Living with Intention: New opportunities for a life of sobriety

This article is a feature on my friend, John L.  Please join me in congratulating him by posting comments of encouragement for continuing sobriety and staying OUT!!

Story by Dixie Reid | Photo by Tim Engle

John Lewis Sullivan was addicted to drugs at age 13, stealing to support his habit and generally making mischief of varying degrees. He’s since spent 18 of his 42 years in jail or in California’s prison system.

“I’d never been out a whole year until I decided to change my life,” Sullivan says. “Don and his program helped me.”

Don Troutman, a recovering alcoholic, is the founder of Clean & Sober Intentional Living, a communal-living program for people committed to a lifetime of sobriety. It’s the oldest and largest such community in Northern California, with 15 residences in Orangevale and Fair Oaks.

“After they leave treatment, a lot of people think they have it made,” says Troutman. “You get a guy detoxed and send him through treatment and then put him back into his old environment, and he’ll start using again. The expectation is that he is what he is, and everything he’s learned goes away.”

Troutman got into the recovery-home business in 1989 as a way to keep himself sober after his brother died of an overdose. He calls himself “Resident No. 1.” He currently has 130 men and women in his program, all determined to stay clean for life.

Rent ranges from $450 to $795 a month, and the average length of residency is two and a half years. The longest anyone has been in the program is 16 years, making Sullivan a relative newcomer.

“Last winter,” Sullivan says, “I was pretty much homeless, running the streets, stealing copper to supply my drug habit. I was living in a tent on the river, and I just said, ‘God, there’s got to be more than this.’ I hit my rock bottom. I didn’t want to do it no more. I was freezing cold, and I was getting the flu. I went and told my parole officer that I needed help.”

Sullivan was sent to an intensive drug-use modification program and afterward moved into a recovery home.

“The people in the house weren’t serious about their program. They were still drinking,” Sullivan says. “So I got a hold of Don Troutman and told him my situation.”

Continue Reading @ ComstockMag.com

Majority of third-strike inmates are addicts, records show

Marisa Lagos and Ryan Gabrielson

Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle: Inmate counselor Vincent Russo talks about healthy relationships at an Addiction Recovery Counseling meeting at San Quentin State Prison in August.

 

Convicts imprisoned under California’s three strikes law are no more inclined to high-risk “criminal thinking” than other inmates, but are far more likely to be addicted to drugs and alcohol, according to data from the state prisons department.

The psychological, substance abuse and education profiles of thousands of inmates – obtained and analyzed by California Watch and the San Francisco Chronicle – reveal that the state imposes especially lengthy sentences on felons with substance abuse problems who have not necessarily committed violent offenses.

But according to their profiles, these inmates would pose no more a threat to public safety than a non-three-strikes inmate.

The never-before-released data could play an important role for critics and supporters of California’s three strike’s law, amid a dramatic year for criminal justice reform. Thousands of inmates are being transferred to county jails under a realignment plan championed by Gov. Jerry Brown, and voters are being asked to alter the state’s three strikes initiative with a ballot measure in November.

The act of judging a person’s criminal proclivity is steeped in a long and controversial history of guesswork and junk science. But modern social scientists and criminologists say California’s prisoner surveys ranking “criminal thinking” – which have been verified through rigorous studies of recidivism rates – are reliable tools to gauge risk factors and psychological makeups.

The data shows that about one-third of all prisoners – including second- and third-strikers – need cognitive therapy to deal with their criminal tendencies, the impulse that drives them to break the law. But the need for substance abuse rehabilitation is overwhelming among inmates serving two- or three-strike sentences.

Some prison reformers say the profiles show a vast need for additional money and focus on drug treatment programs. But for supporters of the state’s three strikes law, a person’s motivation for committing a crime is far less important that taking habitual criminals off the street for a long time.

Continue Reading @ California Watch

 

Related articles

• Data on inmates’ risk level could fuel Three Strike debate (fresnobee.com)
• Drug rehab called key to avoid 3rd strike (sfgate.com)
• Life in prison – for stealing a leafblower (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)