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On one visit, in May, he waited 20 minutes to be told he needed to submit copies of his court dispositions. Out of a briefcase bursting with official documents, he produced the dispositions with a flourish--he had been to court three times to get them. "I got them," he said, with the satisfaction of a citizen who believes he has finally checkmated the state. Nonplussed, the woman behind the counter asked him for copies. He had only the originals. There was no copier he could use in the building, she reported. "You have to go outside for that."
As Sanders ping-pongs from one fluorescent-lighted lobby to another, it's quickly apparent that he does not need more government oversight. He is booked up with appointments every week. "I'm psycho-socialed out," he likes to say. Each week Sanders is required to attend two drug-treatment meetings in Queens. Once a week, whether he has a job or not, he must appear before his parole officer in Brooklyn. Once a month he must also see his welfare caseworker, an hour away in Harlem. After two months on welfare, he must attend eight hours a day of job training to get $22.50 and $130 in food stamps a month. Some weeks he submits three urine samples for three different programs.
He has done all these things in the belief that they are, mostly, helpful. But the ordeal leaves him feeling drained--and watched. One day, as he shuttled between housing and welfare appointments, he started to buckle under the scrutiny--he added up all the people he had to report to, including his family, and he ran out of fingers. When he missed a drug-treatment meeting to go to a job interview, he had to defend himself to an irate caseworker. "It's like they got a rope around your neck, a rope around your feet, and they just tug on you because they can," he said.
That marionette-style supervision produces a common lament among ex-offenders and those who advocate for them. "The expectations placed on the parolee are disproportionate to what they can assimilate," says Carol Shapiro, head of Family Justice, a national nonprofit group focused on prisoner re-integration. "People are looking over their shoulders waiting for them to fail." It would not require more money to improve and coordinate these programs, she says. It would just require more smarts. At Gowanda Correctional Facility in upstate New York, Sanders went through a prerelease prep program. But all the information seemed outdated or useless. No one from the state's housing, welfare or Medicaid services came to help the soon to be released begin the paperwork chase, he says. So when Sanders came out and started the process, he had to wait the customary 45 days to receive health care. Those first days are precarious ones, especially for recovering addicts. Says Stanley Bates, who grew up with Sanders and became a corrections officer at New York City's Rikers Island jail: "The system is designed to make these guys fail."
On a Friday afternoon in June, four months after his liberation and with precious little accomplished, Sanders leaned back in a chair and took a deep pull off a crack pipe. Nothing he had done since his release had felt more familiar. He had spent the day helping an acquaintance move, then wound up in the empty living room as a crack pipe was passed around. He declined on the first round. The next time he reached out. The first hit is always free.