From Drugs and Jail to a Second Act Changing Lives

“I’m here to do whatever I can to help these women get back on their feet.”

Chalia Broudes is a big believer in second chances.

Growing up in Oakland, she was the eldest of six, and the go-to sibling helping her single mom and brothers and sisters navigate “difficult” circumstances.

Not one to dwell on her past, she briefly fills in her background with words like abuse, crystal meth, homelessness and living in squalor, burglary and jail. She says she is still healing from the blurry nine years she moved to Atlanta, then Texas and back to northern California.

It is a past Chalia, 34, wants to lock in a closet behind her. Today she is dedicated to focusing her energy and 24/7 work life on reaching out to help other women struggling with addiction, and who also are experiencing their second chances. She is committed to raising the voices of women who may have unwittingly gotten themselves mired in crime and other horrible situations, but who now are re-starting their lives.  

In September Chalia will be two years sober.

Today, she is an ambassador for Home Free, San Francisco-based trauma-informed reentry program for criminalized survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. She’s also enrolled in Five Keys charter schools program, studying for her GED. College is next on her bucket list. Prior to Home Free, Chalia worked for Five Keys’ Navigation Centers for the unhoused.

At Home Free, Chalia helps women recently released from prison. For some, she will be helping them apply for social security IDs. For others, she’s the tech advisor for setting up an iPhone or new laptop. For others, she is the companion for women who have been imprisoned for decades on their first trek to a happy place they’ve only dreamed about for years: the grocery store.

Driven by her mission

Chalia is passionate about her mission: “I’m here to do whatever I can to help these women get back on their feet.”

She can empathize with their suffering and knows firsthand what it feels like to be trapped. She calls it “being free from our narrow place.”

“My narrow place was when I was on drugs,” says Chalia. “I did not ever think I was going to stop until I went to jail for five months then God had something different planned. He gave me a second chance then, and the narrow place started to open wide doors to a new life. Then the doors started to open like a domino effect.”

Bring hope and faith to the women of Home Free

For the women of Home Free, she is a godsend.

Karen Souder, a resident, says: “Chalia has been my rock here! The one I can totally trust and talk to no matter what the situation is. Her moral values and beliefs bring a feeling of home and love to me. She inspires me and lifts me up when I am feeling alone and discouraged. She enlightens Home Free with hope and faith and empowers us to keep going and improving ourselves. She is fair and honest and truly has a
good heart.”

These days, the simple things are what give her great pleasure.

“I love cooking, even cleaning and going to movies is my favorite,” Chalia says. “I’m very tapped into my spiritual side and know God has plans for me to help others. I love helping others and know that no matter what anyone has been through, they always deserve a second chance.”

Sometimes, she admits: I still struggle with believing in myself, having the courage to start something that is not finished and being good enough. Working with Five Keys helped and still helps me a lot. I have a great support team so I take it day by day.”

About Five Keys

Five Keys was founded in 2003 by the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department as the first
accredited charter high school in the nation to provide diploma programs for adults in county jails. Today Five Keys serves 30,000-plus Californians annually, spanning 14 counties in 25 county jails and over 120 teaching sites. In addition to schools,
Five Keys operates multiple homeless shelters, permanent supportive housing programs, transitional employment programs, reentry programs and housing for women suffering from immense injustice. Five Keys is a second chance employer. Our goal is to restore communities through education and other programs that respond to the students’ and community needs — which in turn creates safer communities. To visit or donate: www.fivekeyshomefree.org.

Home Free’s Tammy Johnson: The personification of hope, possibility and triumph against all odds.

It was a busy morning for Tammy Johnson (formerly Cooper Garvin). Since 5:30 a.m., she was hunkered down at her computer, racing the clock to schedule clinic appointments, navigate government websites to secure I.D.’s for several residents and wading through blocks of email requests from women seeking her support from behind bars. That afternoon, Tammy promised to drive Deborah, a 73-year-old woman and new Five Keys Home Free resident to Target and the DMV.

For Deborah, the trip to Target was a thrilling possibility, one of her first outings after being released from 43 years behind bars. Tammy was determined Deborah would fulfill a decades-delayed dream to push a shopping cart down the aisles of the mega store and buy Jean Nate’ perfume and plastic ice cube trays.

As the residential Program Director of Five Keys Home Free, a Treasure Island-based trauma-informed reentry program for criminalized survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, Tammy is on a mission every day. She says she’s determined “to let the women let themselves be free in the world.”

