An addict’s plea: Prison alone is no cure

He got A’s and B’s on his report cards.

He spent his summers playing Little League baseball and going fishing with his father.

He wrestled, played football,  played the trumpet and drums in the marching band.

Then, at age 16, Parker’s life changed forever.

A girlfriend introduced him to marijuana.

Then cocaine.

Parker quit the band and sports.

He dropped out of school.

At 17 he tried methamphetamine for the first time.

By age 20 he was a continual meth user and dealer.

When he married his sweetheart, Leigh, that same year, Parker promised to quit using meth and other drugs.

But his effort to get clean and sober lasted but a few weeks.

He tried to quit again three years later when his daughter, Linsey, was born, but again that stretch of sobriety was short-lived.

When he started using meth, Parker said he felt like Superman. He could work longer and harder and felt like he could do everything better. It wasn’t long, however, until the drug controlled him and he’d do and say anything to get it.

Instead of working longer and harder, he’d become so explosive and undependable that he couldn’t hold a job.

As happens with all addicts, Parker said, he started lying and stealing, then paranoia set in and he became mean and abusive.

His life degenerated into a chaotic quest for money to buy meth. He stole and sold drugs to support his addiction.

“I stole from my parents. I stole from my wife and family. I stole from my employers to get money to buy drugs,” Parker said.

Finding jobs was difficult without a high-school diploma or any formal job training. Once he enrolled in a technical school to learn mechanics, but he said he was too messed up on drugs to finish.

Over the years he did some mechanic and construction work, but mostly he worked as a cook and sold pot, meth and other drugs.

“When I was dealing, I knew the drugs ruined my life. I knew I was hurting people, but I didn’t care,” Parker said.

“I’d have a breakdown, and I’d try to quit. I’d stay clean and sober for a month or so, then I’d go back to it. It is the devil’s drug. I think it is the drug that will tweak the whole world. Hitler was doing it way back when. Look what he did with it,” Parker said.

After more than 20 years of addiction, unemployment, poverty, lying, stealing, abuse, restraining orders, arrests and stints in county jails for dealing drugs, Parker was sentenced, on March 11, 2009, to 22 months in prison for selling meth.

He was 40.

During his first two weeks of incarceration at the Oregon Department of Corrections Coffee Creek intake center in Wilsonville, Parker filled out computer forms that determined his placement status and rated his need for drug treatment and job training.

Parker was hoping he’d be sent to the Powder River Correctional Facility in Baker City, which is one of the state’s three alternative incarceration programs that focus on drug and alcohol treatment.

But instead he was sent to the Snake River Correctional Facility in Ontario, where he said he didn’t get any drug treatment or job training.

“Being addicted to meth is a revolving door — same (expletive), different day. When you start using, you think you can do it a while and quit anytime you want, but if you believe that, you’re fooling yourself,” Parker said.

“I’ve tried to quit many times, but within a week or two, maybe a month at the most, I was right back doing it again. The pull is that strong. I knew it was ruining my life, my wife and daughter left me, I couldn’t hold a job, but I couldn’t stop,” Parker said.

“By the time I was sent to prison, I’d had enough. I knew the only way I was going to get clean and sober was going to prison.”

Parker’s childhood sounds typical.

He was born in Virginia Beach, N.C., and spent most of his childhood in Clarkston, Wash., before moving to Baker City in his mid-30s to look for work and deal meth.

During Parker’s early childhood, his father was a military man and his mother was a homemaker. His father retired after 27 years of military service, and the family moved to Clarkston when Parker was 3.

“I thought we were a typical upper middle class family,” Parker said.

He doesn’t blame his parents for his bad choices.

Had he just said no to that girlfriend at 16, Parker said his life might have turned out much different. Still, he doesn’t spend much time lamenting the past because he can’t change it.

In prison, Parker hoped to complete drug treatment to break his addiction, and he tried to get into job training programs to learn welding, mechanics, or a building trade, but like most inmates in the Oregon correctional system, Parker was told he didn’t qualify for those programs. He says he never received any drug treatment or real job training prior to his release on May 10 of this year, after serving 14 months.

“When I was released I had $100 in my pocket and no job skills. No tools to help detour me from drugs and alcohol.”

Even without treatment, however, Parker said he kicked his drug habit and came out a better person than when he went in.

“I have to say prison saved my life. I’m actually glad I went there,” Parker said. “The only thing I am mad about is they don’t actually have the training or treatment they say they do.

“During the entire 14 months I was in prison, I never once got to speak with a counselor. We communicated back and forth on pieces of paper called kites,” Parker said. “They said they didn’t need to meet me in person because they knew all they needed to know about me from my computer score.

