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.”

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More Black Men Now in Prison System than Were Enslaved

Dick Price |

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“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation.

Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Interest ran so high beforehand that the organizers had to move the event to a location that could accommodate the eager attendees. That evening, more than 200 people braved the pouring rain and inevitable traffic jams to crowd into the library’s main room, with dozens more shuffled into an overflow room, and even more latecomers turned away altogether. Alexander and her topic had struck a nerve.

Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “In fact, crime rates have fluctuated over the years and are now at historical lows.”

“Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” she said, even though studies have shown that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or above blacks. In some black inner-city communities, four of five black youth can expect to be caught up in the criminal justice system during their lifetimes.

As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities.

“What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.”

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A night spent camping with a murderer

This is definitely worth a click and your time….

Luke Whyte

Voices of  Justice

If you travel east on Rt. 299 from the Northern California coast, the wet winds will be suffocated by the mountains’ meticulous calm.

Somewhere out there (I’d say about a tank of gas east of the beach), a dirt road breaks off to the left and ascends through 20 miles of hairpin turns. Where it ends – next to a picnic table in a vacant campground – you’ll find a Ford Bronco inhabited by a 65-year-old bearded man who murdered his twin brother by strangling him to death.

Barry smokes a cigarette beside the Bronco 

What follows is that man’s story, told to me in his words, when we shared that campground together on a cold evening in December of 2010.

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