Helping inmates navigate life after prison
At San Quentin, program rebuilds lives, helps tackle recidivism rates
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — In January, when John Johnson’s feet touched the ground outside San Quentin State Prison, it seemed surreal to him that he could finally be, at long last, a free man.
After serving more than 30 years in prison for stabbing a man to death in Oakland, he wasn’t sure what he’d be coming home to.
“Thirty years is a long time, and people die, and I didn’t have a family,” he said.
But he had Collette Carroll to help him through the transition.
Carroll, founder of the nonprofit California Reentry Institute’s Empowered Reentry Program, has been working to help inmates like Johnson navigate the move from imprisonment to freedom.
Safety net of services
The comprehensive pre- and post-release program that started in 2010 has provided Johnson and about 70 other inmates with the tools and assistance to rebuild their lives and break the cycle of incarceration. The 18- to 24-month program has had a remarkable zero percent recidivism rate for all its graduates.
“Collette’s work is beyond commendable,” said Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, who last month named Carroll this year’s Assembly District 14 Woman of the Year. “Her selfless dedication and relentless efforts to help the men inside and outside of San Quentin proves that with trust, time and support, eliminating recidivism is possible.”
Johnson received a safety net of services. A volunteer for the program picked him up at the prison gates, took him out to breakfast, gave him new clothes and shoes, linens and a cell- phone. In addition, the nonprofit program helped him find housing and not just one job but three, he said.
“That was my second family,” he said.
As executive director and founder of the California Reentry Institute, Carroll has been lauded for her work helping to pioneer the re-entry program in San Quentin. She hails from Australia but moved to the United States about 40 years ago for her work at a cosmetics company. The self-described “get-it-done type of gal” said she never imagined that she’d be working with prisoners. Before the dotcom bubble burst, she was an events manager, travel director and executive assistant to a CEO at a high-tech PR firm, and had coordinated events for Hollywood actors and directors, she said.
But she took a buyout package
“When you meet these men, you understand that they aren’t necessarily what they did. They want to change.” Collette Carroll, founder of the California Reentry Institute’s Empowered Reentry Program
when she realized her job would probably be eliminated, and her late husband, Roland Peck, who started a ministry for prisoners with HIV and AIDS, enlisted her to help lead a self-help group at San Quentin in 2000. It quickly became her passion, as it was for her husband, who died in November 2011.
But she realized she was just scratching the surface of what prisoners really needed to transform their lives. So she started the re-entry institute in 2008. Then her nonprofit launched the more far-reaching Empowered Reentry Program, during which men start by choosing to give up every Saturday for two years so they can dig deep to understand why they did what they did and how to be better people.
They don’t have to be defined by their past, Carroll said.
“When you meet these men, you understand that they aren’t necessarily what they did,” she said. “They want to change. They want to be who their authentic self is and we help them to care for themselves because if they don’t care for themselves, they can’t care for other people.”
During the program, the inmates spend a full year on emotions. In the second year, they focus on life skills, including how to deal with their addictions, find employment and get an education, and what life is like on the outside.
They also must take full accountability for their crimes. They write letters of remorse to their victims and their families, she said.
“There are hundreds of thousands of stories in those prisons,” she said. “But the wonderful thing about it is when they are done with our program, there are no excuses. They understand they had a choice, and they chose.”
Becoming a ‘peacemaker’
At a recent Saturday at San Quentin, a number of graduates of the class gathered for a “Train the Trainer” workshop to learn how they could help instruct a new class of inmates, starting in late spring.
One of its recent graduates, David Stephens, 48, who has so far served 26 years for murdering a man in Grass Valley, said the program helped him understand his childhood traumas that led to a life of drugs and crime.
“I was overweight and teased, and I always wanted to fit in,” he said, calling the class “a game changer.” “And I ended up fitting in with the wrong crowd.
“You spend so many years being treated bad and degraded, and you start telling yourself that’s all you are, and then you run into someone like Collette, who takes the time to say, ‘Hey, you’re not a bad person anymore. Let’s work on you,’” he said.
Edward Buchanan, 53, of San Jose, who has served 29 years for murder and is scheduled for a parole hearing in a couple of months, said what he and other inmates get from Carroll’s program is “pure love.”
“After 29 years of being looked at like an animal, and being treated as such, to have someone all of sudden who cares about you - and it’s genuine, it really means a lot to you,” he said.
“Hurt people hurt people, and healed people heal people, as they say.
“And once you learn the pathway of healing people, you become a peacemaker,” Buchanan said. “And you don’t want to hurt anybody. You want to help somebody, because you are helping yourself at the same time.”