“I told them (via notes) I started doing crank when I was probably 17, and started doing it on a continuous basis from 1985 on,” Parker said. “I told them I’d been an addict all my life, but they still said I didn’t qualify.”

State and national statistics show drug and alcohol addictions are a contributing factor in roughly 80 percent of the felonies that land people in prison, yet the Oregon Department of Corrections provides intense drug and alcohol treatment on a voluntary basis to about 600 of the state’s 14,000 inmates each year, provided they qualify based on computer risk assessments and other factors.

“I think drug or alcohol treatment should be mandatory for everybody in prison, whether they want it or not,” Parker said.

Next to drug and alcohol addictions, Parker said he believes the inability to get a job that pays enough to support a family is the biggest reason people commit crimes.

The National Institute of Justice reported that 60 percent of former prison inmates were unemployed one year after release, and within that first year, about a third of all ex-convicts commit another felony and return to prison.

Parker, however, is luckier than most.

Even without any job training during his 14 months in prison, it took Parker just three months of knocking on doors before he found an employer willing to take a chance and give him a part-time job.

On Aug. 5 he started washing dishes and cooking at a local restaurant.

Leigh said she saw Parker getting depressed over the lack of a job and income during the three months he was unsuccessful looking for work, but his spirits brightened when the restaurant hired him.

“At least now I can pay the electric bill,” Parker said. “It’s hard to maintain your self-respect, as a man, when you are living off your family and charity. That’s one of the things that causes people to turn back to crime, when they can’t  get a job.

“People tend to do what they know to make a living, and for some people, crime is what they know. That’s what they’ll revert back to unless they get training to do something else,” Parker said.

Although his request for drug treatment in prison was rejected, his parents and family offered to pay for drug treatment after he was released from Snake River this spring.

Private drug and alcohol treatment is available on a sliding scale from $50 to $200 per session, but Parker said if you don’t have a job, $50 can be an insurmountable amount of money.

Like many former inmates, Parker’s three-year post prison supervision plan requires him to undergo drug treatment, but provides no money to pay for it.

“How are you going to get $50 if you aren’t working?” Parker asked.

“I have a month to go on my drug treatment” Parker said. “I know some people who have done the 28-day program, but after a while they are right back doing drugs again. I think it takes a more in-depth program, at least 90 days or six months so you can understand the inner part of your addiction.”

He is on a 90-day treatment plan, but said he is willing to extend that if necessary.

Despite everything, his wife, Leigh, who divorced Parker when he went to prison, recently told him she still loves him, and would consider giving him another chance if he completes drug treatment and stays clean and sober.

“Twenty years is a long time to throw away,” Leigh said. “I know this time is going to be different.”

“She told me she was willing to take me back because she feels like she is finally going to have what she always wanted, which was me, clean and sober,” Parker said.

Linsey, 17, said the biggest change she noticed in her dad was that he became a very organized person in prison, whereas he was very unorganized before.

And she said he’s much nicer now that he’s in treatment and off drugs.

Parker’s story is a common one.

Craig Prins, executive director of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, said crime rates began exploding in Oregon and across the nation in the 1960s, in part as a result of widespread drug and alcohol abuse.

According to the FBI Crime Index, Oregon crime rates more than doubled from around 3,000 per 100,000 population in the mid-1960s to more than 6,200 by 1978, and rose another 258 percent by 1985.

Less than a decade later, in 1994, Oregon voters responded to the trend by passing Measure 11, which sets minimum prison sentences for crimes such as murder, first-degree assault and certain sex crimes.

Between 1965 and 2005, the total population incarcerated in state prisons nationwide soared from around 125,000 to nearly 1.4 million, according to the Association of State Correctional Administrators.

However, the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission reported that with the aging of the baby boomer generation, the crime index has been dropping nationwide and in Oregon, where the crime index decreased 24.5 percent from 1995 to 2008.

Statewide, about 14,075 people are locked up in Oregon prisons, down from 14,167 in 2008.

In addition, there are 34,000 offenders statewide on post-prison supervision, which is part of the community corrections program that took a $6.6 million budget cut July 1, according to the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

While some states house criminals for years without offering much in the way of treatment, education, job training or work experience, Ron Miles, communications specialist at the 286-bed Powder River Correctional Facility, said the minimum-security prison is one of three in Oregon where inmates can get comprehensive drug and alcohol treatment,.

“Nobody wants to warehouse inmates,” Miles said.

He said Oregon is a national leader in assessing prisoners’ mental health and drug and alcohol addiction issues, and in developing treatment programs to help them overcome those issues so they can be good citizens by the time they get out of prison.

The prison employs 70 DOC staff, along with 40 employees of New Directions Northwest, the Baker City company that runs the prison’s drug and alcohol treatment program.