Nothing was going to stop her from fulfilling Deborah’s Target trek.

“I told her ‘hey girl, I don’t even know if they still sell Jean Nate’ and plastic ice cube trays are pretty old school,” said Tammy. “It’s all about bringing a little happiness to bring these women up. It can be a trip to the grocery store or for some it’s eating a favorite food. But at a deeper level it’s all about coaching them through re-entry.”

Tammy is more than just a shot in the arm for the women of Home Free. She has walked in their shoes.

Survivors and Friends: Susan Bustamante (31 years inside), now Home Free Re-entry Coach, Tammy Johnson, and Brandi Taliano, (28 years inside), now Five Keys Housing Services Site Director

Like Deborah and the other women, Tammy spent decades (28 years) in prison unjustly sentenced as an LWOP (Life Without the Possibility of Parole). Tammy was sex trafficked at age 14 and was imprisoned for 28 years for being in the car while her pimp murdered a client. Her sentence was commuted in 2018 and she was hired by Home Free as its reentry coach in February of 2021.

Her embodied experience and fierce determination to move forward with her life is combined with a commitment to reach backward to accompany other women on their journey. Her dedication speaks volumes about the second chance mission of Home Free. The six two-bedroom unit apartment complex is California’s first transitional residential facility for criminalized survivors of domestic violence, and human trafficking.  

“As soon as I met Tammy, I was blown away by her quiet strength and self-determination, her prideful spirit, her hopefulness and how she owned her humanity, which is such a paradox to the horrific injustice she has experienced,” says Sunny Schwartz, founder of Five Keys. She met Tammy for the first time during a visit to the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, CA. “Her leadership is instrumental to Home Free. She can talk about not giving up and her determination to keep growing as a person and leader are amazing.”

Steve Good, Five Keys President and CEO, Susan Bustamante, Tammy Johnson, and Sunny Schwartz, Five Keys Founder and Home Free Co-Founder

“She is the personification of hope, possibility, and triumph against all odds. Her personal struggle and determination to thrive every day comes to life through her commitment to the women of Home Free,” said Sunny.

In her role, Tammy helps Deborah and the other women residents of Home Free transition back into their new lives. She also counsels other women as they prepare for their upcoming release from the prison system after years or even decades of incarceration.

When they get out, Tammy is there to wipe away their tears. Her heart swells when she expresses gratitude for Home Free and the opportunity to help guide and walk alongside women whose lives have been locked up.

“The greatest gift I can give them is telling them to just let themselves be free, to let their freedom soak in,” said Tammy. She’s at Home Free daily from 5:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and on call 24/7. At Home Free, we really strive to make the women feel like they are at home.”

“Tammy was a person who did everything she could to educate herself and prepare for her release from prison,” said Sara Malone, who is mentoring Tammy in her role at Home Free. Sara is the former Chief of the Office of the Ombudsman, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation who worked with Tammy when she was incarcerated. “But more significantly she was committed to helping other women. She was and still is always there for others, never putting herself first. It would have been so easy to give up, but she never did, and she inspires others to always have hope. She is committed to helping others make their lives better.”

These days, Tammy also is enjoying life as a new wife to her husband, Demian, who she met working at one of Five Keys SAFE Navigation centers for unhoused persons (prior to joining Home Free). Her goal is to “laugh, to always laugh.”

Mrs. and Mr. Demien Johnson at their wedding at Home Free

“We go to a lot of comedy clubs because we both just love laughing together,” says Tammy. “Our dream is to go to Paris. And my dream for Five Keys Home Free is that we keep getting bigger so we can offer the promise of freedom to other women who are in prison and longing to be in the world.”

Tammy Johnson

Pardon Us: Meet the Women Behind Home Free Here, they open up about life after prison

On Never Losing Hope

Meet Nilda Sarayda Palacios, 39

Today: Health worker, the San Francisco Department of Public Health

Life behind bars: Nilda was 17 when she was convicted and sentenced. For 17 years, Nilda served time behind bars, ending up in prison and sentenced to 27-years-to-life for killing a man who was abusing her physically and very cruelly and emotionally during the time she was homeless. She wasn’t allowed to bring into court evidence of abuse.

Beginning again:  Nilda was released in 2017 from the California Institution for Women in Chino, CA. Her sentence was reduced to involuntary manslaughter, and she was given credit for time served. For 16 years prior to that, she spent 16 years in Central California’s Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, the largest women’s prison in the state. 

First thing she did when she was released:  “I went to the beach and wrote ‘freedom’ in the sand.”

