Audio By Carbonatix
part 1 of 2
Are tattoos a problem? Maybe not for Drew Barrymore or some teenage goof scooping frozen yogurt down at the mall. But they haven’t spent nine and a half years in the joint, in a sea of tattoos, like Roy has.
“It’s hard not to feel funny around people on the street,” says Roy, a burly, bearded ex-burglar. “You come out tatted down–that’s a whole stigma in itself. People think you been in prison, they better bolt down everything they got.”
His friend Steve nods in agreement. Both men asked that their last names not be used, because they don’t want to queer things with future employers.
“I challenge you,” Steve says. “In fact, I would challenge anybody–“
He slaps a piece of paper on the table.
“Here’s a hundred bucks,” he says. “Go make a life for yourself. No, don’t call your friend. No, no, no, you don’t get to go home. You’re out on the street with the shirt on your back and a hundred-dollar bill, and that’s all you get. You go find an apartment, get a job, feed yourself. Go ahead.”
Steve slumps back in his chair and takes a long, satisfied drag on his cigarette. He has a lean, sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked look, as if something has been burned out of him. He could be in his early forties, but he carries about a decade more wear than that.
“It’s a lot harder than most people realize,” he says, “getting out of prison. But I’m not going back. I’ve lost all my, what would you call them, delusions of grandeur.”
Steve can’t afford any more delusions, grand or otherwise. After six years inside on felony theft charges, he is, for the moment, making it. So is Roy. A few months into their paroles, they both have good jobs, a steady income and decent lodgings in a sprawling, three-story Victorian house in the heart of Capitol Hill. Their roommates are ex-junkies, rapists, thieves and all-purpose con men. All of them have gone from the Big House to Dismas House, with one humble goal in mind–never to go back.
Named for the repentant thief crucified with Christ, Dismas House is a last-chance boardinghouse for the kind of ex-con nobody wants: high-risk parolees and career felons who’ve reached their discharge date. Some have been in the system so long that even their families, if they’re still around, consider them institutionalized.
Unlike halfway houses, Dismas receives no money from the state Department of Corrections (DOC) and has, at best, an arm’s-length relationship with parole officers. Instead, the nonprofit program relies on a small staff, private and corporate donors, volunteers and the unfashionable notion that all a reformed ex-con needs is a break–in the form of cheap housing, a few basic ground rules and enough time (three to six months, typically) to get back on his feet, financially and mentally.
“To try to correct bad personal behavior in ninety days is impossible,” says Bob Sylvester, the president of Dismas House and an ex-con himself. “We can’t do that. All we can do is give them a supportive community. This is the real world–you pay rent, you do chores and you stay clean.”
It may sound simple, but the odds against any parolee making it on the street are formidable. About half of all ex-cons return to prison within three years. Older cons, particularly those who have already served long sentences–Dismas accepts only men who’ve been incarcerated for five or more years–fare much worse. If drugs are involved, as they frequently are, the odds skyrocket; most drug-abusing inmates never complete their drug treatment programs, and nine out of ten of the untreated wind up back in the penitentiary.
Colorado’s response to escalating crime has been to get tough, then tougher. Life sentences for habitual criminals. More prisons. Boot camps. Intensive supervision parole–known as ISP–with strict curfews, ankle monitoring devices and frequent drug testing. More “deferred” parole decisions for violent offenders.
The result has been a corrections logjam. The inmate population is soaring so rapidly that the DOC, after a frenzy of prison construction, is once again shipping prisoners out of state. According to one Texas study, ISP simply produces more technical parole violations; studies in other states suggest boot camp is no antidote, either. Meanwhile, the recidivism rate continues to hover between 40 and 60 percent, depending on whose figures you believe.
The Dismas concept, which originated in Kentucky in the Seventies and has since spread to several states, flies in the face of the lock-’em-up-and-to-hell-with-’em mentality. Ex-cons room with college students and share meals with volunteers who help them find jobs, open savings accounts and prepare to move out on their own. Although the high-risk clientele suggests Dismas should have a horrendous failure rate, the program’s overall recidivism is less than 25 percent–half the national average.
