"From what I hear from the other inmates, they see her as a role model," says Bruce Thron-Weber, a facilitator with the nonprofit New Foundations, which oversees many of the AVP offerings within the state prison system. "They see the way she carries herself, the way she resolves conflict, and that encourages others to take the workshop."
Prisoners serving long sentences often don't qualify for or don't bother with some of the classes and training programs offered within the Department of Corrections. Pakenham says Perry "took everything that was offered and excelled in everything." She worked with at-risk youth who visited the prison. She spent years in the popular K-9 program; some day she hopes to be a professional trainer of service dogs for war veterans. She also pursued a college degree — no small feat from behind bars, since funding for higher education for inmates is almost nonexistent, and the few programs that are offered require prisoners to pay for the courses themselves or find a sponsor.
Brian Stauffer
During her sophomore year of high school, Perry kept secret her relationship with convict Randy Miller — who had dark secrets of his own.
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Perry had no funds for the classes. "I believe in the law of attraction," she says. "Everything we put out comes back to us. I kept putting out this intention, 'Please don't let me go to the parole board after fifteen years and not have a college education.'"
Westy Bush, who's taught art classes in Colorado prisons for thirty years, remembers hearing about a young woman who was bright and motivated but had exhausted the system's usual educational opportunities. She persuaded other members of her church, the Flame of Life Universalist Church in Pueblo, to make contributions.
"We are a tiny church," she explains. "It just happens that our group really cares about helping people contribute to society. I could see changes in prisoners when they took college classes. But Tara's sentence was so long that she wasn't eligible for any assistance."
Perry finally met Bush at the ceremony when she received her associates' degree in 2009. She's now working on her bachelor's, majoring in business administration, with the ongoing support of Bush's church. Jim Bullington, who oversaw a now-defunct program offering college courses for prisoners through Adams State College, says Perry was one of the program's standouts.
"It was very rare that someone received an AA degree — maybe less than twenty out of hundreds," he says. "But there was a group of women at the facility in Cañon City who were unbelievable, and she set the bar high for others."
Pakenham watched Perry transform herself over a period of nine years, up until that prison closed. "She was very well liked, for the most part," she says. "I'm sure there were some inmates who didn't like her, especially as she tried to become a different person. She would find a way to circumvent some of the convict codes to get help, if someone was cutting on themselves or needed to be watched. She's done everything she possibly could to show she would not be a threat to society and would be an asset to the community."
After ten years inside, Perry applied for a commutation of her sentence from the juvenile clemency board, created under then-governor Bill Ritter to consider cases of adult inmates serving time for crimes committed as juveniles. Her application included glowing letters of support from prison volunteers and staff, a nearly spotless disciplinary record, an outside network eager to aid her in finding suitable employment — her mother stopped drinking six months after Perry went to prison, and their relationship is now stronger than ever — and her own eloquent, carefully typed appeal.
"I never take what happened lightly," she wrote. "The guilt I carry in my heart every day will be a huge part of my life forever.... I have come to the understanding that I committed more than just a criminal act. I supported the criminal behavior of the others involved by going along with them instead of resisting and standing up for what was right.
"I have learned that absolute freedom is not in where I physically reside but in becoming free from emotional and mental suffering. I have strengths that I did not have prior to and leading up to my incarceration."
She described her "powerful" reconciliation with the family in Wyoming and expressed the hope that one day she would be permitted to meet with victims of the Colorado robberies, too: "I would never want to re-injure them, but rather to give to them the remorse that is in my heart."
Perry was considered a strong candidate for clemency. But after months of waiting, she discovered that her application hadn't been approved or denied. It had simply been withdrawn because of what amounts to a paperwork glitch. Although she'd entered a guilty plea and been sentenced in Wyoming, she'd never been officially processed into their corrections system; there was still a "detainer" on her record from the Cowboy State, and she wouldn't qualify for clemency consideration until it was cleared up.
She was told she could reapply to the board after the paperwork is addressed. She's also eligible to meet the parole board in 2014. Even though inmates convicted of violent crimes almost never get parole the first time around, she hopes to achieve some form of reconciliation with the other crime victims before the hearing arrives. "Requesting release would not be the same for me if they did not feel comfortable with me going back to the community," she says.
