years have passed since the murders. “This is the first time I’ve gotten through the story without crying,” she says.
One part of the story ended with the murders of their parents, but Marlena’s trauma has continued.
When I spoke with Marlena in 2018, her brother’s fate had yet to be determined. “It’s been almost five years and I’m just starting to figure out how the process works, because the stories change, the dates change, attorneys change, the judges change, everything changes all the time and these cases just kind of get lost,” she tells me. “They keep delaying. There are really only two options, because of the amount of evidence. There’s the option that he is found insane and goes to a mental institution, or there’s the option that he is found guilty without insanity and goes to prison. There’s no other option, so I don’t understand why it’s taking so long.”
As a single mom, Marlena had relied heavily on her parents to help her raise her boys. Forced to constantly reschedule work and childcare for court dates, she is now on her own with all of it. Until the trial, and potentially even after, Marlena has to cope with uncertainty and fears for her safety and the safety of her sons. She ends her story with the sobering conclusion she has come to: “Initially I thought it would be better for James to be found insane. I had thought that would be better because conditions in prisons are horrendous—no place for a human being. I thought going into a mental asylum would be better conditions. However, from what I understand—I’m still a little fuzzy—if James is found insane, he could potentially get out. Because I know him so well and know how his mind works, I am convinced that if he got out, my life and my children’s lives would be in danger. I know he would come after us because we’re the next closest people and that’s just how his mind and his life is at this point.”
I don’t agree with the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole, but it’s hard to argue with her on this. I think about how I would feel if one of my siblings murdered my parents. I would have a difficult time seeing the person I once knew. This points to the fact that even a culture of care will probably still need prisons, but they will be our last resort rather than our first option. When someone commits such deep and ongoing harm that they destroy a relationship beyond repair, then the punishment of prison—isolating them from the community for a time because they have ostracized themselves through the gravity of their violence or cruelty and demonstrated no interest in making it right—may be the only appropriate consequence.
I also know that people who have committed horrific acts can change. I know it because I know of those people. I think of Shaka Senghor, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Phil Melendez, and many others convicted of violent offenses who have done deep work on themselves and who have committed to spending the rest of their lives working to make up for their mistakes. These individuals are doing incredible work healing communities, and they have supported many others in their transformation. Such healing occurs through relationship and engagement, the opposite of isolation.
“The thing that strikes me as most wrong with the justice system is that the deeper in it you go, the more isolated you become. That was true for my brother. He never got the support he needed. Children and adolescents make mistakes. That is part of growing up. Yet, when young people make mistakes and become involved in the justice system, it is a set up for failure,” Marlena tells me. “When James first became involved in the system, he was not capable of causing the kind of harm that has led me to fear for my life today. Now, he is capable. The costs of that failure are too high for families like mine. And we are not the only ones. I talk to so many families whose story are like mine. We have to do better. No one should have to go through what I did.”
What interventions could have saved the lives of Marlena’s parents—and James’s life, given that he will likely now die in prison? The first opportunity to rewrite the story came at school, as it did for Durrell Feaster. While James’s impulsive or unfocused behavior in East San Jose was met with workaround solutions that allowed him to stay in the classroom, in Aptos his teachers more often responded by sending him to the principal’s office or suspending him.
The difference between those two school experiences reflects a conundrum that parents of color find themselves often facing: Do we choose a school that is more culturally diverse where teachers may (sometimes, though certainly not always) relate to our children and treat them with tolerance, or do we choose a school that may be higher performing (because it is wealthier and whiter) but has less tolerance for real and perceived misbehavior?
