Life of parole: you can get out of an American prison, but can you ever leave the system?
The clerk paused and squinted at his computer. “What were you getting done again?”hose who study and experience life after prison often describe it as an alternate reality. “Did a stretch in prison to be released to a cell,” poet Reginald Dwayne Betts wrote. “Returned to a freedom penned by Orwell.” Others have called it “a parallel universe”, a “purgatory”, a place of “exile”.
On his first day, the background check came back and his boss sent him home early. They never called him “You get to a point where you’re like, you’re just numb to everything. And then the anger will start to boil” I visited Rodeo in jail a few days later. He was still trying to piece together how he got there. He hadn’t slept or shaved or worked out, which was how he liked to start his days – lifting weights, listening to music, tuning out the world. Now he felt antsy, like someone was after him, though he couldn’t name anyone specific or didn’t want to.for permission to move out of the county. Leave it all behind and start over. But when he’d asked before, hissaid it wasn’t possible.
He ran from Trinity School in Ukiah, from California Youth Homes in San Juan Bautista, from Chrysalis House in Pleasanton, Chrysalis in Livermore, New Life group home in Petaluma. Hitchhiking and panhandling across 50 or 100 or 150 miles, all through his teens, always back towards the yellow house, towards mom, until the cops caught up and dragged him back to court. He knew he shouldn’t run. Still he ran.
When Rodeo left Corcoran in the late 1990s, the number of people on parole in California alone had grown tenfold, from roughly 11,000 in 1980 to 11o,000. And thousands of these were violating their parole provisions and returning to prison.
So Rodeo took odd jobs, often the kind that wore down his body and made his fingertips throb. Construction was his mainstay. Running steel pipes, hooking hoses, pumping and pouring concrete. He worked as a bouncer at night clubs, Quincy’s, Hopmonk. He fixed tyres and brakes at Big O Tires. He washed dishes. One year he worked as a prep cook at a golf club, because the owner knew his mom. He worked winters on crab-fishing boats. He made between $8.25 and $20 an hour, depending on the employer.
The unsettling sensation overtook him yet again as he lay in bed one evening watching a show about paranormal phenomenon.He walked around the house, into Jesse’s and Taryn’s bedroom, but seeing no one, he tried to calm himself.Rodeo relayed these experiences to me as we sat at the back of a city bus. He always sat in the back of the bus, for the same reason he preferred to shop along the outer perimeter of the grocery store, his back against the wall.
But it was hard to bounce back from small setbacks, to write an email, sit at a job interview or stand in line at McDonald’s – to be normal. He had recurring nightmares, waking up in a cold sweat and swinging his fists in the air. “It fucks up your nervous system. You know what I mean?” Later, as a prison superintendent at the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York, Brockway honed what he advertised as a more humane approach to punishment in America.
By the 1980s, criminal-justice officials were debating whether parole should continue at all. It had “drifted along without a positive vision of what control was and how to achieve it,” in the words of Simon, the professor from University of California, Berkeley. Instead, with American prisons overflowing, parole expanded its reach.
After six months in two different halfway homes, he thought he was ready to move back in with Jesse and Taryn. Hisagreed, but tacked on some new conditions, which is how Rodeo ended up with the breathalyser, ankle monitor and a weekly addiction class. Rodeo tried to be open to these classes.
As it turned out, Bobby was wrong. The sign-up fee was closer to $500, not $100. Alley had offered to lend him the money. “I know you’re good for it, keep doing what you’re doing,” she always told him. But she’d already spent thousands of dollars to pay for his phone, dinners out together and his mother’s funeral costs. He decided to stick with construction a bit longer. By this time Rodeo had got his licence back, so he also planned to get a second job driving for Sam’s Taxis.
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