Barbra Scrivner thought winning clemency was the hard part. Then she got out.
By Liz Goodwin, May 29, 2015 - https://www.yahoo.com/politics/barbra-scrivner-thought-winning-clemency-was-the-120128031516.html
On a sunny day just a few months after she was released from federal prison, Barbra Scrivner drove three blocks from her ranch-style home on a quiet street in Fresno, Calif., to the Walgreens on the corner, tottering on her wedge heels as she got out of the car. After sending out her résumé to dozens of nearby businesses, she had finally landed a job interview, to be a sales associate at the store.
Scrivner clutched her résumé, but she also brought what she considered a secret weapon of sorts: a letter sent by President Barack Obama after he set her free last December. The single sheet was hand-signed — Scrivner moved her fingertips over the signature to check that it wasn’t a copy —and was full of encouragement from the president. She planned to show her interviewer at Walgreens the letter, so he would know she wasn’t just like any other ex-felon fresh out of prison.
But once the interview began, it moved so fast that Scrivner never felt like there was a good time to bring up the letter. The manager scanned her résumé quickly — and asked her what “DCI Dublin,” her former employer, was.
“I’ve never heard of that company,” he told her.
“Well, it’s because it’s a prison,” Scrivner answered nervously.
The manager assured her he wouldn’t judge her for that, that he’d give her a “fair shake,” just like any other applicant. Scrivner had heard that before, as employer after employer turned her down. Just a month earlier, she had been escorted from the premises of a call center company after her interviewer learned she was a felon. The Walgreens manager asked her how she had handled various customer service conundrums in the past, such as a dissatisfied, difficult customer. Scrivner paused to think about it and then said that when she worked in the prison kitchen and laundry, fellow inmates were often angry and rude to her, and she always managed to deescalate the situation.
When she left the interview, she felt panicked. She should have shown him Obama’s letter, but now it was too late. She opened it up and read it again in the parking lot.
“I am granting your [clemency] application because you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around,” Obama wrote to Scrivner. “It will not be easy, and you will confront many who doubt people with criminal records can change.”
“I believe in your ability to prove the doubters wrong,” the president said.
That’s exactly what Scrivner wants to do — prove the doubters wrong. And as it turns out, an important piece of Obama’s legacy rests on Scrivner and hundreds of prisoners like her doing just that — beating the odds and staying out of trouble. In his most ambitious criminal justice initiative, the presidentplans to release hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of federal prisoners who have served 10 years or more on a nonviolent drug charge, and his Justice Department has tasked a team of private lawyers to sift through the thousands of applications that have poured in since the unprecedented program was announced last year. (The Obama administration has said there is no estimated number of clemency petitions the president will eventually grant.) His unusual letter to Scrivner and the handful of other prisoners he’s let out so far shows that he wants the beneficiaries of the program to defy the trend of high recidivism among the nation’s ex-convicts. History will judge him based on their success.
Freeing prisoners is a test of political will; finding ways for them to successfully reintegrate into society is a test of smart policy and governance. The Obama administration has supported programs that help prisoners succeed in life outside, and now, more than ever, they’ll find out if those programs work.
Scrivner’s own trajectory from the euphoria of freedom after 21 years in prison to the grinding, daily realities of job discrimination and family troubles shows how difficult it is for prisoners to succeed once they’re free — even with a letter from the president in their pockets.
‘I had a better life in prison’
More than 20 years ago, when Scrivner was a 27-year-old new mother, federal agents busted her husband on drug charges. Scrivner fell behind on the bills and called him in prison to ask for help. She was worried that she and their baby were going to get kicked out of their apartment. Her husband sent some of his friends with a few ounces of meth, which she delivered to pay the bills. Less than a year later, when the whole drug ring was rounded up and arrested by the feds, Scrivner was slapped with 30 years in prison after she refused to testify against her husband and his friends.
Though she was addicted to meth and knew her husband dealt drugs, she had almost no involvement in his business except for the month she transported meth when he was in prison. She couldn’t believe she was now serving a 30-year sentence, as if she were a kingpin. Scrivner tried to appeal her case several times but lost. After the reality sank in, she passed the long years making intricate needlepoint pillows and tapestries and looking forward to visits from her daughter, who was only 2 years old when she was locked up, and her father, who raised her baby for her. In 2005, Scrivner applied for a presidential commutation, with the support of the judge who sentenced her. The judge said he would have given her 10 years, not 30, if he could have, but that mandatory minimum drug laws had tied his hands.
Still, Scrivner’s applications were rejected — first by President George W. Bush and then by Obama. Scrivner, who was diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder in prison, attempted suicide several times, driven into despair by her petitions’ failures. Then, she got a break. Nearly a year after the Justice Department announced Obama’s new clemency push, Scrivner’s commutation request was finally approved.