Educator Christopher Emdin has written about how teachers who come from the same neighborhoods and backgrounds as their students are more likely to succeed at teaching.6 He also believes that teachers who come from elsewhere can have more success if they actively learn about and become familiar with their students’ communities: “If you want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education, you’ve got to leave the confines of that university and go into the hood. You’ve got to go in there and hang out at the barbershop, you’ve got to attend that black church, and you’ve got to view those folks that have the power to engage and just take notes on what they do. At our teacher education classes at my university, I’ve started a project where every single student that comes in there sits and watches rap concerts,” Emdin says in his October 2013 TED talk.7
As with Durrell, it’s not hard to imagine a school environment for James that would have served him better. A social and emotional learning program (SEL) would almost certainly have helped. As part of a “whole child education” philosophy, SEL programs train students in how to be self-aware and aware of others, how to set and achieve positive goals and make responsible decisions, and how to exhibit empathy and compassion for others in order to navigate relationships more successfully. Schools that adopt SEL see a drop in suspensions and expulsions, while students who receive SEL show “improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behavior, and academic performance that reflected an 11-percentile-point gain in achievement.”8 A 2015 cost-benefit evaluation of SEL programs found that benefits outweigh the costs by a factor of eleven to one.9 This is consistent with research demonstrating the enormous impact of healthy relationships on children and youth.
If James had attended a school with SEL, he might have been engaged in the process of designing discipline procedures at his school rather than just being a victim of them.10 He might have been engaged in developing a new outdoor program for kids with ADHD. Perhaps this would have not just kept him in school, but helped other students as well.
At the Catholic high school I attended, I remember getting to do a ropes course, a series of physical challenges out in nature. I remember climbing the “giant’s ladder” with a classmate and jumping out to catch a trapeze that was suspended forty feet above the ground. It’s an example of ways adults provide environments for youth to positively challenge boundaries and rules, and their sense of what’s possible. Making those kinds of experiences available is critical. Every student does better when those who struggle do well.
As with Durrell Feaster, a high school environment that was less prone to suspension and expulsion for minor infractions would have kept James out of the downward spiral into the juvenile and then adult criminal legal system. “When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development,” writes civil rights leader Angela Davis, “they are attending prep schools for prisons.”11 That’s how it was for James.
Marlena says that James’s mental illness was dramatically exacerbated by his repeated encounters with police. As it stands now, members of law enforcement are the default response in instances of mental health crises. In the event of an emergency, but also in the event of many non-emergencies, police are called to the scene. They are the “first responders.” Yet police officers are only rarely trained to deal with people experiencing a mental health crisis. They have a set of tools available to them that are largely based on force, yet they are called upon to respond to situations that require other tactics and other skills. Many police officers themselves will be the first to admit that they can’t arrest their way to community safety.
Most importantly, we need to broaden our understanding of, and budgets for, first responders—professionals with training in conflict resolution and in managing situations caused by mental illness and substance abuse. Specially trained first responders should be the first point of contact in myriad situations that police now struggle to handle appropriately. We need to transition from law enforcement responses to a more suitable public health response when circumstances arise from mental health conditions, thereby avoiding unnecessary arrests and detentions, and even fatal shootings. Community members and elected officials need to recognize the importance and benefits of creating these programs and be willing to divert funding or raise new revenues to support this vital work. City budgets should be geared toward advancing a public health approach to community safety.
People with mental illness are four and a half times more likely to be arrested than others, and are sixteen times more likely to be killed by police.12 Because police are not equipped to respond to these crises, situations involving people with disabilities and mental illness can prove deadly. Joint partnerships involving mental health and advocacy agencies can respond much more effectively to crises than police alone. Crisis intervention team (CIT) protocols involve mental health providers and other medical professionals, who can provide immediate referral services and treatment alternatives to avoid arrest, incarceration, or involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Compared to situations in which police alone were involved, responses involving CITs have higher rates of resolution, of making referrals to mental health treatment and immediately transporting the person to a health facility that can deal with a crisis, reducing incarceration. The CIT protocol is also associated with a reduced risk of injury from interactions with police.13 Marlena believes that had a crisis intervention team been dispatched on the day of her parents’ murders, it would have prevented their deaths.
Across America, suffering is increasing, amplified by the anxieties of job losses, insecure housing, and unaffordable healthcare. One in five adults in the US, almost 47 million people, experience some form of mental illness, while one in twenty-five, over eleven million adults, live their lives with a serious mental illness.14 Approximately 10.2 million adults live with both mental illness and addiction.15 Many people go untreated, while many others are treated with the big-pharma approach: medication. Yet many mental illnesses are linked to past trauma, where people’s bodily integrity was violated and they were made to feel unsafe. While medications can play a role as a stabilizing force in moments of crisis, this form of treatment doesn’t address rebuilding a sense of safety through self-awareness and positive relationships.
