The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison

by Jason Hardy

The home inspection had two purposes, and even a rookie could see that they were an odd match. Purpose one was to look for contraband: drugs, guns, stolen property. If I found any, I was supposed to confiscate it, write a police report, and charge the offender with a crime. Purpose two was to make surface-level observations about the health, socioeconomic status, and pattern of life of the offender and the home’s other residents and use the data to help the offender turn his life around. In simple terms, purpose one was to put the offender back in jail. Purpose two was to keep him out.

Most people see jail as an investment in public safety. When we think about public safety, we don’t think about the costs. As soon as incarcerated people are released, we tend to reclassify them as receivers of social services. Investing in them stops feeling like investing in a less violent, less addicted America. It feels like a handout for people who probably don’t deserve it. During my four years as a PO, I learned that “deserving” really has nothing to do with it. Probationers and parolees who go without housing, health care, drug treatment, and reliable income reoffend at alarming rates. Offenders paired with services tailored to their needs suffer fewer relapses and go back to jail far less often. They cost taxpayers less money. Some become taxpayers themselves.

Our failure to provide adequate probation and parole programming remains the single greatest missed opportunity in the entire criminal justice system, and possibly the entire American safety net.

I believed him. By sheer luck I’d landed an office mate I trusted implicitly. “It doesn’t get easier,” he said. “Sometimes the job’s talking and listening, trying to make people feel like they’ve got somebody in their corner. But sometimes it’s this.” I couldn’t figure out how to explain what I was thinking. That I mustn’t have really thought things through? That I’d known the jail would be part of the equation, but I’d hoped to get through my first day without having to take the ride? “I guess,” I said, “I thought there would be more of an in-between.” “You’re feeling how you’re supposed to be feeling right now. The POs who walk out of that place like it’s nothing—those are the ones I worry about. We’ll pick her up in a few days, get her into sober living. This is a temporary stop.”

If the heart of the problem at P&P was POs who were bigoted, incompetent, or just plain lazy, then an infusion of better people—people like me—stood to transform the system overnight. If the POs already on the job were people like Charles—that is to say, people as good as or possibly better than me—then the answer was a lot less clear.

While middle-class kids were training to be better off than their parents, poor kids were training to survive.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with him?” “He’s probably never gonna be able to hold down a real job. GED’s out: he’s not a reader, we know that. Your goal now is straight disaster prevention. He told you he can be violent. Safe to assume getting high increases the risk. You’ll want to be on the lookout for that.” I had just heard the answer to my initial question about my coworkers. This was why they stayed in the job. To prevent disasters. If they couldn’t address need, they could get to know it so well that they could track peaks and troughs.

Charles had already told me that enrolling in Medicaid, the government health care program for poor Americans, was a complex process. Fraud was rampant, if more on the billing side than the application side, and the people who determined eligibility went to great lengths to ensure that applicants were as poor as they said. “If you want Medicaid,” Charles said, “you’ve gotta be able to fill out forms, show up on time for appointments, that kind of thing. You need somebody in your corner.” “I could help with the applications.” “It’s not just the applications. It’s the follow-up. You don’t have time. You’re in the disaster-prevention business, remember?” The irony was as tragic as it was laughable. The people who most needed social services were often the people least able to run the gauntlet required to receive them.

“That just means you’re paying attention,” Charles told me, and he reminded me that they hadn’t hired us because of our policy chops. We weren’t getting paid to solve macro-level problems. In fact, P&P was as micro as it got. The disasters we were getting paid to prevent occurred on a case-by-case basis. The micro-ness of the work was what made it so challenging and, to people who kept doing it, what made it worthwhile. You didn’t have to approve of the system to do disaster prevention. You just had to understand how it worked.

P&P treated everyone equally—that is to say, poorly—because we didn’t have the resources to treat anybody well. White or black, male or female, everybody got the same two treatment options: talk or jail. And putting someone in jail was such an unpleasant experience that it was hard to imagine a bigotry powerful enough to induce a PO to take that ride any more often than he had to.

