Daring to Care for Women Down on Their Luck

About 25 women are sitting in a small room on a scorching day in Chowchilla, shouting out encouragement, clapping and yelling “Amen!” like they are at a revival meeting.

Brett Anderson, a counselor at Dare U To Care, a South-Central Los Angeles drug and mental rehabilitation program, is preaching the gospel of sobriety to the group, urging the women to continue their recovery when they get out.

This congregation is made up of inmates at the Central California Women’s Facility. Jerri Allen, who has spent 25 of her 39 years in jail, is among them, mostly because of her addiction to drugs. Dare U To Care, she believes, may be her last chance.

When her sentence--for driving someone else’s car without their permission--ends in about five months, the Compton resident says, she will enter Dare U To Care’s residential treatment program and try to reclaim her life. After the meeting, Allen reflected on what she had heard.

“Like the brother was saying, my life is at stake and this is an opportunity,” says Allen, whose short hair is neatly curled and showing traces of gray. “It’s a good thing being around people who are going through the same things you’re going through. I’ll need their help to fight my fears and demons.”

People like Brett Anderson and Dare U To Care Deputy Director Sabrina Parker are on the front lines in the battle to turn around the fortunes of soon-to-be-released inmates like Allen.

Each month, members of the group pile into a van and make the long drive from L.A. to this dusty Central California prison sculpted out of the fertile ground of former almond orchards.

The 6-year-old program, founded by former day-care provider Ruth Hamilton, epitomizes the kind of grass-roots organization that chugs along in the trenches day after day, providing the hands-on treatment that, little by little, helps restore families and communities.

As well as operating a day-care center, Hamilton was a foster mom who saw drug- and alcohol-ravaged mothers lacking education, job and parenting skills, struggling to maintain sobriety.

Hoping to help her South-Central neighbors, she entered Charles Drew University and was trained in drug and alcohol counseling.

The group started with a single house on 120th Street, tending to women who were ex-cons, prostitutes, HIV-infected, mentally ill--many in their 40, 50s and 60s and who had long since given up their children to the foster care system or relatives.

The program now operates five bungalows with a total of 107 beds and includes a men’s program. The goal is to provide a home-like environment, with structured activities and counselors who are like sisters or brothers.

“My goal was to give hope to the hopeless,” Hamilton says.

The group has hired about 20 of its own clients to work in various capacities and half of the 700 people who have walked through its doors have gone on to complete high school or college degrees and find work.

Dare U To Care’s approach is based on a 12-step recovery program and includes group and individual counseling, anger management, mental health treatment, education and vocational training.

The program also helps clients obtain any government benefit checks that clients might be entitled to. The money is pooled to help pay for room and board.

And there is a strong religious theme that underlies the group’s work. Its founders are Christian. Men and women are encouraged to pursue their spirituality in their own way. But nothing is forced.

“The tenets of the 12-step program speak of a higher power,” Parker says. “A strong spirituality is our higher power; it’s what worked for us. We tell our clients, you have to find what works for you.”

In the beginning, Hamilton’s labor of love struggled to pay the bills each month. Often it was only the wages of her husband, Thee, a postal supervisor, that got them through.

But Hamilton built an alliance with Drew University, from which many of the program’s counselors are drawn, and won a contract from the private recovery group Walden House to participate in a parolee rehabilitation program run by the California Department of Corrections. In the last year, at least seven women have entered the program from prison.

Others are referred by word of mouth, the courts and Child Protective Services. Some, like Brett Anderson, manage to find the group after being paroled. Anderson, 39, was released from Chuckwalla state prison less than a year ago. Now, as a counselor, he establishes a visceral connection with the women enrolled in Chowchilla’s in-house recovery program run by Phoenix House.

“I’m an eight-time loser,” he tells the women, prompting them to contemplate their own checkered jail histories.

He was born and raised in South-Central. His parents owned their home and other properties. His father was a sheriff’s deputy, his mother a homemaker.

But such trappings of normality did not shield Anderson. His brother was killed at 7 by a gang member. Anderson was molested by the son of a neighbor whose father worked for the city. He was shot three times. And one night, high on crack, he crawled into his bedridden mother’s room after she had had a stroke, took her hand and forged her signature on a mortgage loan for $5,000 that he smoked up. That’s what being an addict will do, he tells the group of women.

But there is a way out.

“The door opens once you get to know who you are,” he tells them, and adds: “Some of you are going to get master’s degrees and some of you are going to open your own businesses.”

“That’s right,” someone cries out. “Yes we can,” says another. Others, maybe less sure of their fate, sit silently.

After his talk, Leslie, 39, who is serving a 36-month sentence for possession of cocaine, is not sure if she will join the program. But of the people from Dare U To Care, she has no doubts.

“They’re very spirited,” she says. “The house loves it when they come up, because they make the women feel loved.”