For the most severe of mental illnesses we have a serious shortage of care dating back to the 1960s, when many state-funded psychiatric facilities closed with the intention of providing treatment in more humane, less restrictive settings. But the community-based health centers and care facilities that were to take the place of those institutions never materialized, resulting in a public health crisis. Psychiatric experts recommend a minimum of fifty beds per 100,000 people; in 2010, the national average was closer to fourteen beds per 100,000, and in some places in the country, there were fewer than five.16 Many of the private mental health hospitals still in operation do not accept insurance and can cost upwards of $30,000 per month, while a provision in the Medicare law prevents the use of federal funding for long-term care in an institution. As a result, many of the people who experience serious mental health crises wind up in the emergency room; but most hospitals are unable to keep them for more than seventy-two hours, at which point they’re sent back out into the world. Many individuals who require intensive psychiatric care find themselves homeless or in prison.
“People in mental health crisis can’t be put on a waiting list,” Marlena says. “Their families need immediate support and interventions in order to maintain their safety. There needs to be somewhere to take people immediately so that they can become stabilized medically, emotionally, socially.”
Today, the largest providers of mental health services are jails. According to a study published in 2017, “almost half of [state prison] inmates were diagnosed with a mental illness (48%), of whom, 29% had a serious mental illness (41% of all females and 27% of all males), and 26% had a history of a substance use disorder.”17 Other studies have found that approximately half of people in prison and jail meet DSM-IV criteria for substance abuse or dependence.18 People with mental illnesses are disproportionately placed in solitary confinement in response to behavioral difficulties, but the confinement can cause their mental health to deteriorate further. They’re also at a higher risk for abuse by other people in prison and correctional staff. Despite the need for treatment, only about a third of people in state prison and a sixth of people in jail who need mental health treatment report receiving it while incarcerated. The leading cause of death when exiting incarceration is drug overdose, illustrating the life-threatening risk incarceration poses for those who don’t receive effective treatment while in custody. The environments within jails and prisons make them far more likely to worsen someone’s mental state than improve it.
The reliance upon policing and imprisonment as opposed to medical care for mental illness and drug use endangers lives. We should not be blaming or punishing those with mental illness and substance abuse issues. We should not be burdening police officers with societal problems that we can solve. Instead we must directly address the public health and economic concerns that manifest in the forms of mental illness and substance use disorders. While the current conversation refers to these strategies as “alternatives,” I think a better way to describe them is “imperatives.” It is imperative for our well-being and safety that we move away from the framework of fear responses, to a new status quo: the culture of caring.
James was first arrested for possession of a small amount of marijuana. This is a direct result of the war on drugs, the federal initiative beginning in the 1980s that used “tough-on-crime” rhetoric and mandated long sentences for drug-related offenses, even those involving small amounts or first-time offenders. In 1980, there were just over forty thousand people incarcerated for drug offenses; by 2013, this number had increased to 489,000. The vast majority of drug arrests are for possession, not for selling.19
The decriminalization of drug possession would not just save young people like James from the trauma of youth prison; it would allow for reinvestment of millions of dollars into the development of much-needed drug treatment and harm reduction services. Many countries have decriminalized drug possession and consumption and, in place of these punitive measures, have developed advanced treatment options. With increased provision of treatment, these places have seen decreases in adolescent drug use and a decrease in drug-related deaths. As a result, major public health and human rights groups like the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Red Cross, the NAACP, and the American Civil Liberties Union have called for drug decriminalization as a public health measure.20
In 2014, California voters passed Proposition 47, the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, which presents a model for reinvestment in prevention. After one year of implementation of Prop. 47, which reduced certain nonviolent, nonserious drug and property offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, more than thirteen thousand people had been resentenced and released. The savings of approximately $156 million in incarceration costs from just the first year has begun to be reinvested in drug treatment, mental health services, victim services, and K-12 programs for at-risk students.21