At my most starry-eyed—before I complained to Charles about the lack of in-between sanctions, and long before he told me about disaster prevention—I’d never imagined that a PO could provide an offender a ladder like the one Travis had been handed. It stood to transform not only his own life but his mother’s and his girlfriend’s—and his unborn child’s. If the opportunity of a lifetime wasn’t stronger than the disease, how was I supposed to supply a cure? There would be 72,000 overdoses in America in 2016, most of them from opioids, but the drug sucked up plenty of other things before it made off with your life.

Charles and Beth and everyone else I worked with had assured me that if data existed showing that an easygoing PO got better results than a hard-ass, or vice versa, the department would insist we heed it. The dream of reducing incarceration without spending money was behind every decision Baton Rouge made, and forcing POs to adjust their supervision style was the cheapest fix imaginable. The data just didn’t support it. Revocation rates decreased when caseloads were low and POs had ample resources to offer alternatives to criminal lifestyles. In other words, revocation rates were tied directly to spending. Federal probation was the shining example. His first day on the job, the federal PO was given a binder of service providers that could address an offender’s every need. Only 16 percent of federal offenders were sent to prison before their terms expired, a statistic made all the more remarkable when you considered that the federal criminal justice system is set up to prosecute complex crimes committed by sophisticated offenders. Federal probation begins with a more challenging population but produces far better results.

Sheila put it like this: The law had failed to protect African Americans, and it had failed to protect the very poor; therefore, anything forbidden by law—the drug trade, for one—was probably good. To Sheila, a don was a Robin Hood figure, a rebel living outside the law because the law was unjust. The moral costs of the drug business—addiction, overdose, violence in pursuit of territory—were billed not to the rebel but to the institutions that made rebellion necessary.

What criminal court judges really wanted was help from the American social safety net. They wanted a city with equal access to education and employment. Some of the African American judges shared their own experiences with discrimination at the hands of the schools and the job market and the police.

Loads of criminology research have shown that a job that pays a living wage is the most effective anti-recidivism measure there is.

We raised hell once a quarter when Dan the Regional Manager sat us down in the conference room for an all-hands meeting and gave what passed for a pep talk at the New Orleans District. Because his desk was located there in the district, Dan the Regional Manager was more one of us than one of the bosses, but he spoke to the bosses on a regular basis, and so we believed we were within our rights to let him have it. We had more people on our caseloads than ever, and fewer POs, and overdoses were on the rise, and offenders lacked the resources or the know-how to make any substantive changes. We could see that he was doing for us what we did for the families of deceased offenders: taking the blame for a broken system. He said that, absent new funding and a new mind-set from our bosses, our wins would have to come through grit and energy alone. He looked out on the room and saw plenty of that. He’d given the speech dozens of times and was good at it, and most of us were appeased. A few people weren’t. A couple of them had conspiracy theories to share. The most widely held conspiracy theory was that headquarters wasn’t really interested in seeing the New Orleans District succeed. Headquarters believed that the thinner they spread us, the less we would see of offenders. And the less we saw of offenders, the fewer of them we would take to jail. In other words, the bosses weren’t trying to fix problems. They were looking the other way. Meanwhile, offenders were going back to old hab...

It was a point made every day in that building, but it always bore repeating. Overcrowded dockets ensured that the people deciding what to do about all these human lives didn’t know very much about them. For all its limitations, the probation and parole department was the only arm of the criminal justice system that developed a personal relationship with the offender. Ideally, the personal relationship allowed the PO to guide the decision-makers—judge, assistant district attorney, public defender—to fairer and more practical decisions. It made the system a little more just.

Inertia, wasted talent, or whatever other terms I might apply to the scene of the two brothers on the couch were tragic in their own right, but I didn’t think they compared to hunger or addiction.

Like most social service providers in town, Unity was bound by its meager budget to offer its assistance to only the neediest of the needy. Unity couldn’t be walked in and appealed to. The only way for an offender to get on the list was for a Unity caseworker to come across him in her daily canvass of the shelters and Under the Bridge. Trying to look shabby enough to catch the eye of a Unity caseworker was a competitive business. Offenders had gone as far as pissing their pants and rending their garments. Only one offender on Charles’s caseload—compared to zero of mine—had landed a Unity voucher. Every time I tried calling Unity to make a case for someone, the woman who answered the phone gave me the same explanation of the Unity standard. “I know it when I see it.”

