UT San Diego
Less than a week after moving to her new living quarters, Angelic Williams celebrated her 36th birthday.
It may not have been the first time she marked the passing of a year while in the custody of state prison authorities, but this time was different. Here, in San Diego, there were no crowded gymnasiums, no guard towers, no razor wire.
Here, she was looking for a fresh start and a chance to rebuild her life.
Williams was one of about 80 female inmates transferred from prisons around the state to a Kearny Mesa facility that opened in August. She and the others were chosen for a state-run program designed to help inmates make a successful transition from prison back into the community by providing life skills, education and job training before they get out.
It’s a concept known as prisoner re-entry, one that is gaining traction in California — partly out of necessity — as state authorities struggle to shrink prison populations and local officials grapple with swelling ranks inside local jails.
Williams, a married mother of seven from Palo Alto, has battled drug addiction for years. This was her third stint in prison, she said, and she was hoping it would be her last.
“This time, I really want this,” she said. “I’m learning about myself. I’m learning how to deal with others (while) being sober.”
The 45,000-square-foot building in Kearny Mesa, which houses the state’s Custody to Community Transitional Reentry Program, is one of several places in San Diego County focused on preparing inmates to be self-sufficient and law-abiding on the outside.
It’s no secret that finding a job and a place to live can be tough for someone getting out of prison. Returning to old neighborhoods, old friends and old habits can often land an offender back behind bars.
Of all felons released from prison in California in fiscal 2006-07, 65 percent returned to prison within three years, according to the most recent recidivism report from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
About 74 percent of the felons who reoffend get sent back to prison within a year of release.
“Prior to re-entry, especially in California, you got a bus ticket to San Diego and $200 and instructions to report to a parole officer in 48 hours,” said San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore.
“Re-entry is so critical because it works on integrating these people who have been incarcerated back into our communities, giving them the tools they need to be successful,” he said. “It’s a recognition that 95 percent of the people that go away to jail or prison are going to come back to our communities. …
“Morally and fiscally, it’s the right thing to do.”
Although some treatment and counseling is offered to prison inmates, Gore and other county officials say local agencies have done a better job than state prison authorities of preparing offenders for life after incarceration.
“You need space to do re-entry,” he said, noting California’s ongoing prison overcrowding problem. “And for years in the state prisons, every space was taken up with bunk beds.”
California has been under a federal court order to significantly reduce the overall prison population since 2009, when the courts ruled overcrowding was the primary reason inmates weren’t getting adequate medical and mental health care.
A few years later, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the Public Safety Realignment Act, which shifted responsibility for housing and supervising some offenders from the state to the counties. So far, the law has helped reduce the prison population by tens of thousands.
A different environment
After Williams applied and was accepted into the state’s re-entry program, she was transferred from a prison in Chowchilla to San Diego. She was one of 21 women who arrived at the Kearny Mesa facility within its first two weeks.
“There were a lot of mixed feelings because we didn’t know what we were coming into,” said Williams, who has been in and out of custody since 2004.
She learned right away that her new environment would be different. Her shackles were removed — exchanged for an electronic monitor. She was given clothing, sheets and towels no one else had ever used, a luxury unavailable in most lockups.
“When they get here, they’re greeted with open arms and everybody’s a clean slate,” said Lynn Pimentel, a deputy administrator at WestCare California, the private nonprofit that runs the program with funding from the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“When they walk in the door here, we do not ask them, ‘What are your charges?’ We don’t ask them, ‘What got you there?’ We ask them, ‘What are your needs and strengths? What do we need to do to get you out of here and never back again?’”
Williams moved into a suite of rooms joined by a small common area inside the newly renovated building, something akin to a college dorm. She and two other women were urged to name the room they would share. The handmade sign they hung on the door reads: “Unique sisters.”
Their days are highly regimented. The women are up at 6 a.m., They do chores and go to sessions with substance abuse counselors, mental health clinicians, job counselors and educators. They’re back in their rooms by 9 p.m.
“They’re working, full-time students,” Pimentel said. “They have 26 hours a week, maybe 30 hours a week of activities and groups and classes, and they still have to buff the floors and work in the kitchen and the laundry.”
The facility can house up to 85 women, with the possibility of 118 by next year if there are further renovations. Candidates have to have at least two years left to serve on their sentences.
“There’s an opportunity here for huge change…,” Pimentel said. “If you have one woman who does not reoffend and stays home and raises her children, the chance of breaking the cycle of addiction and criminal behavior is exponential.”