In a name: Nilda’s name comes  from the Greek word that stands for “Warrior

Woman.” It’s a name her Guatemalan mother picked for her after a niece who died early, and her mother says, is meant to conjure up the image of a woman always having to face challenges all on her own.  As she grew older, Nilda changed her name for a while to “Emily,” her brother’s middle name. In prison she had to abandon both names and was referred to as an identification number.

Moving on: Life after being behind bars: “I do self-nurturing and self-care by focusing my energy and time on things that are interesting to me. I’m also mindful of my five year parole plan and not allowing myself to be deterred from completing the plan objectives.”

Mantra and mission:  “Do not lose hope, engage in persistent prayer, and rely on your unwavering faith. My overall message is to be kind to others as you may never know when you’re entertaining angels, remain consistent in reaching for your dreams and don’t give up no matter how difficult things may seem.”

How she’s redefining herself: “I’m reconnecting with the community, working

on being more spiritually grounded and more open to learning things I didn’t know about myself.

Favorite book: The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks an intensely romantic book—a novel about the everlasting power of “true love.”

Her Good News: In the five years Nilda has been working tirelessly to have her dream come true — to own her own home. She set a goal and worked every day toward it. In August, she purchased a three-bed, three-bath home in Pittsburgh, CA, where she lives with her new partner, and dog, Milo. Over the Labor Day weekend, she hosted a weekend-long celebration inviting her whole family over.

Treasure Island housing gives domestic abuse survivors second chance

BY SHARON CHIN

UPDATED ON: AUGUST 11, 2022 / 6:00 PM / CBS SAN FRANCISCO

TREASURE ISLAND - Domestic violence survivors are unlocking hope in their new homes, in what's believed to be a first-of-its-kind housing program in California.

Cooking in her own kitchen was a taste of freedom Belinda Anderson had not known for more than half her life.

"I'm starting my life at the age most people retire," she said.

Anderson was once a dental assistant, living with her boyfriend and their daughter.

She recalled, "The hitting started, the beating started, then the cheating came."

She says back then, people didn't consider the behavior domestic violence as we do today.

"I felt like such a failure. I couldn't tell [people] what I was going through, because they would've been like, 'Girl, shake it off!'" Anderson said.

So she looked for coping mechanisms.

"I grasped at anything. I grasped at other people's lifestyles. I grasped at using drugs, and then that became my life," she said.

And one day, the San Francisco native killed a cab driver during a robbery. She spent the last 31 years in state prison in Chowchilla.

Abuse survivors like Anderson have served decades-long prison terms; some for killing their violent partners. But legislative reforms in the last decade have allowed women to challenge their convictions by showing they were abuse victims.

Anderson was released in March. Governor Jerry Brown commuted her life sentence.

"It was like a dream," she said, to hear of her release.

Anderson is one of up to a dozen formerly incarcerated women who live in furnished 2-bedroom apartments on Treasure Island rent-free.

The Five Keys Home Free Project started the innovative transitional housing program two years ago, to help abuse survivors unlock a second chance at life.

"When I walked through that door, I was like - I got an apartment. You know, I held the keys, I rattled the keys. I just kept jiggling the keys in my hand," Anderson smiled.

She is getting the wide-ranging support she needs to re-enter society: a second family at five keys, a job, technology and financial literacy classes, and help enrolling in college this fall.

"I wake up with a smile on my face every morning because it's like, 'God, thank you, I made it,"" Anderson declared.

Every day is new experience. From the high cost of eating out, to sleeping in a room alone.

"At first it was kind of spooky to me, because you could hear every little sound," she said.

Simple pleasures bring her joy: her comfortable bed, bubble baths as long as or as many times as she wants, and breathtaking views of the bay bridge from her back window.

"It';; be all lit up at night. Sometimes I just stand here and it'd be like, 'I'm really home, there it is !'" she reflected.

Thanks to Five Keys, Anderson is hope-filled, and home free.

The nonprofit's second annual fundraiser, Home for Dinner, will be held September 22nd at Delancey street. Five Keys is also planning to open another Home Free in the Los Angeles area.

For more information, you can go to www.fivekeyshomefree.org.

Read the original post on CBS News

Home Was a Nightmare, Then Home Was Prison. Finally Home Is Now a Refuge.

Published on Mother Jones, written by MARISA ENDICOTT
October 21, 2021

Nilda Palacios with her dog, Milo. Lizzy Myers

The first thing you notice when you walk into Nilda Palacios’ apartment is that it’s spotless—a blanket is carefully folded on the back of the couch, the floors shine, and cereals and supplements are meticulously arranged on top of the fridge and microwave.

