He was fourteen when he met Charlie Pa and his friends at a party. "They resembled everything I liked about my mom's side of the family," he remembers. "They were older than me, but they treated me like an equal, as a friend. Gave me drugs. Gave me keys to a car and let me drive. It was like I was leading a double life, still trying to maintain this all-star athletic persona. I chose the negative. I just drifted. It was almost like a natural thing to do."
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Josh Beckius in 2000, seven years after the murder of Dayton Leslie James.
Dayton Leslie James
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During his entire time in prison, Beckius fought for his freedom. While still in solitary, he had found a new attorney, Neil Silver, who crafted an appeal to have his plea set aside on the basis of inadequate representation so that he could get a new trial. The court decided against him.
In August 2007, in the wake of an influential Frontline special titled "When Kids Get Life" and stories in the local and national press (including Westword), Governor Bill Ritter established a juvenile clemency board to consider the cases of people sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed in their teens; legislators had already decided to limit such sentences to forty years — a decision that was not retroactive. Beckius put his case before Ritter's board and was turned down. (The board never granted clemency to any inmate.) And last December, Beckius lost his first bid for parole.
But his work with the Therapeutic Community in Sterling had made Beckius eligible for transfer to one of the organization's residential treatment centers. Peer 1 staff members, including director Gaipa, visited him in prison to test his motivation, and late last year the transfer was approved by the Denver Community Corrections Board. Like those in halfway houses and other community facilities, Peer 1 residents remain under the control of the Department of Corrections.
Beckius remembers the day when he was called into the prison office and told of his acceptance at Peer 1 as an emotional roller coaster. "There was a lot of emotion, a lot of relief," he says. But two hours later, someone came to his cell door to inform him there had been a mistake. Two hours after that, he was back in the office and being told that the mistake was a mistake: "They'd found the paperwork, and I was accepted," he remembers. "November 3, they told me to pack up my stuff and take it to Property. It kind of made me sick to my stomach. Almost like, this isn't real. Something bad's gonna happen, there's gonna be another mistake. But the next morning I got on the big bus, the gates opened up, and I looked back and realized that's been a part of my life for almost sixteen years, and today's a new day. It was a two-hour bus ride, and I couldn't even begin to tell you how that felt. I thought about the endless possibilities. I just kept thinking to myself, I have the chance. I've been given an opportunity to have my life back, and that was the most...I don't know how to put it into words. While you're inside, all you think about is, 'I wish I was out. I wish I was working, I wish I could be with my family. I wish I could look up at the mountains.' Simple things — hear a river, hear the birds chirp, walk down the street in the middle of the night. Just walk out wherever you're at and realize you're not surrounded by prison bars and razor wire and metal and concrete, guards. You don't have to look over your shoulder and worry about...anything."
He was amazed by the atmosphere at Peer 1, delighted in the verdant grounds and Victorian buildings. But just being on the outside can be tricky. At first, Beckius says, "you want to be able to be observant of everything around you, sit with your back against a wall, make sure people are in sight or in your peripheral vision. To have been lonely, depressed, kept from any kind of human contact and then get thrown in with a bunch of people, it's almost like a culture shock."
Going home from work one night, he realized that the new school semester had started at the Auraria campus, and the light-rail train was packed with "people sitting and standing on top of each other," he recalls. "I didn't get the feeling of claustrophobia in solitary like I did those first times on the light rail. Now it doesn't bother me, though."
The concept of Therapeutic Community is national and has been around for forty years; Peer 1 is one of several facilities both inside and outside prisons connected with the Colorado Department of Corrections. TC places a strong emphasis on both self-help and peer influence. The treatment is confrontational and very intensive, and the entire group can be punished if one resident breaks the rules: punishments include writing a paper and reading it to the group, being given a curfew, standing or sitting for a period of time alone, or missing a scheduled camping trip, Rockies game or trip to the Buell Theater for a musical. "There are consequences if you fall asleep in group or leave a coffee cup on the table," director Gaipa says. "The location where you lived before was probably filthy. Here you clean up after yourself. We check how you walk. How you look at someone else. We check for jailhouse behavior, intimidation. It's like living in a fish bowl, with eyes and ears on you all the time.
