Pubdate: Wed, 19 Jan 2005
Source: Wisconsin State Journal (WI)
Copyright: 2005 Madison Newspapers, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wisconsinstatejournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/506
Author: Phil Brinkman
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)

PRISONS - FREEDOM AND THE STING OF REALITY

Clutching a cardboard box holding his meager belongings, Delmarcus
Burnette stepped into a cold and clammy October morning and toward
freedom.

Still wearing his dingy prison greens, smartened up with a new pair of
bright white LeBron James basketball shoes, Burnette lopes, smiling,
toward the gate of Fox Lake Correctional Institution. He nods to the
correctional officer who checks his face against the mug shot in his
hand - the last line of defense in a series of redundant safety
measures at the medium-security prison - before ushering him through
the gate.

As the van taking him back to Madison turns out of the prison parking
lot and slips through the fog, Burnette sinks back into his seat, a
look of ease spreading over his boyish face. It's his first taste of
freedom after two years behind bars for selling crack cocaine.

"This is the best day of my life. I knew it was going to come one
day," he said, on his way to a Madison halfway house where
correctional officials can monitor his progress at
reintegration.

Despite his optimism, Burnette is re-entering society at a tremendous
deficit. Like thousands of other young men who will be released from
state prisons in the coming year, he's young, has no money, no car, no
apartment and zero job prospects. Although he earned his high-school
equivalency degree in prison, he has worked exactly one job in his 21
years, a two-week stint in the back of a fast-food restaurant washing
dishes, baking biscuits, dumping hot grease.

Released under what's called "extended supervision," a period of
court-ordered monitoring following his prison sentence, Burnette has a
two-in-three chance of being re- arrested within the next three
years. Nearly half of the people admitted to Wisconsin prisons each
year were there before.

Prison hasn't exactly improved Burnette, who speaks in a quiet,
dismissive monotone, the words spilling out in an endless stream
salted with obscenities. He fancies himself a hit with the ladies. He
says he was wrong to be selling drugs but can't say he won't go back
to it if things don't work out.

Weeks before his release, he dropped $90 on a pair of Nikes and some
new underwear, leaving just $21 to his name. He expected his
ex-girlfriend (whom he calls "my baby's mother" and has been ordered
not to have any contact with) to help him out. When she doesn't
deliver, he's contemptuous. Didn't he take care of her when he was
still dealing, buying her clothes and a car?

Helping Burnette become a law-abiding, tax-paying member of society is
going to be a challenge. But the alternative is spending more than it
would take to send him to one of the nation's finest colleges to spend
another term at Fox Lake.

Yet, it's precisely here, when they are back in the community, when
they pose the greatest risk to the public, that the state spends the
least to supervise and, if necessary, punish offenders. On average,
taxpayers pay more than $28,000 a year to keep someone in prison while
devoting an average $2,000 a year to watch a person on probation or
parole.

It's also the moment when there is perhaps the best chance of turning
offenders away from crime by offering useful help finding housing, a
job, drug counseling or other support. Nothing motivates a person to
stay clean like the new-found taste of freedom following a period of
incarceration, offenders and those who work with them say.

"People who control the purse strings don't feel this population is
worthy," said Gerald Thomas, a Madison psychologist who works with
returning offenders. "(They think) people who commit crimes don't need
to be assisted."

Easy money in drugs

Growing up in Chicago, Burnette had a fairly ordinary childhood. His
mother walked him to school until eighth grade. But the family was
poor, and that wore on him.

"Going to school with holes in your shoes, same pants on (every day),
your mother can't go to no department store. Shoot," he remembers.
"You're like, 'Man, I want what he got. I want what you got. Those
clothes are fine.'. "

He found those things came easily when you sell crack.

Like many dealers, he says he's never tried the stuff himself. He was
turned off to it since his father, an addict, once unplugged the
family's TV while he and his brother were watching it to sell it to
buy crack. When he started selling, Burnette said, users would come to
him begging for a hit, willing to do anything for it, even have sex
with him.

It didn't inspire much sympathy, nor did he feel any particular
responsibility for his part in fueling the cycle of addiction and crime.

"If they're going to kill themselves, it's on them; I want some money,
too, you know what I'm saying?" he said. "If I don't do it, somebody's
going to do it. Me stopping ain't going to change the world."

He tried working once, but quit after his first pay check. "It was,
like, seventy-some dollars, then they took out taxes, so it was, like,
sixty-something," he said. "I could have made that soon as I stepped
out the door if I was selling drugs. . . . I went to get me some
cigarettes and weed and liquor and I was broke."

Burnette followed a girlfriend to Madison, where he knew no one but
eventually found a niche in the local drug market. They had a child,
but they fought; she got an order of protection against him. He got
arrested for dealing, and soon was earning 17 cents an hour in his
prison job.

A job, finally

When he was released in October, the Department of Corrections put him
up in a halfway house on Madison's East Side where his movement could
be restricted and where he was ordered to participate in counseling -
for drugs and criminal thinking.

Initially, he was allowed to leave only to look for work, and was
required to call in frequently. But staff suspected he was going to
the mall or seeing his girlfriend. He denied it. A month after his
release, he said he had filled out 50 to 60 applications and
interviewed for five service jobs at area restaurants and stores to no
avail.

"They don't know what's going on. They ain't never been to prison, so
they don't know how hard it is out here," he complained about the
staff at the halfway house. "I got braids in my head. Man, nobody
going to really, too much, hire me."

Eventually, the staff got fed up. In November, Vicki Trebian, the
halfway house program manager, decided he'd have to go. The private
facility, which contracts with the Department of Corrections and has a
long waiting list, simply needed his bed for someone else.

"We need people who want to be here and who are going to work on
stuff," she said, scheduling a meeting with his case manager and
parole officer for the next day.

Against all odds, Burnette got a job that same day. Trebian was told
as the group met to discuss his case. He was allowed to stay.

It's a temporary job bagging beef jerky at a plant in New Glarus. To
get there, Burnette forces himself to wake up at 3 a.m., fixes a sack
lunch then hikes four miles to a Madison temp agency, where he catches
a ride with others working at the same company. He's getting $7.50 an
hour.

"I think that once he got the job, it became a pride thing: He wanted
to make it work," Trebian said. "He's really done a 180 here.
Employment is always a big thing for these guys."

Burnette's outlook is less sunny.

"It's good I got a job and stuff," he said. "I probably wouldn't have
had one if I just got out" without the halfway house. But he also says
"it's no big deal."

"I got, like, probably, $400 saved up. I need some shoes. I need some
clothes. That's going to be gone real quick."

He thinks of going back to selling drugs, then thinks of his daughter
and how much longer he could get locked up if he's caught. Then just
as quickly, he's thinking about that money again.

"When all else fails (there's) dope," he said.

The contradictions continue, and one can almost sense this impulsive
young body waiting for a push one way or another.

"I like working. I like the fact that it's legit," Burnette said.
"It's crossed my mind not to even sell drugs no more. I'm doing good.
It's showing me the way to budget my money. I can't just go out and
spend it cause I'm working for it, not out there selling dope. (But) I
can go spend that money real fast. Easy come easy go."
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MAP posted-by: Derek