Cleaning is therapeutic, the 38-year-old tells me. A warm and welcoming host in a light blue sweatsuit that accentuates her dark hair and dark eyes, and a shiny cross around her neck that matches her glossy nails, she shows me around while her Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix, Milo, follows. Despite the view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge from her back window, her favorite spot, she says, is really her bedroom—with its peach accent wall and purple curtains, a mirrored vanity that’s orderly but crowded with what she calls her “girly stuff.” “It’s homey,” she tells me.

It’s a room of her own—really the first one she’s had in at least two decades. “When I first got the keys to this apartment, I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “We haven’t had keys in forever. I had to learn how to open the door and then how to get in the house.”

Nilda Palacios in her living room. “It gives me a way of feeling comfortable, to be here all the time,” she says. Lizzy Myers

The “we” in this case is Palacios and the three other women who recently become her neighbors. They have all spent much of their lives in prison. But now they live at Home Free, a six-plex on Treasure Island, in the San Francisco Bay, that is a novel transitional housing program for women who share a complicated history: survivors of domestic abuse or trafficking who’ve served long sentences for serious crimes committed against or at the behest of their abusers. These experiences have created a complex web of shared trauma—the abuse, the crimes, the prison system, the reentry—that Home Free aims to untangle.

“I can’t believe that programs like this exist for people like us. I feel safe,” says Palacios, who is the youngest of Home Free’s residents; the oldest is 86. Despite their many differences, she explains, “this is a community here that we all have something in common.”

[Listen to Palacios talk about the personal touches she added to make it feel like home 🔈]

It’s a population that has long been overlooked or ignored—in part because the entire criminal justice system has always been designed with men in mind, even as the number of women in prison has soared in recent decades. Now, this specific community of women is seeing increasing, though still limited, opportunities for release, due to trickling criminal justice reforms and commutations, and an evolution in how we understand the links between trauma and crime. But with few resources at their disposal and little systemic support after long sentences, they are largely unsupported as they return to a completely changed world.

“Somebody might not think grass or trees is important, or it’s not that significant. To us, it’s the world.”

“We owe them service and dignity and second chances, whether it’s a small population or not,” says Sunny Schwartz, co-founder of Home Free and a prominent advocate for criminal justice reform in California. “They can still have impact. They can still effectuate change in their own right. As a society we need to do much, much better.”

All of this is why every aspect of Home Free, from the greenery out front to the bright paint in the bedrooms to the two-ply toilet paper (a luxury unheard of in prison), is deliberate and intentional—and a drastic departure from typical reentry environments. “Somebody might not think grass or trees is important, or it’s not that significant,” Palacios says. “To us, it’s the world.”

But beyond the careful aesthetic choices, the program’s true differentiator is the central focus on restoring autonomy—something denied to many of these women long before prison. “This environment is so conducive to creating a sense of normalcy that they’ve not had for a long time,” says Velda Dobson-Davis, a retired chief deputy warden of a women’s prison in California. “It’s just a wonderful thing to see that someone realizes that these women need the opportunity to live this way—to have a home that is not just clean and sterile, but is homely, inviting, comfortable.”

Prison was incredibly difficult for Palacios; she attempted suicide three times. “I lost who I was,” she says. Lizzy Myers

Palacios has been at Home Free since last fall. It was a long journey to get here. As a kid, she was sexually abused at home and at school. She tried to escape into a relationship, which turned abusive. Then, at 17, she was sentenced to 27 years to life after killing her partner during an altercation. Prison was incredibly difficult for Palacios; she attempted suicide three times. “I lost who I was,” she says. “Every day I had nightmares. I couldn’t sleep. I was restless. I was dealing with depression. I wanted it to end.” Eventually, she decided she wanted to make it through, pursued a degree, and started working as a peer counselor in health education. Finally, in 2017, after 17 years—half her life—she was released.

[Listen to Palacios describe the challenges of her life in prison 🔈]

But the challenges continued on the outside. The first housing facility she went to shut down abruptly, and she was left to fend for herself. She didn’t have enough money for rent, and she didn’t want to get into another relationship just to put a roof over her head. “I struggled a lot, and I stayed in my car,” Palacios says.

Home Free became a lifeline. It’s where she’s finally found a stable space and a home and a community. “To come home to quiet, not have to fear,” Palacios says, “that has established a lot of peace. Even the TV or having music or cleaning…I know that in some essence that has helped me. It gives me a way of feeling comfortable, to be here all the time.”