The decriminalization and legalization of marijuana could also be linked to a larger push to fund services and supports for communities hardest hit by mass incarceration. The Center for American Progress has argued that the revenue from the taxation of legalized marijuana should fund public sector jobs for communities of color that have been most harmed by the war on drugs.22
Even with drugs considered more serious than marijuana there is a movement afoot to reconsider framework-of-fear-style drug policies. The scope of the opioid crisis—in 2015, thirty-three thousand drug overdose-related deaths were caused by prescription pain relievers like hydrocodone and oxycodone, as well as heroin and illegally manufactured fentanyl—has overwhelmed law enforcement and led to more care-based public health approaches.23 “The punishment of a disease wasn’t working,” says Leonard Campanello, who, as police chief of the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, invited anyone needing help in overcoming an opiate addiction to come to his police station without fear of arrest and get placed in a detox facility “not in hours or days, but on the spot.”24 This approach has evolved into a nationwide initiative called police-assisted addiction and recovery initiative (PAARI), which almost four hundred police departments have adopted. So far, the places adopting this public health approach tend to be smaller, more homogenous (largely white) communities, where public officials including the police either personally know the people who are addicted, or have connections to them. Yet it illustrates the effectiveness of moving beyond Us vs. Them thinking and criminalization, toward policies of caring and healing.
Most of us have been trained to call the police first. On the terrible day that James killed his parents, Marlena chose not to call 911 and instead called the local sheriff’s department, believing it was the best way to help her family given the department’s familiarity with her brother. This was a choice she later regretted, not only because it failed to send any responders at all, let alone the crisis intervention team Marlena believes could have stopped the murders, but also because a call to 911 would have been recorded, which would have created more accountability. But there is room for improvement with 911, our default emergency response and dispatch system.
At nearly six thousand call centers around the country, more than a hundred thousand workers receive over 240 million 911 calls each year. The call taker assigns the emergency a priority level from one to nine and decides whether to relay the information to police, fire, or medical responders. In her investigation into racial bias in 911 call centers, author and activist Rinku Sen noted that at “most call centers throughout the U.S., both call takers and dispatchers are predominantly White.”25 According to Sen, “There is no universal regulation of 911 dispatch. Each center creates its own policies in conjunction with associated emergency departments, subject to state laws. While some statewide 911 dispatch centers exist, most counties have their own.”
More funding, more training, higher wages, and higher standards for call workers could make the difference between tragedies and public safety. For example, in the case of Tamir Rice, the twelve-year-old boy shot to death by police in a public park in Cleveland, the officers had responded to a 911 call from someone else in the park. The caller told the dispatcher that the pellet gun Rice was playing with was probably fake and that he looked like a child, not an adult, but the dispatcher failed to pass this information along to the police. The dispatcher was suspended without pay for eight days as a result.26 With more funding and more training, call takers could also talk people through life-saving procedures, from administering CPR to delivering babies, which could save lives before any first responders arrive.
We all need to be retrained to think differently about 911. Alternate assistance lines like 211 and 311 have been created, but are underfunded and undersold. The 211 number provides callers with information about social services for everyday needs but also in times of crisis. It can help with basic human needs by helping people obtain assistance with shelter, clothing, and utilities; by providing disaster response information and job training and employment services; and by helping people find support for elders and children and identify health and mental health resources.27 Although the 211 service is available in all fifty states, in 2017 it received fifteen million requests (compared to the 240 million per year to 911).28 The number 311 is dedicated to reporting such problems as abandoned vehicles or debris blocking the road, stolen vehicles, code and housing violations, nonworking streetlights or traffic lights, and noise complaints. There are also ways to divert calls away from the police even when someone does call 911. In Eugene, Oregon, a program called Cahoots has a mobile crisis intervention team that provides immediate stabilization in cases of urgent medical need and psychological crisis. The team “is wired into the 911 system” and is thus able to respond to most calls without police.29
We need public education campaigns and resources to support dispatch lines to divert calls to the appropriate services and experts. Everyone benefits—people in need of support are more likely to have someone to call and bystanders are less likely to fear their call will end with an inappropriate and potentially deadly response, while police have their calls narrowed to those that best suit their skill set.