Efforts and costs
San Diego legal and law enforcement officials have been trying to make the concept of re-entry work for some time. They began looking for solutions in 2002, when the Re-entry Roundtable was formed. The group, made up of representatives from more than 60 public agencies and community organizations, meets once a month.
In 2007, San Diego became the only county in California to launch a multiagency prisoner re-entry program for nonviolent offenders after Senate Bill 618 was passed by the Legislature. The partnership includes the District Attorney’s Office, Public Defender’s Office, and the Sheriff’s and Probation departments.
District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis hosted a ceremony for the first graduates in October 2010.
Public safety realignment upped the ante when it became law in 2011. Counties were suddenly forced to supervise a population of ex-prisoners who previously would have been monitored by state parole officers. The change in the law also allowed some offenders to be sentenced to years in county jail, instead of prison, for nonviolent, nonserious felony crimes.
As a result, the existing re-entry program lost its funding and county officials focused their efforts elsewhere.
The county gets money from the state each year to pay for its efforts to deal with the realignment law’s influx of prisoners. In the 2014-15 fiscal year, San Diego is expected to receive $67.1 million, about a third of which will be used for re-entry purposes.
Chief Probation Officer Mack Jenkins said his department spent about $18 million the previous fiscal year on re-entry services, including substance abuse and mental health treatment, housing and contract costs at the Community Transition Center in Point Loma and the Residential Reentry Center in Mountain View, where probationers and some jail inmates receive job training and other services.
Spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said the Sheriff’s Department expects to pay more than $4.3 million in the current fiscal year for counseling and religious services at all seven county jails, but she was unable to break down the costs by facility. Nearly all of those costs, however, are offset by funding from the state and other sources.
Volunteers and community organizations help the effort at little or no additional cost.
Not giving up
The Community Transition Center opened at its current spot in Point Loma in April. Located on the site of an old motel, it shares space with The Lighthouse, a residential drug treatment program, and provides a place where probation authorities, mental health clinicians and treatment counselors can work together to figure out each offender’s needs.
Men and women who have completed terms and are slated to return to San Diego County get picked up from prison and transported to the center. Some leave the center within a few hours, after members of the staff have assessed what services they may need and what factors put them at risk to reoffend. Others stay until a bed opens up at a residential treatment facility or housing program.
“The first 72 hours are critical,” said Karna Lau, supervising probation officer at the center.
She said the goal is for every offender to leave with a plan to help him or her stay out of prison or jail. Probation officers make sure they follow through. If not, the offenders face sanctions: curfews, GPS monitoring or jail.
“We have people who do get arrested from here,” Lau said. “We bring them back. We have people here three or four times. It’s a message to them, ‘We’re not going to give up on you.’”
Staying clean
During a late summer visit to the center, some participants seemed open to the message.
“I’ve never felt such caring in my entire life,” said Jesse Lowell, 51, of Oceanside.
Lowell said he was learning how to work on anger issues, communicate better and “live life on life’s terms.” Because the counselors had signed him up for Medi-Cal, he now has medical insurance the first time in his life. “It just feels like I got a fighting chance,” he said.
Lowell and another man, Johnny “Bee” Sengsourinthone, said the program was helping them put their drug abuse behind them. And both said their No. 1 priority was to get a job.
Sengsourinthone, a father of two, said he eventually hopes to move to Tennessee, where his parents live, and work at a Nissan automotive plant located there.
“If this program wasn’t working, we would have left a long time ago,” said Sengsourinthone, who recently completed a stint behind bars for forgery and theft.
“Normally,” he said, “I relapse right away.”
Those who commit crimes while on community supervision can be referred to Reentry Court, where a team of lawyers, law enforcement officials and treatment providers work together to identify what led each one to break the law.
“If substance abuse has been an underlying problem, it’s very apparent in their history,” said Judge Desiree Bruce-Lyle, who heads the program in San Diego Superior Court.
Instead of going straight into custody for the new, nonviolent crime (sex crimes do not qualify) participants are placed on probation and attend regularly scheduled court sessions to discuss whether they’re following the mandated plan.
“The prison time or jail time is hanging over their head,” Bruce-Lyle said. “That’s the incentive to get them to complete treatment and turn their lives around.”
