The Right to Live Again By Leticia Miranda

As California prepares to start shrinking its prison system, advocates see more peril than promise.

November 4, 2009

Michelle Freeman's life hit rock bottom when she first started using crack cocaine in 1984. She lost all contact with her family and friends and became homeless because of her addiction.“I don't think back then that I was living,” says the 50-year-old mother of two. “From that first time on, I was chasing that high. I lost contact with my children, lost contact with life, actually.”

After cycling in and out of jail and prison three times, Freeman was last released from Chino’s California Institution for Women in 2005. She was dropped off at her parole officer’s workplace on the corner of 6th and G streets in San Bernardino, an area known as a local drug market. Her parole officer told her that if she didn’t find a place to stay within the next two days, she would have to go back into the system.

Freeman was devastated. She had only $200, a standard payment the prison gives all prisoners on the day of their release, she recalls, and no place to go. She and her release advisor inside had been planning for months on her finishing parole in Los Angeles. But because of an error in the system, Freeman was told the day of her release that she was going to San Bernardino, not Los Angeles.

Then she remembered a business card she had kept for Kim Carter, the founder and director of A Time for Change Foundation, a service and housing organization for homeless and formerly incarcerated women with children. She had heard Carter speak about the group's work during a pre-release program in prison.

“Of all the people who came there, her card was the only card that I kept. She was the only one that I listened to,” Freeman recalls.

She soon entered a rehabilitation program run by the foundation. Through the program, Michelle not only became clean and sober, but also worked with state lawmakers to pass a bill in 2005 to strengthen programs to help currently and formerly incarcerated parents stay connected to their children.

But as Freeman now approaches her four-year anniversary of sober living outside of prison, San Bernardino is enacting a city ordinance barring the establishment of new transitional homes for parolees, probationers and sex offenders.

"We can’t feed our families. We can’t get a job. Without the establishment of new group homes, what are we going to do?" asks Freeman, now project coordinator and health policy advocate with A Time for Change.

San Bernardino’s ordinance comes as a federal court has ordered California to devise a plan to reduce prison crowding. As a result, prisons may soon be releasing more people from the system even as the state threatens to cut back the very programs former inmates need to stay out of prison.

The new policy increases the strain on programs like A Time for Change. As one of only a few licensed group homes in the city, the organization runs two facilities at full capacity and receives several calls each day from formerly incarcerated mothers, many of whom are forced to live under bridges or in cars.

“Instead of the state investing more in services, they pass a law that says you're violating the law if you support women coming back to their community," says Zaheva S. Knowles, director of communications and government affairs at A Time for Change Foundation.