If you slept in a tent or on a bedroll under an overpass, protecting yourself from retaliation wasn’t as simple as bolting the door. You could carry a knife or gun, but other people would find out that you had one and try to steal it from you. Or, if you were especially unlucky, the day you carried would be the day a cop thought you looked like the suspect he’d been canvassing Central City for, and you would get patted down and taken to jail on a felon-in-possession-of-a-firearm charge.

He took a big sip of his soda and let out a satisfied belch and unfolded the second wrapper, and he looked down at the little hamburger as if it were a brick of gold. “Life is good sometimes,” he said. I’d seen offender resiliency and adaptability take many forms, but none of them rattled my nerve center quite like the sights and sounds of the old man delighting in his $3 lunch.

Hard Head liked almost everything about the dry-out process. He liked the redemption talk, everybody sitting in a circle, making plans and promises. In the places that worked Scripture into the curriculum, he felt close to the New Testament God and fearful of the Old Testament one. He always managed to feel just as they wanted you to when you were there. He never had to fake it, like many of the people he’d encountered in dry-out facilities over the years. They were saying the words as you might say a mantra or a spell, hoping that repetition would make them true. It wasn’t like that for Hard Head. He always believed this dry-out would be the last.

One of the most critical go-bys for staying clean was also one of the simplest: Don’t hang around people who can sell you drugs. Even for addicts of means, this isn’t easy advice to follow. In many cases, before the addict gets clean, other drug users are his inner circle. If he can resist reaching out to them, and he can go home to a quiet neighborhood where opportunities to encounter a drug dealer are few, he improves his chances of avoiding relapse. A poor person in a poor neighborhood is far more likely to run into people who can get him high. If he wants to buy groceries or put gas in his car, he’s almost certain to come across someone along the way who can feed his habit. Getting clean in a poor neighborhood means facing temptation several times per week. Getting clean while homeless means facing it every five minutes.

“That’s one tough bastard,” Beth said. “Too tough, maybe,” I said. “Institutionalized,” Beth said. Usually when people used this term, they were talking about prisoners. Beth and I knew it applied to plenty of people living on the outside. Poverty was the institution that truly shaped the men and women under my supervision. Whether you were trying to find the right corner to fly your sign or seeking out a Section 8 holder willing to let you trade your food stamps for a piece of her floor, you were living the life of a survivalist. You didn’t make long-term plans. You didn’t think about upward mobility. All your energy was tied up in holding on to your bit of shelter or finding your way to your next meal. While other people were going to school or learning a trade, you were cultivating skills unique to your station, like knowing whether to fight back against a band of robbers pillaging your tent or recognizing you were outnumbered and had better let them take what they wanted.

Numerous studies have found that the rich and the poor consume about the same number of drugs, but whereas the poor end up in the criminal justice system as a result, the rich are allowed to continue their drug habits unabated. The enforcement disparity is obviously a serious problem, but I was beginning to believe that the scholars and activists trying to reform this aspect of the system were missing an important point. Drug abuse really is more hazardous for poor people.

The fact that some early architects of the drug war had racist and classist intentions was well established by this point, but by the time I met Hard Head, I was convinced that if the drug war were called off tomorrow, police would still be spending more time responding to drug-related incidents in poor neighborhoods than rich neighborhoods. Poor people in America didn’t have the means to cope with the fallout from addiction, and American social services weren’t filling the gap.

When I thought of need, I usually thought of all the aspects of daily life that offenders found intolerable, but it was just as important to think about the things they could tolerate, so that when a person like Hard Head determined how much of a given hardship he could handle, he measured it against going to war. When that was your yardstick, you could put up with almost anything. It also meant that people in serious trouble could look like they were all right long after they weren’t. Even when need was apparent, risk could stay hidden until it was too late.

When he talked about his addiction, I got the impression he was picturing a malfunctioning gland, or an extraneous one, installed only in addicts. I’d read that some substance-abuse scholars preferred this concept of addiction to the more common disease framework. They reasoned that if an addict saw his addiction as an inextricable piece of himself—an essential body part—he would have to dispense with the notion that he could ever cease treatment. Whereas diseases could be cured, faulty organs had to be managed, lived with.

