A record for life

Repeat offenders

With no one to turn to, ex-convicts have a greater chance of relapsing, which may take them back to prison. According to Harold Clarke, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC), the recidivism rate is around 20 percent in prisons run by the Commonwealth.

“If folks don’t address their addiction and the lifestyle that goes along with their addiction, relapse is almost inevitable and … means new crimes being committed, and people usually go back to prison,” adds Levy.

Pamela Henderson, 51, born and raised in Roxbury, knows the drill. She has been in and out of prison for 15 years for repeated incidents of shoplifting. Influenced by her older brother, who robbed people and brought her gifts, Henderson said she started selling drugs in 1977. By 1981, she said, she was using them and soon started shoplifting to support her habit.

Looking for a fresh start, Henderson moved to Georgia. But her addiction dragged her back into shoplifting again. She was finally arrested in 1989 in Atlanta trying to steal clothes at a local shop.

“I was doing drugs and I was doing bad,” says Henderson, who was taken to Scott State Prison in Hardwick, Ga. “And there was no help there.”

The only help she found was God. On one day in 2003, Henderson found herself struggling with her cocaine habit on the streets of Atlanta. All of a sudden, she said, she fell to her knees.

The next day, ashamed of her appearance, she tried to steal a dress to wear and got caught. This time, she said, she spent the whole year in prison studying the Bible, looking for answers to overcome addiction.

She still keeps the first Bible she had in prison — pages aged by the constant handling, heavily highlighted with yellow and pink markers, underlined in pencil and pen, scribbles in the margins.

“I keep all that stuff in hand, just as a reminder,” says Henderson.

When she was released in 2004, she had problems getting housing and a job in Atlanta. Three years later, she moved back to Boston.

After living in shelters with her four granddaughters, of whom she has custody, Henderson finally found a subsidized apartment in Dorchester. SPAN Inc. helps her pay the rent.

After a year looking for a job, she finally got a temporary one last month, in the packing department at the Dancing Deer Baking Company. She says she now feels better than ever.

“Life is as difficult as you make it,” says Henderson.

Like Henderson, Buggs had to find his own way to battle addiction. He went back to life in the community only after spending four years at Fresh Start Recovery Coalition, a nonprofit organization in Malden that offers housing and counseling for people with substance abuse problems. Buggs needed a place to live and a way to make sure he wouldn’t return to drugs, he says.

“If you’ve been doing drugs for 27 years, there’s not gonna be no short-term fix,” Buggs said. “You have to really work on yourself.”

Once out of jail and free of drugs, Buggs restarted his life, getting a job in upholstery while living in Everett. But many don’t have the opportunity he had to learn a trade in prison.

Lack of skills

Mercogliano is the typical example. Instead of attending hairdressing school while at MCI-Framingham, she chose to get her GED. She dropped out of high school in the 10th grade. Scheduling conflicts prevented her from taking both courses.

But now, with her degree, she wants to go to college or back to school to learn a trade.

Mercogliano’s story is common, according to commissioner Clarke, who manages 11,000 offenders in the Commonwealth’s 18 correctional facilities.

“We are facing a number of challenges in terms of getting offenders prepared,” says Clark. “Better than 50 percent don’t have work skills.”

According to the DOC’s 2007 annual report, 64 percent of inmates reported having an education level of 11th grade or less — only 35 percent of men and 52 percent of women had completed grade 12 or higher. Sixty percent of inmates read below a 6th grade level.

Inmates’ level of education, though, is not the only problem.

“We need to increase our capacity to be able to serve more offenders [and] we need some enhanced case management strategies to get the inmates who are going [to programs] but may not be engaged,” adds DOC Program Services Director Christopher Mitchell.

In 2007, about half of the 12,000 men released from Massachusetts DOC prisons participated in the Correctional Recovery Academy, a program that targets substance abuse, anger management, criminal thinking and relapse prevention.

“We just don’t have the program space,” explains Clarke.

Mary Nee from hopeFound adds that Boston has neither enough drug rehabilitation in prison nor enough programs to ensure that all people coming out of prison have solid plans of where they will live and how they will get a job.

To raise the number of convicts attending programs, though, is not simple, says Clarke. The main impediments are limited capacity, resistant inmates and insufficient monitoring.

Ideally, says Levy, inmates should get counseling and training in jail and keep working on it after release. The reality, though, is still far from Levy’s dream. According to the DOC’s 2007 annual report, 39 percent of released inmates had no supervision when they got back on the streets.

Levy explains that if inmates build relationships with someone in the community while incarcerated and if they feel they have a support system, their chances of staying out of jail “are a whole lot better.”

Mercogliano agrees.

“I was so overwhelmed when I got out of prison,” she recalls. “I didn’t know where I was going, what I was doing, who was who, what was what. And [SPAN] helped me gradually get back into being in society again.”

Tough future

  DOC Commissioner Clarke’s staff is now trying to assess the department’s needs, so he can then ask for the funding to match them. Historically, says program services director Mitchell, the DOC has built capacity as funding became available. The department is preparing a report for Gov. Deval Patrick about its situation.

But inmates’ fates depend on other variables as well. How the community treats them will influence their future greatly, says Mary Nee from hopeFound. And today, she says, communities in Massachusetts are not organized to give ex-convicts a chance based on their present behavior.

“Obviously people need to be accountable for behavior and the well being of other citizens needs to be protected,” adds Nee. “It’s just that right now, what we don’t have in our system of government is a way … that after a period of time, [people can] demonstrate that they’ve changed.”

As Mercogliano puts it, the community loses if ex-convicts are not accepted. Without opportunity and hope, they often go back to crime.

“[Y]ou get out of jail and … keep hitting a brick wall because you can’t get a job,” says Mercogliano. “Then they wonder why people go on to commit crimes again and end up back in jail. It’s the only way they can support themselves.”

To Nee, society has to do something, because leaving ex-convicts unattended “doesn’t help the public safety.”

“Unless we are going to incarcerate everyone for the rest of their lives,” Nee says, “we need to have some way in which people can work and demonstrate that they can be responsible.”

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