Leaving prison presents challenges to all ex-cons. Transitioning from an environment where everything is dictated—when you eat, when you sleep, when you stand up for count—to total freedom, sometimes for the first time in decades, can be shocking and overwhelming. But for recovering drug addicts like me, the obstacles are more daunting still.
After more than 20 years of incarceration, my release date is getting very close. It’s just months away now.
I’ve been clean on the inside for over a decade, following years of drug problems on the street and in prison. I know my release will alter the challenge of avoiding drug use, risking my newfound freedom. And although drugs are widely obtainable here in prison, they’re still not as plentiful or affordable as in the outside world. But I’ve prepared myself as well as I can and I feel ready.
For over two years, I’ve been living in a unit designed for prisoners with drug issues. I’ve spent the last 10 months as an active participant in RDAP (Residential Drug Abuse Program), a therapeutic community that has helped me tremendously. I’ve been forced to examine my criminal thinking errors and come to grips with who I am and what my ugly truths are. Let me tell you, it’s been unsettling. But although I accept that I am a criminal and a drug addict and alcoholic, that doesn’t mean that is my permanent lot in life.
Not all those who went through this program before me were ready for the world. I know I need to be aware of this, because when it’s time to walk out those gates, everybody feels ready. From observing the program, it seems to me that if you put in the effort now, you have a better chance on the street. A lot of dudes breeze through doing the bare minimum, thinking they know it all, and end up back in prison.
“I thought I was good, that I had changed and all that,” says Dylan, a 26-year-old former prison gang member from Oklahoma, who did three years on a meth charge and graduated from RDAP last September. “It was hard; I thought it was going to be easier.”
It soon started going wrong for Dylan: “I got busted with a cell phone at the halfway house, got in a fight. I thought I was ready, but I wasn’t and I started using again, thinking I wouldn’t get caught, thinking that I knew best.”
He was finally sent back to prison after being caught violating his probation condition by smoking K2—he wasn’t even out for six months. “Everybody at the halfway house was smoking K2,” he tells me. “They said it didn’t show up on the urine tests, but I got a dirty. Now I’m back with 18 more months to do. I should have just stayed here in the first place.”
Tyree, 32, from inner-city Chicago, who did five years on a crack cocaine charge, is another recovering addict and drug program graduate who went home from prison only to come back again.
“I was doing everything right,” he says. “I took my recovery seriously—I got six kids to take care of. I got a job. I had a girl. I was staying away from the wrong people, but it wasn’t as easy as all that.”
At the halfway house in Chicago, Ty was subject to every possible temptation. “It was crazy, for real. Dudes had guns, drugs,” he says. “They were hustling out of the halfway house. Wasn’t nobody trying to work—they were only trying to get money and make up for lost time. They didn’t care that I was trying to change my life or do the right thing, they were laughing at me. They acted like they were still in jail.”
And when Ty went back to his old neighborhood, he says, his homeboys hardly helped. “They gave me care packages, you know, like homecoming gifts,” Ty tells me. “But it wasn’t clothes or money or anything I needed, like a phone or something like that, after doing five years in prison and losing everything—it was like: ‘Here take this ounce of crack, get on your feet;’ ‘Here’s a pound of weed;’ ‘Take this heroin pack.’ I was trying to get out of the life and away from drugs, but it was all around me. It just sucked me back in.”
Depressed by his options and succumbing to peer pressure, Ty started drinking and eventually got busted and violated. “I came back to prison for getting a drunk shot,” he says. “Eighteen more months for drinking—not for hustling or selling drugs, but for drinking.”
Luckily, neither Dylan nor Tyree caught any new charges, which could have seen them serve additional time—but they could easily have done. I think about Dylan and Ty’s examples every day. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners are released in the US each year. Over two-thirds of them will be rearrested within three years and half of them will return to prison. I don’t want to add to those statistics.
Happily, some released recovering addicts do overcome the challenges. They utilize the available aftercare and reentry services and stay on point—do what they’re supposed to do, be where they’re supposed to be—so that they don’t violate their halfway house rules and jeopardize their freedom.
“I have been out for over a year now and I am going to school and working part time,” says Chuck, a 27-year-old ex-soldier from Arkansas, who did three years on an ecstasy charge and graduated from RDAP last April. “I did my halfway house time and am now on probation. I got my own apartment and a truck. I am doing all right.”
“I haven’t used any drugs or alcohol for the whole time I have been out,” says Country, 34, from St. Louis, who did eight years on a cocaine conspiracy. “I have even left the gambling alone.”
Country graduated from the drug program in July 2013, did his halfway house time and now feels he has a future. “I got an apartment, got a good job at a factory making $18 an hour, bought a nice truck and got a baby on the way,” he says. “Life is hard enough trying to survive out here as an ex-con without going back to drug use. Even drinking a beer is not worth it for me.”
What people coming out of prison have to understand is that we already have everything against us. Everything is difficult enough without supporting a drug habit, or sliding back into the criminal lifestyle. And if you’re in recovery, you can double that at least.
I know that I will face the same challenges that all these gentlemen faced. They didn’t do as much time as I have—which will just make my transition that much more difficult. Still, it’s better than the alternative: staying in prison.
When I graduate the drug program here I will go to a halfway house for a six-month term. I will be expected to obtain employment, continue my drug treatment and recovery through aftercare, take random urine tests and comply with all the rules and regulations of the halfway house.
After this I will still be on federal probation, facing more random urine tests, meetings with my probation officer, continuing aftercare and mandatory attendance at 12-step meetings.
Recovery doesn’t stop when you walk out of prison. It’s an ongoing situation that I know I will have to deal with for the rest of my life. But luckily for me there are programs in place that can help—even if part of that help consists of making me accountable by spelling out the consequences if I don’t comply.
If I slip up like Dylan and Tyree, I know that the only outcome is prison again. I’m determined to follow Chuck and Country’s path instead. Resisting relapse is a personal struggle for anybody in recovery—but I have even more than most to lose.