If she feels sad or lonely, she hangs out with the other residents or the program coordinator; she often helps her neighbors with chores, like cleaning their windows or grocery shopping. “I feel a connection because we all know the challenges we’ve been through inside and the limitations we had,” Palacios says. “Being around them, it cracks me up. It makes me feel like we all understand and enjoy what freedom is about.”

---

Before Rosemary Dyer, now 69 years old, became the first resident to move into Home Free last November, she spent 34 years in prison for killing her abusive husband.

When Rosemary Dyer first came to Home Free, she couldn’t believe it. “It’s really, really happening. Confirming it is amazing.” Lizzy Myers

For years, she had endured psychological and physical torture at his hands. He had threatened to put her in the “hole,” a grave dug on their property that he forced her to clean out every week. During one vicious attack in 1985, he sodomized her with a gun. “I begged him to pull the trigger,” she tells me recently. “I knew he wouldn’t. That would put me out of my misery. That would take all his fun away.” That night, when she was able to get the gun, she killed him.

But Dyer’s trial did not include expert testimony on her abuse and its effects. Evidence and consideration of “battered woman syndrome”—a pattern of signs or symptoms displayed by someone who is suffering persistent abuse—was not deemed scientifically legitimate or relevant in court at the time. So, in 1988, when she was just in her 30s, she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Starting around that time and in the following years, researchers, doctors, and lawyers began to pay more and more attention to the connection between abuse and criminality. Research increasingly showed that abuse and trauma, especially when they’re prolonged or starting at a young age, have links to PTSD, depression, heightened fight-or-flight impulses, and greater odds of interaction with the criminal justice system (systemic racism and classism compound the latter).

Expert testimony on battered woman syndrome became expressly admissible in court under California law in 1992; by 2000, it was admissible in 39 states. Battered woman syndrome put expert testimony “in a framework that seemed more palatable to some judges who were used to dealing with quote unquote hard science,” says Cindene Pezzell, legal director for the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women.

“The criminal legal system is set up to measure harm in a way that’s asking whether or not something happened and not necessarily why it happened or is it going to happen again or how can we put things into place to prevent it from happening in the future.”

Today, battered woman syndrome—first developed in the 1970s on the heels of the 1960s feminist movement—is often viewed as an outdated and limiting concept. For one, on top of being gender exclusionary, experts point out that the framing as a “syndrome” is pathologizing and can be unnecessarily stigmatizing. Moreover, people respond to intimate partner violence in a wide variety of ways dependent on their individual circumstances and life experiences that don’t fit neatly into a prescribed set of symptoms or reactions. It “has always been a bit of an inaccurate and problematic framework, but it did open doors,” Pezzell says. That open door has enabled the overlap between intimate partner violence and the carceral system to become increasingly clear over the past couple decades. Though data is limited, research suggests that when women are condemned to long sentences for violent offenses, abuse is a frequent motive for their crime. One California state prison study from the early 2000s found that 93 percent of the women who had killed their significant others had been abused by them, and 67 percent of these women indicated the homicide occurred in an attempt to protect themselves or their children. The Stanford Criminal Justice Center is currently undertaking a three-year national research project to quantify how many women are in prison for killing their abusers; they believe the number will be in the thousands out of the roughly 12,000 women serving sentences for homicide in state prisons.

Dyer developed a close relationship with former California Assembly member Fiona Ma, who picked her up from prison when she was released. Lizzy Myers

Yet even as our understanding of the connection between trauma and criminality has evolved, the system has not yet caught up. “The criminal legal system,” Pezzell argues, “is set up to measure harm in a way that’s asking whether or not something happened and not necessarily why it happened or is it going to happen again or how can we put things into place to prevent it from happening in the future.” In fact, courts continue to hold onto outdated views on domestic violence and the cycle of abuse, and juries rarely find abuse justifies violent retaliation. An analysis conducted by the New Yorker of justifiable homicides between 1976 and 2018 found that men who killed other men were 10 percent more likely to receive that ruling than women who killed men. These types of misconceptions have contributed, at least in part, to the explosion of the national incarceration rate for women—who are disproportionately Black and Latinx—in recent decades. And one in 15 of them are serving a life or virtual life sentence.