A handful of Powder River inmates are also chosen each year to gain work experience in corrections industry jobs provided inside the prison by Step Forward Activities. The inmate workers earn a small wage to assemble printer ink cartridges.

Other alternative incarceration programs around the state provide job training in hair styling, building trades and others, and there’s also another correction industries call center staffed by inmates in Salem.

Miles said 97 percent of inmates will eventually be released, so it behooves society to provide job training and drug and alcohol treatment to reduce the rate of recidivism.

Currently, about a third of all prisoners nationwide commit crimes after release, Miles said.

“When we wind up with people multiple times in prison, they are less likely to change their lives without treatment,” he said.

Unfortunately, due to lack of funding and other issues, Miles said treatment and job training opportunities in Oregon prisons are limited, so a computer-scoring model created from inmate records and answers to computer questionnaires are used to identify and provide treatment and training to inmates who pose the greatest threat of recidivism.

From a former prisoner’s perspective, Parker said he believes the high recidivism rate is due in large part to the failure of lawmakers to fund meaningful job training and drug and alcohol treatment.

Ginger Martin, an assistant DOC director, agrees.

“I agree with people who say that is what we should do,” Martin said. “Putting people in prison longer doesn’t reduce the risk that they will commit a crime in the future.

“We have to address their criminal risk factors, and success in employment and addiction are two of the most significant areas where we could make a difference in the long term,” Martin said. “We know that from the research. It’s just a matter of not having the financial resources to do it.”

Parker said inmates don’t buy that argument. He suggests that getting rid of counselors and letting the corrections officers run the prisons, making prison guards and administrators eat the same food inmates eat, and cutting frills like the walking track built for guards at the Snake River Correctional Facility, would leave more money for treatment and job training.

Parker challenges the notion that having inmates do chores such as mopping floors, scrubbing toilets, washing dishes and cooking constitutes job training.

But Miles said prisoners who do those jobs learn the importance of showing up on time, doing a good job, treating people with respect and other attributes that can make them more employable.

Prins said research shows that in addition to the cost dilemma, some studies show that providing treatment and job training to all inmates might actually be counterproductive.

“What the DOC does well in Oregon is assess risk to re-offend,” Prins said.

He said the computer scores used to assess inmates’ recidivism risk is a process similar to risk assessments done by car insurance companies and lenders.

Studies show that when low- and high-risk offenders are housed or take job training or drug and alcohol treatment together, the overall recidivism rate actually increases, Prins said.

Instead of providing treatment and training to 100 percent of the prison inmates, and therefore wasting the cost of those services on the two-thirds of inmates likely to succeed without it, Prins said the DOC strategy is to focus those services on those most likely to re-offend if they don’t receive treatment and job training.

“The guys who don’t get services are low risk, so we don’t waste money on them,” Prins said.

However, alternative incarceration programs that provide specific treatment and job training programs were provided last year to just 614 of Oregon’s 14,075 statewide prison population, according to Jeff Duncan of the DOC research staff.

Out of 614 receiving a higher level of treatment or job training at alternative incarceration programs, 518, or 84.4 percent, did not re-offend during the first year after their release, while 96, or 15.6 percent, did commit another crime.

That’s less than half the recidivism rate for the overall prison population, which is about 33 percent, Duncan said.

Of Oregon’s 14,075 inmates, 4,595 (32.7 percent) had been in prison previously, he said.

The National Treatment Improvement Study conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services looked at thousands of offenders receiving drug and alcohol treatment in federally-funded facilities, and found that after treatment the number of clients selling drugs decreased 78 percent, while the number arrested for felony crimes declined by 64 percent.

According to the National Treatment Improvement Evaluation Study conducted by the Center for Substance Abuse, treatment costs range from $1,800 to $6,800 per inmate, a relatively small percentage of the nearly $70,000 per year total cost to house one inmate.

A study by the Rand Corporation found that treatment is 10- to 15-times more cost-effective than incarceration.

Parker said he feels confident that with the private drug treatment he is finally getting with his family’s help, combined with his job and the prospect of being reunited with his wife and daughter, he won’t become one of the 33 percent who wind up back in prison.

“I’m breathing free air again, and I have hope,” Parker said.

Now that he’s been sober for nearly 17 months, Parker said he’s more aware and remorseful for the damage his drug dealing and addiction caused, both in the Clarkston area when he was younger, and in Baker City from 2006 until he was sentenced in March 2009.

“I was greedy. I was selfish, but I wouldn’t admit that when I was using. Now that I am clean and sober, I realize I ruined many people’s lives,” Parker said. “I’m sure I caused many family failures and divorces.

“I can’t take any of that stuff back. All I can do is help people realize what meth does,” Parker said. “My advice to kids is don’t fool yourself. Don’t let other people fool you. A lot of people say I am only going to try it once. That’s what I said.”