The judge also leads Mandatory Supervision Court for those offenders, under realignment, who are ordered to serve part of their sentence in jail and the rest under supervision by the Probation Department. Prosecutors said it’s the only one of its kind in the state.
Thinking for change
The data are unclear whether any of this will work in the long run to reduce recidivism in San Diego and throughout the state.
“I hope it’s working,” said Gore, who stressed that the alternative is to keep locking people up without helping them to change their lives.
“Then they can get out and steal your car and burglarize your home,” he said.
The Sheriff’s Department completed expansions this year at two local jails, each with a focus on re-entry. In June, the East Mesa Reentry Facility in Otay Mesa opened a 400-bed expansion, providing more room for male inmates to take educational courses, or life-skills classes on parenting, coping and “thinking for change.”
Capt. Billy Duke said inmates can learn a range of skills by working in the on-site bakery or print shop or learning landscaping, welding or bicycle repair. He said even though an inmate may have a background in construction, that doesn’t mean he will automatically go into the construction program at East Mesa.
“They should be learning something new so when they get released, they have options,” he said.
Some inmates said they chose to participate in the programming because they wanted to learn a new job or social skills. Others said they just want to keep busy or keep their minds occupied while doing their jail time. A couple said they’d gotten the opportunity to teach.
Reaching independence
A 41-year-old man, who did not want his name used in this story, said he’s helping fellow inmates study to take the GED in Spanish. He had been a hydraulic engineer in Mexicali, and he said his first job in the United States was to design the water pipes for the East Mesa facility.
Now he works in the jail commissary, earning 50 cents a day.
“I took every single class that they got,” he said.
In Santee, where the first phase of the new Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility opened in August, inmates can learn landscaping, sewing or how to operate institutional machinery in the laundry. Some work in The Missing Fork Cafe, where deputies and other staff members eat, a program that allows inmates to earn a nationally recognized restaurant management certificate. The cafe is named for those occasions when a staffer would inadvertently walk away with a utensil, prompting a search of the grounds.
Authorities are tailoring the curriculum to the all-female population. Reentry Supervisor Kathy Myers said women tend to get involved in the criminal justice system because of their relationships with men, and they’re more likely to have suffered abuse.
“That’s the hope, that they all leave better than when they came here,” said Capt. Edna Milloy, who runs the jail. “We can’t hold their hands forever.”
Local efforts to help ex-inmates’ reenter society
Custody to Community Transitional Reentry Program
Located: Kearny Mesa
Operated by: WestCare California, Inc. and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Mission: To provide educational, behavioral and vocational services to female offenders nearing the end of a prison sentence
Capacity: Up to 85 participants
Opened: August 2014
Budget: $2.4 million annually (the state already owned the building)
Community Transition Center
Located: Point Loma
Operated by: San Diego County Probation Department. Shares space with The Lighthouse residential drug treatment program
Mission: To provide a first stop where nonviolent offenders released from prison can be transported for assessment, treatment and case management before they are supervised in the community by probation authorities.
Opened: April 2014 (It first opened at a different location in January 2013)
Capacity: Up to 60 people in short-term housing
Budget: $1.7 million annual contract with Health Care Services, Inc., which provides transportation, short-term housing, food, etc. That figure does not include costs for probation personnel.
East Mesa Reentry Facility
Located: Otay Mesa
Operated by: San Diego County Sheriff’s Department
Mission: A medium-security jail for male inmates, offers them the opportunity to train in construction, computer graphics, printing press operation, industrial laundry machine operation, baking and cake decorating. Certificate programs available.
Capacity: 962 inmates
Opened: Once a probation work camp, it was turned over to the Sheriff’s Department in 1991. The 400-bed expansion opened in June 2014.
Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility
Located: Santee
Operated by: County Sheriff’s Department
Mission: Primary intake facility for female offenders jailed in San Diego County. Offers educational, behavioral and vocational programming for women, including restaurant management, sewing and industrial laundry machine operation. Staffers said they are looking to expand the offerings and find more opportunities for certificate programs.
Opened: The new jail opened in August 2014, replacing the old Las Colinas facility, which was built in 1967. A second phase of construction is expected to open in January 2016.
Capacity: 888 inmates, will expand to 1,270 when phase 2 is complete.
The Sheriff’s Department said it does not track costs for reentry services by facility, but its Reentry Division, which provides services at all seven jails, spent $5.7 million last year on education services, reentry program staff, equipment and other costs.
dana.littlefield@utsandiego.com