In the late fifties and early sixties, more than 500,000 Americans suffering from mental health disorders were housed in state hospitals. The “deinstitutionalization” movement, driven by cost-cutting administrations as well as human rights activists concerned about the living conditions in many facilities, caused the number of state hospitals to plummet throughout the second half of the twentieth century. By 2016, fewer than 40,000 mental health beds remained. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that as many as 800,000 mentally ill Americans go to jail or prison each year.

The mentally ill make up anywhere from a fifth to a third of the US jail population and are anywhere from two to four times more likely than the general population to end up on probation or parole.

In other words, to get an appointment, a mentally ill person needed to show up to Metropolitan with his paperwork in order and the name and contact information of a doctor who could confirm that the individual qualified for services. Getting told by a service provider that I had the sequence wrong was turning into a familiar experience. If I wanted to get help for an offender, I needed to start at the beginning. “I can’t get to the beginning,” I told the screener. “I don’t have time. This guy needs help now.” “Honey,” the screener said, “your tone is wrong. I’ve got crazy people screaming in my face all day over here. I don’t need it over the phone.” I apologized and tried to reset. “I’m just trying to figure out why, if you’re the provider of last resort, you’re not set up to take last-resort-type people, if that makes sense.” “That’s a question for the governor. I do the best I can with what they give me.”

“When you have a moving target,” the social worker said, “what good’s a mounted gun?” Social workers were always good for a metaphor.

“I really thought I was done being surprised by this place,” he said. “Here we’ve got a guy who wants help, and we’ve got a chance to give it to him, and all I’m hearing from Baton Rouge is we don’t normally do it like this. We don’t have a procedure in place. We’re doing all this research about getting smart on crime, we’re trying to find answers for people who, if they got clean or they got their meds on time, might not be our problem anymore, but when we get a chance to do something for one of them on the fly, we say we’ll table it, figure it out at the next meeting. Why don’t we say to ourselves, ‘We have a doctor. We have a parolee who wants help. Let’s get these two in the same room and see what happens’? What’s stopping us from doing that? If we can’t get anybody a job, and we can’t get anybody clean unless we put them in jail first, why are we gonna pass up the chance to get some mental health meds to a mental health case?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s the answer I was looking for.”

On the surface, there wasn’t very much to be proud of here. A guy had come to me for help, and I’d arrested him and put him in prison. But anyone could choose between good and bad, between healthful and harmful. You got your coworkers’ respect when, faced with potentially disastrous outcome, you could engineer a less disastrous alternative—a “medium-bad,” as these were sometimes known. Ninety days of mental health care behind bars were better than a click-out Under the Bridge. A combination of poverty, addiction, and untreated medical conditions had made Kendrick a risk to public safety—and to his own safety as well. If he kept going as he had been, someone would get hurt. He knew it. He had told the social worker as much, and he had very recent history as evidence. A traumatic event had come along and pushed Kendrick’s risk as high as it could go. He picked up a gun with intent to use it. If he’d found the man he was looking for, the time-tested arc from deprivation to capital offense would have been complete,

Some offenders would reveal these things to me. Most wouldn’t. I couldn’t hope to know very much more about anyone on my caseload than I knew about Kendrick, but you didn’t have to spend more than a half hour with him to know that his needs were immense, and the risk of failing to meet them potentially catastrophic. If the only way to meet his needs and reduce his risk was to put him in prison for three months, I had to be willing to do it.

Public assistance was scarce and came only by way of suffering. If I’d tried to convince him otherwise, I would have sounded like another well-meaning but ignorant member of the comfort classes.

I’d come to P&P to keep people out of prison. A year later, my proudest moment, the one that my coworkers agreed was proof I could actually do this job, began with handcuffs and US Marshals and ended with a bus ride to the Department of Corrections.

The treatment I’d told her about was a set of six counseling sessions with a social worker trained to help offenders work on habit-forming but not chemically addictive patterns of behavior. We sent overeaters there, as well as gambling addicts, people who couldn’t control their anger, and people who appeared to be using weed to treat depression or to get back to baseline so that they could face the day. The program’s scope was limited, but it offered a flexible schedule and was paid for entirely by the state. Dan the Regional Manager was advertising it as the first sign of intelligent life at headquarters. The bosses were finally coming around to the idea that spending money on offender needs in the short term could save a fortune in incarceration costs over a lifetime. If someone like Sheila could tame her habit enough to hold on to her job, she could keep paying taxes and avoiding police interactions. If she slipped deeper into depression and substance use, she was more likely to lose the job and return to the lifestyle she’d been living before, the one that found her flushing a bag of crack down the toilet and pleading guilty to a felony offense. Another felony after that and the former taxpayer could get shipped upstate, costing her fellow Louisianans fifteen to twenty grand per year.