Even if James had still wound up in prison as he did, things did not have to end the way they did for the family.
The experience of leaving prison has been compared to the experience of returning home from war. Even the very first night one is released can be difficult if not disastrous, as the harrowing story of Jessica St. Louis illustrates. She had spent just over ten days at Santa Rita County Jail in Dublin, California. It’s not at all unusual for people to be released, as she was, in the dead of night, with little more to their name than a bus ticket. She was released at 1:30 a.m., but the subway didn’t start running until 5 a.m., so Jessica bought drugs. She died of a drug overdose on the train platform. Santa Rita jail officials have consistently refused to provide Narcan (a brand of naloxone, an opiate overdose medication) to at-risk people whose drug use contributed to their being jailed in the first place. In fact, a new harm reduction initiative aimed at reducing fatalities from opiate overdoses is providing naloxone kits to everyone being released from prison, understanding that they are uniquely situated to encounter and avert overdoses.30
People who have been incarcerated have real challenges even finding places to sleep: in a survey conducted by my organization and others, 79 percent were denied housing based on a conviction history.31 Finding employment is also extremely difficult: our survey revealed that three out of four people found finding employment after release difficult or nearly impossible. This was corroborated by numerous studies, including one published as “Rethinking Corrections: Rehabilitation, Reentry and Reintegration,” which found that 60 percent of formerly incarcerated people were still unemployed a year after release and 67 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals were still unemployed or underemployed five years after release.32
Upon his release, James could have been enrolled in Santa Cruz County’s Maintaining Ongoing Stability Through Treatment (MOST) program, a nationally recognized program that provides support with housing, jobs training, and psychotherapy for people with mental health needs who have been involved in the criminal justice system. Mental health counselors, psychologists, probation officers, psychiatrists, and correctional officers make up an individual’s MOST team. They also provide support around specific issues related to the justice system like probation and court discharge planning. The goal is to involve the person in the community, and thereby reduce homelessness, time in jail or psychiatric facilities, probation violations, and new offenses. Unfortunately, although this excellent program is considered among “best practices” related to incarceration, a critical shortcoming of such programs is scale. Lack of funding means they are available for the lucky few rather than the broad masses.
So James was released without the supports that could have ultimately prevented the deaths of his parents, a lifetime of re-incarceration for him, and sadness and anxiety for his sister Marlena.
People who break the law need to be held accountable, yet part of being held truly accountable means having an opportunity to make amends and contribute. We have an obligation to make matters better whenever we can. This obligation is also to the people that incarcerated folks might harm upon release. Hurt people hurt people. But also true is that healed people heal people. If we are invested in a safer and more prosperous society, we need to take a hard look at where families face lose-lose scenarios and instead ensure that people have real choices and the support they need.
For Marlena’s life after the death of her parents, what supports could a culture of care offer her that the current framework is failing to provide? Marlena has had to cope not just with the loss of her parents as team members in her parenting, but also with the lost days of work due to court dates. The kind of parental supports that would have helped Allen as a single father—universal, guaranteed, and unconditional monthly child allowance payments—would also help Marlena, who now struggles as a single mother who relied intensely on her parents to help raise her two sons. Additionally, a network of government-subsidized, good quality childcare facilities as proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren would have helped Marlena with the care of her younger son when he was still too young to attend school. Warren’s plan aims to improve wages for the workers of those child care centers while simultaneously allowing lower income families to afford them by having the government bear the costs.33
A culture of care also needs to provide support to victims after a crime. Trauma can arise not only from the violent act but also from interactions with law enforcement or the court process, as is the case for Marlena. If the trauma of victimization goes untreated, it can create a host of problems down the line, including substance abuse, mental illness, and homelessness. Traumatic experiences can affect an individual’s ability to function effectively at work and to retain a job; as well as cause sleep disturbances, panic attacks, difficulty concentrating, and stress-related health problems.
