Over and Over Again -- Westword

In case you missed this article in last year's Westword. Things haven't changed. People are being released homeless at a staggering rate and our prison population is still being driven by the recidivism factor of parole revocations. The drivers aren't new crimes, they are technical violations of parole conditions.

OVER AND OVER AGAIN

Spending half a billion dollars on new prisons won't solve the state's biggest crime problem: the staggering failure rate of parole.

By Alan Prendergast

Published: April 6, 2006
Having been deep in it most of his life, John "Jake" Johnson can smell trouble coming. So last year, when the fifty-year-old inmate found out he would be paroling from a private prison in Trinidad to a homeless shelter in downtown Denver, the news smelled very bad indeed.

"I told my case manager,'I can't go back to a shelter,'" he recalls. "You put me in that atmosphere, people drinking and shooting dope and smoking crack, and man! I can't help what I am."

What Johnson is, among other things, is an alcoholic and a thief. He started drinking heavily in his teens, around the time his father died and his large family had to move from an upper-middle-class neighborhood in east Denver to a housing project on the west side. "That changed my life right there," he says. "I'm not using it as an excuse, but it might have been a defining moment. My dad died, we went to the projects, and that was it." He dropped out of high school, picked up a juvenile record, then an extensive adult rap sheet -- burglary, robbery, auto theft -- that has kept him weaving in and out of the prison system for most of the past three decades.

Throughout his erratic criminal career, Johnson has been consistent in one area: He's been a thoroughly unsuccessful parolee. Each time he received parole, he'd get a job, start drinking -- and end up going back to prison on a parole violation. The first few times that happened, he'd complete his sentence behind bars ("kill his number," in convict lingo), then return to the streets.

Read Alan's article here in Westword