After more than two decades behind bars, Scrivner got off a bus in Fresno, Calif., in January a free woman. But she was five months too late to see her father, who died of lung disease in August. With her 23-year-old daughter, Alannah, Scrivner lives in the house her father owned for more than 40 years. She cries every time she talks about her dad, a somewhat stern builder and welder who raised her daughter for her when she was sent to prison. “You just need to hold on, it’s only a couple more months,” she told him. She said she was sure that this time she would get clemency. “I think he was excited about it, but I think he also felt that he would not make it,” Scrivner said, sitting at her dad’s kitchen table and wiping the tears from her eyes.
With her father’s death, Scrivner became the adult of her new household, even though after 21 years in prison, she lacked many basic skills. She found grocery stores and dollar stores confusing. She lost a résumé she painstakingly created on the computer, a constant source of frustration. Shortly after she came home from prison, Scrivner realized that her daughter, Alannah, had relapsed into her own meth addiction and had stopped checking in with her parole officer.Scrivner desperately did not want to be sucked back into her old world of petty crime and addiction, even as she also felt obligated to take care of her daughter.
A few years earlier, Alannah was arrested for possession of meth and temporarily lost custody of her son, Draydon, who is now 4 years old. Shortly after her mom came home, Alannah left Draydon with Scrivner for about a month, signing over custody to her. She went to live with friends because she was worried the police would come to the house to arrest her for absconding from parole, which could get her mom in trouble. Scrivner was happy to see her grandson, but she felt overwhelmed and uncertain about the future. She wanted to get a job and get established as quickly as possible, but instead she stayed home babysitting her grandson and wondering how the bills would get paid.
“Pretty much every day I would cry,” Scrivner said, choking up at the memory. “Because it’s not what I wanted to get out for. There were a couple of times where I was like, ‘I had a better life in prison.’”
And while she had cleaned her father’s house from top to bottom, clearing the cobwebs and removing the scent of cigarette smoke, she also knew that she probably wouldn’t be able to stay there. Her father had taken out a reverse mortgage on the place seven years earlier, and the home was in foreclosure. Though she hoped her older brother could get a loan to help them save the place, it seemed unlikely, especially since she still hadn’t been able to find a job.
Scrivner spent most days watching cartoons with Draydon, and hiding her tears when she began to feel hopeless and afraid for their future.
At one point, she texted her brother, who lives in Portland, that she felt like she was drowning. “Go in the backyard, take a deep breath, watch the sunrise,” he wrote back. Scrivner answered that the sunrise wasn’t going to get her a job. “I understand that, sis, but you also need to enjoy that you are out,” he told her.
Constructing a whole life
Criminal justice experts call the process of getting out of prison and then reintegrating back into society “reentry,” and it’s universally recognized as an incredibly challenging — and for some, impossible — task.
“Reentry is all about constructing a whole life,” said Ann L. Jacobs, the director of the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College in New York City. “You have to figure out every aspect of it.” The best predictor of whether a person leaving prison will be able to reenter society with success is how supportive and helpful the individual’s family is when he or she gets out.
“Family support is critical in successful reentry,” said Nancy La Vigne, director of the Justice Policy Center at the nonprofit Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. “All manner of support, moral support and tangible support.”
In the federal system, inmates are moved from prisons to halfway houses or home confinement to provide a structured environment before their full release. Scrivner is on home confinement until mid-June and must call and check in with authorities at the local halfway house several times a day. The staff there asks her to look for work, and tells her she must volunteer if she doesn’t get a job within a couple of months. After her home confinement is over, she is under supervised release for as long as five years. She will check in with a court officer periodically and undergo drug testing. Any missteps could land her back in prison.
According to criminal justice experts, people who have served longer sentences tend to recidivate at a lower rate than those who have served shorter ones because they have typically aged out of the peak offending years by the time they’re let out of prison. Obama’s clemency program is aimed at prisoners who have served at least 10 years, which will likely mean a lower recidivism rate for these ex-prisoners than average.
The Obama administration has attempted to tackle recidivism. Former Attorney General Eric Holder created the Reentry Council in 2011 — a group of employees from 20 federal agencies who propose rules and laws that help prisoners reintegrate into society. Recently the group proposed changing child support rules, so that child support debt doesn’t keep accruing for parents who are incarcerated, often leaving them tens of thousands of dollars in debt once they’re released. The president also supports legislation to increase education opportunities for prisoners still incarcerated.
But the average recidivism rate for the more than half a million people who have been let out of state and federal prisons every year since 1990 remains high. One 2005 study found that 75 percent of released state offenders were arrested again within five years of getting out, and half of them were back in jail. The rate for federal ex-cons is closer to 40 percent, accordingto a different 2005 study. Many of these people were imprisoned for parole violations.
Scrivner has to pass drug tests and check in with the government for five more years or she could end up back in prison, all while attempting to care for her daughter, who has had her own run-ins with the law.
‘I need to look out for myself’
After Scrivner spent a lonely month with her grandson, Alannah turned herself into her parole officer, served four days in the county jailfor her earlier failure to report to him, and then came back home with her girlfriend, Marissa. The three women and Draydon now live in the two-bedroom house together in relative peace, though they are all concerned about losing the house this summer, when the bank is expected to finally sell it off.