During an adversarial court process, the survivor of the crime is used as a key chess piece in getting the wrongdoer convicted, but is generally abandoned as soon as the verdict is in. Helping survivors recover after the trial is not the focus of the criminal legal system or the overarching framework of fear. People who have witnessed and experienced violence and serious harm need grief counseling, trauma therapy, and support navigating the courts and the justice system, at a minimum. They might require shelter, legal services, time off from work, childcare, access to financial assistance or assistance getting victim’s compensation.
The peace activist Aqeela Sherrills, who famously brokered a peace between rival gangs in the early 1990s in Los Angeles, comments: “When someone gets shot in our neighborhoods we deploy law enforcement in force but we don’t deploy healers, therapists and counselors in force to help folks deal with the after effects of violence in our communities.”34
According to a national survey of victims in 2016 by the Alliance for Safety and Justice, two out of three victims did not receive help following the incident. 35 Those who did often received the help from family, as opposed to any formal services. Danielle Sered and her organization Common Justice have drawn attention to the unmet needs of a particular group of survivors of violence: young men of color. Her 2014 report, Young Men of Color and the Other Side of Harm: Addressing Disparities in Our Response to Violence, identifies significant barriers that prevent young men of color from accessing victim services. These include social norms that make it less likely that young men will identify themselves as “victims” or be seen as such in our culture, as well as distrust of the justice system based on prior negative experiences with the criminal justice system. Sered concludes:
Addressing these disparities also requires recasting a persistent and pervasive narrative that over-represents young men of color as aggressors or criminals. This narrative, which is often amplified by the media, includes the misperception that violence and pain somehow impact young men of color less profoundly than other victims, a distortion that may limit our ability to accurately recognize symptoms of trauma (such as being overly reactive to perceived threats) as natural human responses to pain and fear rather than signs of character flaws or moral failure. Transforming this narrative matters, not only because young men of color internalize its negative messages, but because it can also powerfully shape how others see and treat them—with serious implications for social services, the criminal justice system, and the development of an equitable society more broadly.36
In Marlena’s case, the trauma could extend to Marlena’s sons even though she did her utmost to shield them from the media coverage of the murders. The whole family would benefit from supports for survivors of crimes that do not rely on law enforcement or adversarial court processes as the primary strategy. These supports need to be accessible to everyone—culturally as well as geographically.
Marlena’s story is still unfolding as this book goes to print. She hopes that sharing the details of her family’s story will help change the system to work better for others. I hope so too.
Here is a summary of my recommendations:
• We need to hire and train more teachers and administrators who look like students and can relate to their experiences, whether that means educators of color or educators who represent particular backgrounds and abilities—ideally people who live in the same neighborhoods as their students.
• Schools should implement SEL programs to set students up to succeed at relationships and collaboration. We also need to offer more physical education and outdoor learning opportunities, the better to engage students like James, who have a hard time sitting at a desk for extended periods. These programs pay for themselves in better outcomes for students.
• We need robust first responders who are trained and paid to handle incidents involving mental illness, substance abuse, and other issues not suited to a police response. This goes along with funding and promotion of emergency lines like 211 and 311, as well as alternative dispatch systems within 911 call centers.
• We need to continue the work of decriminalizing drug possession, instead reinvesting “war on drugs” resources into the social contract, and adopting a public health approach to substance abuse issues. This includes offering sophisticated treatment options for substance abuse nationwide, in big cities as in small towns.
• Clearly we need more resources and programs for mental health care, both in emergency and in everyday situations. People with mental health issues deserve help, not containment; we need beds in facilities equipped to give them the proper care.
• Reentry programs that provide support with housing and jobs training for all who are released from incarceration, and psychotherapy for those with mental health needs, are essential to reducing recidivism and helping people become productive and healthy members of their communities. Reentry programs should also support families as they help their loved ones return home and reintegrate.
• For survivors of all kinds of trauma, we must create a culture of care and provide access to mental, emotional, logistical, and financial supports beyond what is offered by the court system.
• In addition to a universal guaranteed allowance paid per child by the government, we should implement a government-subsidized network of childcare facilities that pay their workers well and offer good quality childcare while still being accessible to all families.