By
Doc Gurley, City Brights Blog, sfgate.com, February 17, 2011:Sentenced to indefinite homelessness
It is universally acknowledged that the first wave of homelessness occurred when the mental health system was abolished. Many would argue that a second wave of homelessness occurred when vast amounts of affordable housing were eliminated. I would argue that a third wave of a more desperate, intractable, and frequently violent phase of homelessness has been created by our vast prison system.
How many people enter the prison system homeless? How many leave our prison system with no fixed destination? What subset of the 70 percent of ex-felons who return to prison are homeless?
Just for public safety reasons, you might assume the correctional system would want to know those numbers. A homeless person, by definition, is a wild card. You cannot know where they are at any point in time – much less immediately after a crime has occurred in the vicinity.
Surprisingly, according to both California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) research division and the voluminous reports on its website, the prison system does not explicitly track that information. A well-funded assessment tool (COMPAS), which has the goal of predicting the inmates likely to become higher-risk parolees, was begun in 2008. A preliminary assessment of its data shows that 39% of inmates are at high risk of "residential instability."
By Doc Gurley, City Lights blog, sgate.com, 15 February 2011:
You can read Part I of this series about homelessness and our prison system here.
Get on the bus
Each year, for 130,000 Californians, the prison door is unlocked one day and the question now becomes - where do you go? And how do you get there? Do you get any money? If so, how much? It is remarkably hard to find an answer to those basic questions, even if you’re a concerned family member trying to find out.
Nowhere on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) website could I find a description of the release process, or how a destination is chosen, or how much (or little) financial aid or transportation help a prisoner might get upon release. If you are the mother of a son with disabilities, impulse control disorders, and mental illness and you’re trying to find out exactly when he’ll be released – you can’t know. And if you’re trying to find out where he might be headed, or how much money the prison system might give him – you can’t know.
Recently released prisoners often tell me in clinic that they got “nothing.” After 10, or two, or 15 years, the door is unlocked and they take a bus somewhere with no medicine, no appointments, no place to stay and not a penny to their name. After being unable to verify this process on the CDCR website, but finding references in news articles to “$200 and a bus pass,” I decided to call CDCR and find out what was true. Eventually, I spoke to the highly professional and extremely helpful officer Joanne Duroncelet. She was a bit surprised that she couldn’t find the information on the website either. But she proceeded to explain that decisions about what you’re given, and where you can go on release can be highly variable. The maximum someone can get on release is indeed $200 – but you’re not guaranteed it. And there is no adjustment for length of time behind bars. And, if you need a bus ticket, and/or clothes, those come out of that same amount.
But you may indeed arrive in a neighborhood without a penny. There is something called a “parole hold,” which is when a parole officer decides to keep whatever is left of your potential after-bus-ticket-and-clothes money. A parole officer may choose to do that to encourage you to comply with the conditions of your parole (such as checking in). How does a parole hold decision get made? It depends on the parole officer, I was told.
Officer Duroncelet also later sent me the link to the written policy, which is here:
When it comes to the choice of destination, many prisoners may have contraindications that prevent them from returning to within 35 miles of the place they previously lived. Reasons can include a stay-away order, history of domestic violence, restraining orders or sometimes as a condition of parole. No data exists on where those people go, or how many of them become homeless in a different community’s neighborhoods. But generally speaking, most prisoners are expected to return to their county of incarceration. If you have relationships to rely on, that’s where you are expected to go. Back where it all began.
By Doc Gurley, City Brights Blog, sfgate.com, February 11 2011:
If you work as a doctor in a clinic for the homeless, you see all kinds of simmering panic. There's the God, someone's got to help me panic of the person who lost their house to foreclosure. There's the fatalistic panic of a street person with a hard, bone-rattling cough who senses, deep inside, that this might be the infection that kills her.
But this time, when the man stopped me in the hallway between exam rooms, grabbing my upper arm a little too tightly, there was a different kind of panic in his eyes.
“I don’t know how to find the bathroom,” the man said, terror-stricken. “Curtis,” with salt and pepper hair, was in his late 50s.
“It’s just around the corner - through those doors and to the right.” I hoped to speed-walk past him, but his grip on my arm only tightened.
“I can’t do that,” he said, his voice rising to a near-shout.
His upper lip was shaky with emotion. The only clue that his problem wasn’t some type of unusual neurological defect was the fact that he had way more muscles than you’d expect to see on a man his age.
“Just got out of prison?” I said.
He gave a sharp nod. “Twenty years in a cell. I walked down one corridor. That’s all. For over 20 years.” He said it again, this time shouting it: “I can’t find the bathroom.”
My mind struggled to grasp his last 20 years. All the changes in the world. All the ways in which we maneuver through our lives – simple things that he’d never done. He’d become a man no longer able to even follow an easy task like going through the doors and turning right. At his age, to have been so restricted for so long in prison, he’d undoubtedly committed a truly vile and violent act against another person.
But now he is, as we say in the healthcare business, ours.
He is a man who is unemployable, with multiple chronic health problems, and most likely – even without being confronted with all he cannot do - with serious anger management and impulse-control issues. He is in our town with nowhere to stay, nowhere to go and no ability to get there.
“I’ll walk you there,” I said, and wondered, as we walked the few feet to the bathroom doors, which way he would go when he left the clinic.
