Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

What Statistics Can’t Explain About Life on Parole

Erroll Brantley Jr., the subject of a front-page article on Monday, at Hartford Correctional Center.Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Last Saturday my family and I took the ferry to Governors Island, where we happened upon a gallery hosting an exhibit, “Escaping Time: Art From U.S. Prisons.”

Pinned to the wall in an upstairs back room was a bouquet of roses, fashioned out of toilet paper and stained in a palette of tangy pastels. The artist, Jairo Pastoressa, had no access to art supplies during his time on Rikers Island, a woman there told me, so he used Kool-Aid for paint.

She told Mr. Pastoressa’s story passionately. (I later guessed, based on her first name and some internet searching, that she must have been his mother.) He waited six years to go on trial for murder, then finally agreed to a plea deal. When I asked her what happened, she replied, “What happened is the system is broken.”

I bought the roses.

When it comes to criminal justice, which I cover for The New York Times, there are stories — six years awaiting trial, for instance — that are automatic headlines. No matter how you think criminals should be treated, Americans cherish due process.

But “due process” is a deceptively simple phrase. The system — actually thousands of distinct state and local systems that process tens of thousands of people — is so finely grained that lawyers who work in it sometimes do not understand its subtleties and contortions, much less their clients or the public. Though statistics and data are necessary to show the consequences of such complexity, sometimes a bouquet of roses, and the human artist behind it, can say so much more.

So when Matthew O’Neill, a documentary filmmaker at DCTV and the PBS series “Frontline,” and John Kennedy of Purple States came to The Times with a proposal to follow people closely for a year after they were released from prison, we saw our chance. Connecticut, bravely, had agreed to give Matt unusual access. We ended up following 10 subjects, one of whom was Erroll Brantley Jr., whose experiences you can read about here.

There is no question that Governor Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut has been outspoken and eloquent on the reasons to give offenders second chances, making the state a leader in preparing them to re-enter society and — perhaps more important — a leader in the kind of self-evaluation needed for continued improvement. We wanted to know whether the governor’s intentions had trickled down into practice.

The answer was yes, but unevenly. Mr. Brantley’s case showed how parole, while moving toward rehabilitation, sometimes clung to punitive attitudes. As my colleague Timothy Williams will detail in a planned piece, Connecticut is one of the few states to view methadone treatment for addicts in jail as akin to insulin or asthma inhalers. But inmates can still get kicked off the methadone program for minor disciplinary infractions. Presumably, you don’t lose your insulin when you misbehave.

Matt and his team managed to film many key moments that are normally hidden from view. One scene showed what happened when Mr. Brantley brought the girlfriend he is not supposed to be in contact with into the parole office lobby. His officer, irate after several instances of misconduct, snapped a G.P.S. monitor on his ankle.

Some scenes involved routine indignities, as when one parole officer decided to send Vaughn Gresham back to jail for drinking in the halfway house. The mood changed instantly from consultation to arrest: Mr. Gresham, a tall black man, was suddenly on his feet, hands bheind his back as the cuffs went on. “Widen your stance,” he was ordered, then half a beat later, “widen your stance!”

We were also able to see how people are locked into symbiosis with the system, no matter how enlightened the system is trying to be. Watching Rob Sullivan, whose family tree is riddled with fatal drug addiction, and whose story my colleague Audra Burch will tell, I could not help wondering if he was destined for prison from birth. On a 10-question survey meant to measure adverse childhood experiences, four is considered a high score. He got a nine.

Mr. Brantley, we thought, was a different story. We had all identified him as a prospect for success, in part because he was a skilled chef and his mother and girlfriend seemed to offer the stability of a socioeconomic status at least a shade above that of other inmates. We were partial to his view that the parole officers who would not let him live with his girlfriend, whom he planned to marry, were unduly harsh. But when he took the survey, he also scored a nine.

We watched as one after another of our subjects was reincarcerated — six out of 10. The reasons were not simple, nor could they be captured by data points any more than the success stories could be. But no story was more confounding — or more illustrative of the difficulties of getting re-entry right — than Erroll’s.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Piecing Together Parole. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT