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When the high wore off, the party moved to a nearby crack house, just blocks from the shelter. At 5:30, the police descended, and Sanders didn't run. They found a small rock of crack in his waistband. "They were very courteous," Sanders said of the police. After being strip-searched and photographed, Sanders sat quietly on the floor of the holding cell, processing the notion that he'd just sent himself back to prison. "I lost my mind. I did it to myself," he said by way of explanation. He made no phone calls.
Then Sanders got lucky. He was charged with only disorderly conduct and sentenced to eight days of community service. But his parole officer would be told of the violation, and his urine would be dirty. Sanders walked to his mother's house in the rain, hoping the water would cleanse the stench of the jail. He told his mother he'd been arrested, leaving out the bit about the drugs. "I had a moment of weakness," he said. "You always have a moment of weakness," she replied.
That following Monday, in another familiar ritual, Sanders prepared to run. He packed his things at the shelter and went to his mother's house to ask for money. But as he sat there facing her interrogation, he changed his mind. "I was on the run for two years once. I know how to do it. But I'm 41 years old. I'm tired of running." So the next day, instead of taking Greyhound south, he went to his parole officer. He walked into her cubicle, as hundreds of others have, sweating, shaking, wondering if he would leave in handcuffs. But after he agreed to commit to a drug-treatment program and stay clean, he got a second chance. "He wants to do the right thing," said officer Thersea Fedrick. "I just don't think he has many friends or many different lifelines."
It used to be that the parole officer was a lifeline, helping choreograph all the different pieces of a parolee's haphazard life. When Fedrick started her career 12 years ago, she had 35 cases. She used to drive parolees to job interviews and treatment programs; she would also refer them to an in-house employment counselor and a psychologist. But those jobs have been cut, and she has 75 cases. "The only time we pick people up now is to take them to Rikers [Island]," she says.
After his "slipup," as Sanders calls it, he started attending drug treatment religiously. For three months he spent 16 hours a week doing custodial work in exchange for welfare. He still had trouble placating his five or six different "bosses," from parole to welfare to his mother. "I can do time. It's living I can't do," he said once. But he had moments of certain victory, like the time Janean gave him a tool kit for Father's Day--his first Father's Day gift ever--and the day his eldest brother trusted him with his phone number. At every family gathering, Sanders took pictures with his disposable cameras until he was begged to stop.