Staying Clean in Antigua

Eighteen months ago, two U.S. immigration agents brought 43-year-old Shelley Tennyson Joseph home in handcuffs to a land he hardly knew.

Back in 1980, he had been sentenced to 55 years in prison for committing a rape and armed robbery on St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Joseph recalls that he said to himself: “I can’t serve that time. I’m going to let that time serve me.”

So, amid gang wars and death threats behind 30-foot walls, Joseph learned about plumbing, heating, air-conditioning repair and--mostly--survival.

And when he was released after serving his minimum sentence and sent home to the Caribbean under the United States’ aggressive criminal-deportation policy, he carried with him the attitude that had seen him through prison.

Now Joseph has 140 head of goat and sheep, he’s making $120 a week collecting garbage, and he’s building a house of his own from scrap with his bare hands.

Joseph’s story is the quiet--and, apparently, predominant--counterpoint to bitter Caribbean recriminations over a U.S. deportation policy that has sent tens of thousands of hardened criminals directly from American prisons to the lands of their birth since it became law in 1996.

Although presidents, prime ministers and national security chiefs from Barbados to Jamaica have asserted that the law has fueled local crime, drug trafficking and murder rates by dumping convicts on their tourism-dependent islands, Joseph provides an inspirational reality check.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service statistics show that Caribbean island nations have absorbed 18,103 criminals from American prisons since Congress responded to public demands to reduce prison populations and rid America of foreign-born undesirables by toughening the criminal-deportation process.

More than 80% of the criminals were sent to the Dominican Republic and Jamaica--countries with long-established drug trafficking and organized crime networks.

While independent think tanks say the deportees are strengthening the criminal networks in those two countries, the nation of Antigua and Barbuda is an apt laboratory to illustrate the flip side of the phenomenon.

The 109 convicts from the U.S. who have been sent into the island nation’s population of just 63,000 represent one of the highest per capita rates in the region. And Antigua, like its island neighbors, has seen significant increases in crime and drug trafficking in recent years.

At first, local police officials blamed the deportees.

“America is dumping criminals on these islands,” Assistant Police Commissioner Cardinal King said in February 1999. “Crime is becoming more sophisticated, more international here.”

But after studying the impact over time, both King and Police Supt. Rolsten Pompey now conclude that the former convicts’ influence has been minimal. Police records show that only three of the 109 deportees have been convicted of crimes since they arrived on the island--a ratio similar to that in the region’s other nations.

Although they acknowledge that a few deportees may be committing crimes undetected, police officials insist that the overwhelming majority are law abiders.

Evidence of Ill Effects Called Minimal

“We do not have any evidence that these deportees are creating a great deal of problems,” Pompey said.

“A lot of it, I think now, is environmental,” King added. “Up there in the States, they live with crime. It’s crime, crime, crime. In Jamaica, they go back into a criminal element. You have people being killed every day. But here in Antigua, we are blessed with a civil society. They get back here to where they grew up, and they get back to more peaceful ways.”

Even in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, where a growing number of deportees simply change their identities through illegal passports and then return to the U.S., police officials say that those who leave the crime-ridden cities for the largely peaceful countryside fare far better than their urban counterparts.

And on many of Antigua’s neighboring islands in the eastern Caribbean, police say that those deportees who return to crime are the exception rather than the rule and that most have found new lives in homelands they left in childhood.

For Shelley Tennyson Joseph, his new life is goat farming.

“It’s my dream. I dreamt it every day I was inside. I read about it. I prepared myself,” the wiry, gray-bearded Joseph said after feeding a goat a mango mouth-to-mouth.

“I just want to live comfortable. Uncle Sam says I can’t come back [to the States]. Well, now my attitude is: ‘OK. Been there. Done that.’ ”

Joseph paused. He stood tall in his simple goat pen, spread his arms and took a savoring breath: “This is what it’s all about.”

It wasn’t always that way for this son of a female preacher, who is still delivering sermons on St. Croix, and a father who left when Joseph was born.

For Joseph, the “road to hell” began after his mother migrated with him to St. Croix. He dropped out of the 11th grade and “started hanging around with these guys. I’m not going to say I was lily-white.”

He was 23 when he and four others broke into a tourist resort on the island and staged a brutal armed robbery that included an assault on a woman. Joseph later insisted that he just drove the getaway car, which was registered in his name and later found abandoned.

He fled to Antigua “to lay low” at his grandmother’s house. But local police tracked him down and arrested him on an extradition warrant. He was returned to stand trial on St. Croix.

‘I Could Have Avoided Prison’

Joseph attributes his hefty prison sentence to the fact that he refused to cooperate and give authorities the names of the four others involved in the crime.

“I never squealed on anybody because I wanted to be the kind of person whose word meant something,” he said. “I could have avoided prison.”

After he had spent a year in the overcrowded local jails, authorities took advantage of a federal offer to reduce the prison population by accommodating convicts on the U.S. mainland. Joseph was shipped to the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa.

“You had your skinheads, your ABs--the Aryan Brotherhood--and dirty white boys who get a notch for killing a black. The blacks had the Crips and the Bloods. There were too many killings inside,” Joseph said, wincing at the memory.

“The major cause of death in American prisons is this macho thing,” he added. “You survive by having respect for the other man. In 18 years, I never had one fight. I never joined a gang.

“I ate that time up.”

Joseph studied and worked every day, he said, displaying four prison vocational certificates as proof: “I taught myself to read in jail. I’d take the newspaper and underline words I didn’t understand, then look them up.”

But mostly, he said, “prison for me was a reality check. It made me realize I might have been dead. If you keep living that lifestyle, what I was living in the V. I. [Virgin Islands], that’s where it leads.”

Asked about the assertion that convicts like him are behind the Caribbean’s rising crime, Joseph said: “I’m not a liability. I want to be an asset. And I’d like to think most of us deportees from the islands think that way.”

The day after he landed here, penniless and barred from the nation where he had lived since he was 10, he was not without bitterness for the policy that had sent him home.

“All of my family is right there in the United States. My mother is still in the V. I. I’ve got cousins in Baltimore, Miami and New York,” Joseph said. “And I can’t see them unless they come down here.

“What if my momma dies and they bury her there in St. Croix? Are they going to give me a three-day visa? No way.”

For weeks after he landed, Joseph just walked. He drank in simple sights he’d seen only on television for the preceding two decades: babies, cars, houses, schoolyards, open land and azure sea. He went to his old kindergarten; the teacher remembered him. He found his father, whose absence during his adolescence he blames for his criminality. And he went to work for his dad’s garbage-hauling business--at below minimum wage.

But he also saw a homeland in disrepair--broken streets, corrupt local politics, enduring poverty and growing drug use. So he counseled drug addicts in the streets, sharing the wisdom of 18 years behind bars. He advised neighborhood girls who were pregnant at 15. And he looked after his grandmother Beatrice Adams, now 93.

A Life of Routine but With a New Focus

Today, he still walks several times a week from his grandmother’s two-room clapboard home in St. John’s to his goat pen in Green Castle a few miles south of town. He still sits for hours, gently preaching on the porches of his neighbors.

Yet, as he de-wormed his goats, nursed kids from a bottle and discussed the dynamics and economics of his new life, there was a sense that Shelley Tennyson Joseph--who was named for his mother’s two favorite poets--has somehow turned a corner.

“This is my bankbook now,” he said, beaming as he surveyed the small field of goat droppings, hand-sunk fence poles and patched wire mesh. “This is my devotion.

“And I know in my heart, I’m doing good.”