The Struggle to Stay Outside the Gates

By Amanda Ripley

Lying in bed late one night last spring, a few months after appearing in a TIME IN DEPTH story about the challenges facing ex-convicts, Jean Sanders evaluated his options. Compared with most men just out of prison, he had it all. After a year of scraping and pleading, he had moved out of a homeless shelter and into a rented room in Brooklyn, N.Y. He had apologized to his mother and grown daughters for his years of drug dealing and addiction, and despite a sense of foreboding, they had taken him back. He had finally found a job, as a gas-station attendant. And the TIME article about his return to society had inspired people to send letters of support and checks totaling close to $2,000. At 42, he was clean and free for the first time in 15 years. "I am on cloud nine. I am going places," he told TIME.

Sanders was one of some 600,000 people to leave prison in 2001, more than ever before. The record was broken again last year. The crowds that filled the prisons in the 1990s are streaming back out. Their return to civilian life is the biggest problem facing the U.S. criminal-justice system. Within three years, most ex-inmates are rearrested.

That night last spring, Sanders got out of bed and walked outside, telling himself he was going to buy cigarettes but knowing he wasn't. Instead, he went to the corner and bought himself a beer. Next came weed and then crack. "I was thinking, Damn, I did it. Then I was like, Give me more," he remembers. Most ex-inmates trying to stay off drugs slip repeatedly, even the ones who eventually succeed. "It's like having a disease, like cancer," Sanders says now. "You can put it in remission, but it can come back, like a demon."

After Sanders began using crack again, the fissures in the rest of his life widened. In April he was fired by the gas station for being too friendly with female customers. Then he did something he never would have done 10 years ago. "One Sunday morning I found myself on the corner looking for drugs when I should have been in church," he says. "I just knew it was not my destiny." Two days later, he took the subway to see his parole officer and turned himself in.

In some states, Sanders would have been sent back to prison. But he was taken to an inpatient treatment program in Queens. It had a tough, institutionalized atmosphere, and was filled with ex-inmates. Sanders sank into depression. He did not call his family to tell them what had happened or where he was. He spent his days contemplating his failures, which disgusted him. When doctors told him his prostate-specific antigen levels were high, which can be a harbinger of prostate cancer, he refused to get a biopsy.

In October, exasperated by the program's rigidity--which made it hard to contact family or go to church regularly--Sanders walked out and spent the weekend at his mother's home in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. He went to his parole officer that Tuesday and was put in handcuffs. Parolees cannot change their address without permission. Finally, his parole officer agreed to let him try another program.

Phoenix House is probably Sanders' last chance. Since Thanksgiving, he has shown signs of progress at the drug program's Bronx center, where he now lives. He has earned permission to look for a job. He has handed out flyers for a cell-phone store. He returned to the gas station to see whether he could get his old position back. Brad Goodman, the owner, told him maybe. "I might be stupid," says Goodman, "but he's a likable guy."

Sanders has been allowed to leave the center on recent Saturdays, going to church and then to his mother's house. His family is quiet around him. "It's like they're holding their breath," he says. His mother has reluctantly agreed to let him move in with her, temporarily, after his scheduled release from Phoenix House on Feb. 24.

Like most who leave prison, he will be returning to the scene of his crimes. When he walks down the street, he is greeted by those he did drugs with over the past two decades. "How you doing?" they ask. "Ain't seen you in a while. You looking good. You need something?"

Today when Sanders talks about the future, his optimism is muted. He once spoke of earning enough to put his 19-year-old daughter through college and take a vacation. Now he just talks about staying off drugs. He has been clean for nine months--and counting.