The equation was as simple as it was obvious: if Sheila believed I wanted to help, she was more likely to tell me the things I needed to know to meet her needs—assuming, of course, I had access to programming that was up to the task.

“If she’s doing group therapy,” the judge said, “it’s gotta be with people her own age.” Another thing I’d learned about judges was that they didn’t mind letting you know when you’d misplayed your hand. Once she’d made her point, she was quick to absolve me with a “Not like you guys are busting at the seams with options over there.”

The judge had figured out that offenders wouldn’t take our treatment referrals seriously until we allayed their fear that we would resolve any noncompliance the old way, with a three-year bid at the Department of Corrections. In the incarceration capital of the world, this wasn’t an easy argument to make, especially in cases where we believed the best way to avoid a long jail term was to impose a brief one.

The Day Reporting Center opened when the sun came up and ran until late in the evening. It was all-consuming by design, following the model of some of the most successful of the latest wave of American charter schools, which held that the best way to provide opportunity to at-risk youth was to occupy nearly all of their free time.

Racially the counselors were a diverse group, but only a couple were from the city. Most were from the Northeast or the West Coast, part of a vast migration of indefatigable young liberals who’d started coming to New Orleans after Katrina in the hope of purging it of its Old Southern ills.

How could a population of mostly African American men and women raised in Louisiana not feel instant solidarity with every victim of every prejudice? The counselor explained that when marginalized populations cope by marginalizing someone else, the result is a more discriminatory society, of the kind that developed when poor whites in the Reconstruction South were coaxed by their betters into remembering that they might have been broke and they might have been illiterate, but at least they weren’t black.

the counselors at the DRC dealt frankly and squarely with their charges. They pissed off more offenders than I did, but they were also far quicker to gain their trust. When I asked the counselors how they’d learned to walk the line between calling someone out and making allowances for troubles that simply weren’t the offender’s fault, they told me they had trained themselves not to think about it. Just because you called someone out didn’t mean you weren’t trying to understand where that person was coming from. People who were exposed to violence and extreme poverty at an early age were bound to struggle with human interactions.

The counselors learned to focus on problems they could solve without money. They taught addicts to rely on their support systems: friends, family, neighbors. They trained violent offenders to manage their anger. They urged offenders who were in toxic relationships to get out, and they offered compassion and understanding to offenders who couldn’t leave because they relied on their abusers for food, shelter, or money.

I learned about “the turn,” a term that referred to the moment when the counselor had to stop offering acceptance and begin demanding change. For me, this remained the job’s most challenging proposition. I knew well enough that I was hardly the only voice in offenders’ ears, but I couldn’t help seeing relapses and arrests as reflections of my performance as a PO. I knew that when I made excuses for an offender’s behavior, I was, on some level, making excuses for my own.

I told one of the counselors about the conversation. The counselor said that when you were speaking to victims, “the turn” was the moment when you stopped apologizing for flaws in the system—the “jail or nothing” problem, for one—and acknowledged that you had made a choice. I could have chosen jail. I’d put my offender’s freedom over his victim’s safety, and for that I deserved the victim’s disdain.

Many of the counselors lived in the city’s toughest neighborhoods. They used their privilege to intervene with overzealous cops and okay-with-the-status-quo school administrators. One counselor argued that public service could not be done any other way. Those of us who put in our eight hours in Hollygrove or the Seventh Ward only to retreat in the evenings to safer, quieter neighborhoods weren’t making the full commitment.

“A real man needs a woman to take the heat for him?” the counselor asked, in her lilting, I-know-you-know-better way. “Ride or die,” Sheila said, not with a shrug or a wink but with all the conviction of a soldier saluting a flag. The counselor believed they were talking about patriarchy. Sheila believed they were talking about honor.