Speaking With Conviction

The punishment process not only locks up the guilty, it also locks family members on the outside in a tangle of financial and emotional upheavals and a maze of prison system rules.

The problem is vast and growing.

“Aside from the disruption of basic ties, the criminal justice system and the bureaucracy can be intimidating to almost everybody--especially to the undereducated without funds,” says Mary Weaver, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of Friends Outside.

The group, she says, is dedicated “to reducing the effects of incarceration on families, particularly children of prisoners who are at high risk of themselves becoming incarcerated.”

Southern California funnels more people into jails and prisons than any other part of the country. More than 142,000 men and women are housed in the state’s 32 correctional institutions, with another 97,500 on parole and nearly uncountable thousands more in city, county and federal slammers.

“California’s annual state budget for the warehousing and maintenance of prisoners is $3.6 billion and growing,” Weaver says. “The state ranks first in that category and 40th, among all states, in public funding for education.”

With an annual budget of $200,000, Friends Outside works to minimize the impact on the families of convicts at a time when politicians see more gain from demanding longer prison terms than from working to cure the causes of crime. Last year, the organization responded to assistance requests from 4,338 clients.

Founded in 1955 in Santa Clara, Friends Outside focused its energies on spouses and children knocked off balance by a prolonged incarceration.

It was quickly discovered that family worries and problems outside were frequently the result of problems inside. Volunteers were soon as familiar with the visiting rooms of San Quentin and Folsom as they were with the lobbies of governmental agencies.

The local chapter--based in Pasadena with satellite offices in Watts and Long Beach--recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. It was suggested by the late federal Judge William P. Gray and organized by the late Rosemary Goodenough and Martha Jane Dowds, wife of a superior court judge, “whose status,” Weaver says, “gave Friends Outside immediate access to the system, credibility and influence.”

Now it has more than 100 volunteers, including Joyce Ride, mother of former astronaut Sally Ride, who spends her Sundays visiting women incarcerated for killing their batterers. Such widespread support “sends the message that respected, concerned citizens know how to see through short-term prejudices to accomplish important, longer-term needs,” Weaver says. “To give hope to those who are in a seemingly hopeless situation.”

Friends Outside’s range of services expanded when it became involved in the convicts’ final phase: release, either on parole or after having “done it all,” jailhouse jargon for completing a sentence.

“More than 60% of ex-felons return to prison within six months if they do not secure a job offering a livable wage,” Weaver says. The organization works with the families of former or soon-to-be released felons, helping them get reacquainted with each other and with life outside.

“They’re the only single, unified group that is there from the slam down to the yard and back to the bricks,” is the way one ex-convict describes his experiences with Friends Outside.

Former Pomona gangbanger Rufino Cordero, 28, attributes the turnaround in his life entirely to the help he received from Friends Outside.

“After doing nine years in Folsom for assault, I didn’t know where to look for a job,” he says. “But Friends [Outside] hooked me up with a telemarketing position [his first legitimate job] and now I’ve got a wife, a kid, a car and insurance for the first time in my life. It’s a great feeling.”

Kathryn Kelly, a businesswoman from Rancho Palos Verdes, is typical of those who find the rules of the Department of Corrections mystifying. Her brother, who has been in and out of prisons for 20 years because of drug and alcohol problems, was losing his teeth. Unable to get proper treatment for him, Kelly learned of Friends Outside through a police officer acquaintance.

“Friends Outside have a voice that helps you get things done,” Kelly says. “They got me access to my brother’s prison counselor and my state assemblyman.”

Soft-spoken and self-effacing, Weaver consistently tries to deflect credit from herself for the organization’s achievements, extolling the volunteers and her seven-person staff.

She looks miscast as someone who could be effective in the nether world of society’s outcasts. Yet her record since taking over as executive director of L.A.’s Friends Outside in 1990 shows she’s not only caring and concerned, but a tireless fund-raiser as well.

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The first clue that Mary Weaver trusts the beat of her own heart is on the bulletin board in her tiny office deep within Pasadena’s First Congregational Church.

Thumbtacked there is a personal letter from Indiana University’s hard-charging basketball coach Bobby Knight. It stems from her days as a student at IU, which she attended against the preference of her family--mother, father, brother and sister all graduated from Purdue University, the Hoosiers’ bitter upstate rival.

“I grew up in Delphi, Ind., a town of about 2,500 people, where my proudest childhood accomplishment was catching the greased pig at the county fair,” Weaver says.

“I never related well to people in my little town, except in a very superficial way. . . . Headlines were always being made somewhere else. Strangely enough, I also felt victimized, meaning that I sensed decisions were being made that affected me but over which I had no control.”

Upon earning her degree in English literature in 1978, Weaver visited a girlfriend who was with the Peace Corps in Honduras.

“The conditions were positively appalling. There was only cold running water two hours a day and people had potbellies from amoebas they had gotten because of a lack of sanitation. The children’s minds were poorly developed because their nutrition was so bad. It was an incredibly oppressive environment, offering nothing to no one.”

Although her plans were for a short visit, she ended up spending six months, taking two part-time jobs teaching English in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Then she traveled extensively throughout Central America, “naive to the dangers that were present for North Americans at that time,” she adds. She moved to Los Angeles in 1980.

“Over the next seven years, I worked as a waitress and a model, but I wasn’t trying to get into show business. Then, in 1983, I married a Caltech graduate from Pakistan, whom I did love but whom I married because his boss had reneged on a promise to help him obtain his green card, placing him in jeopardy of being departed.”

It was a move her Midwestern friends and relatives had trouble understanding and accepting. (She later divorced; her ex-husband is a film director.)

Weaver started volunteering at Friends Outside in 1988.

“In the beginning, I had virtually no knowledge of the criminal justice system and was pretty steeped in the ‘rugged individualism’ mentality with which I grew up. I tended to think that our clients had created their own problems and should be able to work through them. But I enjoyed performing skills the office needed, such as organizing files and typing, so I stayed around. After a few months, I was offered a clerical position.

“Slowly, my mind-set began to change. I heard people talk about problems that were beyond belief, certainly beyond anything I had ever experienced. I think it was Martin Luther King who said, ‘How can people be expected to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps when they don’t even have boots?’

“And then something as destructive and powerful as crack is introduced to the ‘porous’ lives of persons in poverty and there is no wonder, at least to me, why so many people have the problems they do.”

Becoming executive director was another turning point. As she remembers it, “Beyond wanting to feel that I was helping with a social problem, I was motivated by the anger I felt at our state’s policy on incarceration.

“I am not an abolitionist. There are persons for whom there are no reasonable alternatives but prison. But, I also believe we have lost our balance. We have become so enraged by heinous crimes that we have lost our perspective with regard to how we can address the problems of less notorious and dangerous lawbreakers.

“The families and the at-risk children of criminals are paying a very high price. And we, as a society, are paying a very high price too.”