Denver’s Dismas House, the only one in the state, opened in the spring of 1993. Although it recently won the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless “program of the year” award, Sylvester says it’s too early to talk about a success rate, since Dismas must track its graduates for three years to see if they stay out of trouble.
But the preliminary numbers are encouraging: Excluding current residents, out of 44 ex-cons who’ve been admitted to the house in the past sixteen months, 31 have completed the program, while 13 are now back in the system for parole violations (not new crimes, technically)–including three absconders who skipped on their first day of parole.
“We’ve taken a chance on a couple of guys,” Sylvester says. “We’ve even taken guys back a second time because they left in good standing. They got regressed [to prison], but it wasn’t because of anything they did while they were in the house.”
Dismas will never make it into the Michelin guide. The house is only partially renovated and the landscaping has all the weedy appeal of a frat zoo. The program is now on its third director and has managed to recruit only two college students, although more are expected this fall.
Some residents have pulled knives on roommates or been bounced for coming home drunk. Several are on ISP and have to report for urinalysis tests on a weekly basis. House meetings tend to devolve into bitch sessions about who’s not doing the dishes or who’s snoring too loudly and whether the locks should be changed to keep out some ingrate who’s been expelled. Staff members have been known to stomp out in frustration.
Still, as any one of the current Dismas crowd will tell you, it beats the last place they stayed. For most of them, it’s their only hope.
“This place is an answered prayer,” says Andrew Gutierrez, who came to Dismas in July after spending 25 of his 46 years in prison for burglary and related offenses. “The parole board thinks I’m comfortable in prison, but I hated every day of it. I’ve seen killings; I’ve been involved in things that normal human beings should never know about.”
He points to his ISP ankle bracelet. “I can deal with this,” he says. “If not for Dismas, I’d still be sitting up at the pen.”
The Dismas House rules can be counted on one hand. Pay rent–$265 a month, groceries and utilities included. Do your chores. No violence. No sex on the premises. No drug or alcohol use, anywhere, anytime.
When cons try to explain what makes Dismas work, they start by talking about how few rules there are. That’s in sharp contrast to the curfews, mandatory programs and round-the-clock supervision they’ve encountered in for-profit “transition” facilities. Most of the residents have a poor opinion of halfway houses, probably because they’ve flunked out of one in the past. Some even believe halfway houses are “out to do you,” that they’re designed to send you back.
“A guy going into a halfway house after eight years in prison, his chances are very slim,” says Terrance Spaulding, who claims he was regressed from a halfway house for buying a car, despite a counselor’s permission. “He had no rehabilitation in prison to begin with. Now he’s got to adjust, he’s loaded down with UAs [urinalysis] and fees…and he goes, `Whoa, this is bullshit, man, I’d rather be in the penitentiary.’
“They make it so tough on you sometimes that you can’t make it. These guys don’t make it any tougher, you know?”
The rules at Dismas may be few, but there are a thousand ways to screw up. “The first thing everybody wants to do is get drunk and get laid,” notes Joe Rice, the house’s 27-year-old director.
Some cons have no patience with low-paying jobs. Some can’t manage money, blowing their paychecks on cars and TVs acquired on time payments when they should be building a stake.
Drugs are probably the biggest pitfall, but Rice figures it all comes down to the mysteries of character, attitude and one’s sense of personal responsibility. Cons who don’t make it, he says, “have the innate ability to explain why shit is not their fault.”
“It’s an art,” he adds. “I had one guy tell me it was my fault he was using cocaine because I put him with a roommate who was driving him crazy.”
Residents have their own ideas about why some guys succeed and others don’t. They talk about making the mental leap from being a con to being a regular citizen, turning some switch inside yourself. If you’re going to make it, they say, you’d better make that decision long before parole–because once you’re out, things get crazy.
“I told myself three years ago, while I was still incarcerated, hey, I’m 36 years old, it’s time to get on with my life,” says Robert Acebo. “I woke up one morning and said, `This is it. I’m done with this.’ There aren’t any classes that can teach you that.”
A heavy cocaine user, Acebo had bounced in and out of prison and halfway houses for years. He had even gone through a Dismas House in Vermont when he was in his twenties, but the coke was always out there, waiting. “I had everything at one time–a home, boat, cars, motorcycle,” he says. “It all went up the nose.”
This time Acebo sought out every drug treatment program DOC had to offer, and last winter he sailed through his three months at Dismas without incident. He now works at a custom window-framing company and volunteers at Dismas every Monday, cooking the evening meal and trying to help the newcomers budget their time, their cash, their lives.
“I talk to the guys, just to give something back,” he says. “It sounds corny, but I’m a changed person.”
Other stories aren’t so tidy. Andrew Gutierrez was out less than two weeks when he found himself back in the county jail on an outstanding warrant for a 1989 traffic violation. The warrant was a computer glitch–court records show that Gutierrez was sentenced for the violation two years ago–but the judge wouldn’t listen. He sent Gutierrez back to jail for five days, to serve time he’d already done.
Now, when he’s not at his job picking up trash on the 16th Street Mall, Gutierrez is trying to straighten out the fines the judge gave him. After years of heroin and alcohol abuse, his health is not good; he suspects he picked up his case of hepatitis from a dirty needle the last time he fixed. But staying clean and sober isn’t nearly as difficult as getting used to the street.
“Right now I’m having a hard time remembering phone numbers,” he says. “I’m in a daze half the time. I’ve almost been run over three times when crossing the street. I’m not retarded, but in prison you never think about cars.”
Then there’s Spanky, who spent most of the last 21 years behind bars. He’s been at Dismas more than six months now, an indication of just how difficult the transition can be for a graying, potbellied con with no skills and a record that would make almost any employer ring for security. “I put out forty or fifty applications and couldn’t find a job anywhere,” he says. “I even tried telling the truth.”
Spanky earned his nickname during a stretch at the state hospital, where he dealt weed that was tossed to him over the wall; he’d be smoking under the bed in somebody’s room, and other guys would come in, and pretty soon it was like a Cheech and Chong version of Spanky and Our Gang: everybody under the bed, getting stoned.
Like Steve and Roy, Spanky doesn’t want his real name used in this article. At present he’s clearing about $600 a month at a part-time job, two-thirds of which goes to rent and mandatory group-therapy sessions. The job is maintenance work, nothing special, but he figures he wouldn’t have it at all if his employer knew about his 1973 conviction for rape, kidnapping and sexual deviance.
He was facing up to 200 years in prison; his lawyer struck a plea bargain for an indeterminate sentence, one day to life. When Spanky asked him what kind of sweet deal that was supposed to be, the man–his own lawyer, damn it–told him he wanted to make sure Spanky went away for a long time. This still rankles Spanky, who has a long, complex grievance about being improperly sentenced and jacked around for twenty years.
Still, he adds, “I’m the one who committed the crime. I was strung out on speed. But what I did was wrong. I committed a lot more crimes, too. The time I did is like doing zip-to-two compared to what they could have given me if they knew about the others.”
They cut Spanky loose a few years ago, but he soon came back to the cold embrace of the DOC, thanks to a credit-card-fraud conviction. Everything about him–his age, his criminal history, his lack of training–suggests he’s a poor risk. But Dismas took a chance on him, and for that Spanky gushes gratitude. All he needs is a real job, he says. His head, he insists, is finally straight.
“Some people just fool themselves,” he says. “I had to sit down and stare at the wall and remember those cells, those asshole guards, and ask myself, `Do you want to go back? Do you know how easy it would be to go back? And how long they could hold you?’
“I’ve done seventeen and a half years. I’ve got thirteen dollars, for crying out loud. It’s not a real lucrative business. There’s got to be a better way.”
end of part 1
