![]() ![]() According to Reuters, we taxpayers in California are paying over $64,000 a year to incarcerate one person. ![]() 'Jute balls' are frozen, flavorless balls of mashed cabbage, veg and mystery meats which serve as dinner. How many women do we continue to incarcerate for drug felony convictions? I've read and heard stories from ex-inmates about conditions in the jails that are not only unhealthy but highly illegal, and I'd like to point out just one among many 'punishments' for bad behavior at a prison in California. 18 months after release, 80% of those who leave Susan Burton's transitional housing programs surveyed were employed or taking classes and had not returned to jail or prison. ![]() Susan's ANWOL is an anti-recidivism success story. This negligence around the study of recidivism rates and what actually affects the numbers is shocking in itself. It's nearly impossible to find national recidivism statistics and the most recent I came across were from 2005, from the National Institute of Justice stating that within three years of release, about two-thirds (67.8 percent) of released prisoners were re-arrested. providing lodging, food, clothing, job training, recovery support and pro-bono legal services to upwards of 900 women and their children so far. After two years of housing and caring for women parolees out of her own pocket, Susan founded a nonprofit organization in the year 2000 called A New Way of Life an organization dedicated to helping women rebuild their lives after incarceration.Īs of this writing, Susan Burton's A New Way of Life (ANWOL) has grown to seven transitional houses in L.A. Most were women who could not return to living situations that contributed to their problems in the first place. She started showing up to invite the women parolees to her house, providing safe haven and comfort to women like herself longing to change their lives, but needed wise care and help to do it. Susan knew about the buses depositing parolees coming from jails and prisons into L.A.'s Skid Row, an area of homelessness rife with desperation, crime and drugs. Putting me in a cage because I medicated my grief did not solve my grief problem, "Drug addiction is a medical problem, not a criminal problem. She decided she would find a way to provide the support she had so desperately needed, to others. Shut out of the system with no support whatsoever, her dream shifted. Susan found work as a caregiver, diligently saving until she'd acquired enough for a down payment on a house in Watts. She dreamed of becoming a licensed home care aid but her felony convictions stood in the way. ![]() She wondered why there weren't similar resources like Clare in south L.A., but the answer was pretty obvious. She found resources on the other side of town - the Clare Foundation in Santa Monica - and went into treatment, becoming part of a sober community. The last time Susan walked free of prison, a smug guard waved her off with this line: "I'll see you back in a little while." Those words became the prompt to turn her life around. She found herself caught up in the vicious cycle of addiction and spent 20 years in and out of prison on drug-related felonies. Losing a child this way cannot be imagined by most, and it's hardly surprising Susan turned to drugs as blanket over her grief. Behind the wheel was an off-duty LA police officer although Susan recognizes the tragedy as an accident, the officer never apologized to her for her child's death. These destructive cycles continue unabated in families and communities until someone strong, brave, and filled with a mighty big empathy stands up to lead others to help break the chain.Īs a young mother, Susan's five-year-old son ran into the street and was struck by a car and killed. Between black brown and white, there are many core similarities in the cycles of working class poverty with addiction topping the list, but the scale is vastly tilted toward people of color on the losing end time after time. There is a desperation that fuels survival against all odds, and sometimes the shield reached for is a balm of nullification. I'm talking the type of emotional pain that all too often grows wild in the darkness of poverty, trauma, lack of opportunity and educational resources. To work through pain often requires a healing hand, a therapist, a loving community. Drug addiction is an insidious blanket to cover pain. At first, Susan's story didn't feel unusual to me, having been incarcerated as a kid alongside girls whose mothers were addicted to drugs, as was mine. ![]()
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