Still, the country’s prison systems overwhelmingly ignore the needs of women. “The system is set up for and by men,” says Amy Fettig, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a national research and advocacy organization working toward reducing criminalization and extreme punishment. “Women are an afterthought in our criminal justice system, and they suffer for it.” For instance, a majority of women in state prisons have children under 18, but everything about how the prison system is structured—from remote locations to inhospitable and limited visitations—makes it incredibly hard for mothers to stay connected with their children. Moreover, gender-specific medical care, mental health treatment, and trauma support, as well as vocational and educational programming, fail to meet demand. Dyer, for one, had trouble getting treatment for her breast cancer behind bars, and it eventually spread to her lymph nodes. Last December, Palacios found out she was at high risk for breast cancer and chose to get a double mastectomy—a condition she feels could easily have been missed or inadequately treated if she were still in prison. “I feel so joyful because I got the option to make that decision,” says Palacios, who as a peer educator in prison was always counseling women to do regular self–breast exams. “Inside prison, I watched so many of my peers die because of cancer.”

For women who have survived abuse, the prison setting can be especially damaging. The violent and controlling environment and standard correctional practices like shackling—not to mention well-documented harassment and sexual assault by staff—have the dangerous power to retraumatize. “Pretty much everything about incarceration mimics an abusive relationship,” Pezzell says. “You don’t even own your body when you’re incarcerated, and for a lot of victims of intimate partner violence, they don’t feel like they own their body either.”

Over time, California has taken sporadic steps to right outdated thinking about abuse and criminality in the legal system. Some of these changes are a direct result of advocacy by women who themselves were serving long sentences for crimes committed against or at the behest of an abuser. In the late 1980s, Brenda Clubine—who was serving a 15-years-to-life sentence in the state for killing her abusive husband—spearheaded the first abuse support group from behind bars where women could gather to help each other process their trauma and learn to break cycles of violence, advise one another on legal strategies, and even launch legislative reform campaigns. When Clubine got to prison she was shocked to find out how many women shared her experience, and she fought for three years to get the prison bureaucracy to finally approve her group, Convicted Women Against Abuse. The group would come to play a key role in statewide clemency campaigns for abused women and the legal reforms to come.

“Here were all these women that were stuck in jail. It could have been my mother, my grandmother that grew up in abusive situations, households, but would never say anything.”

After Clubine’s release in 2008, she continued her advocacy efforts, working with then–California Assembly member Fiona Ma, who was serving on the Public Safety Committee and as chair of the state legislature’s Select Committee on Domestic Violence. Ma, who is now California’s state treasurer, first got involved in intimate partner violence advocacy years earlier when a San Francisco woman who’d repeatedly reported her abuse was brutally murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Clubine connected Ma with others from her support group inside—including Rosemary Dyer. When Ma heard their stories, she felt compelled to act. “Here were all these women that were stuck in jail. It could have been my mother, my grandmother that grew up in abusive situations, households, but would never say anything,” Ma remembers thinking.

She soon introduced two bills: The first expanded the ability of people convicted before consideration of abuse was permitted at trial to petition the court to consider such evidence; the second allowed for abuse that survivors suffered to be given more weight at parole board hearings. Given opposition from law enforcement and district attorneys, Ma’s legislation, known as the “Sin by Silence” bills, failed at first, but were passed into law in 2012. This built upon landmark legislation passed several years earlier that first opened the door for survivors to challenge their original convictions. At last count, these bills together have helped nearly 90 women win their freedom.

This novel collection of laws was an important step forward—but they failed to address another huge problem. Reentry housing is required after people serve long sentences, yet space and options are limited, and programs mostly cater to substance abuse and people who’ve served shorter stints. People who don’t fit that mold often end up without a lifeline, and it can be particularly hard on formerly incarcerated women, who are even more likely to face unemployment and homelessness than formerly incarcerated men. “Although we spend billions on our correctional system, we spend a relatively small amount of both time and money on reentry, which is arguably where our priority should be,” Fettig says. “Too many of the resources have been used to not support people to succeed, but to catch people when they fail.”

Cleaning is therapeutic, Palacios explains in her hyper-organized kitchen. Lizzy Myers

Transitional housing programs are typically strict—often banning cell phones, limiting visitors, setting early curfews, and using the looming threat of reincarceration to enforce rules. The environment can be chaotic, with multiple people to a room. Like prison, this too can recreate or reinforce cycles of abuse. “To get out to someplace who makes you program from 6:30 in the morning to 9 o’clock at night, that’s torture,” says Susan Bustamante, who was released in 2018 at 63 years old after serving over 31 years in prison for the murder of her abusive husband. “You’re supposed to be in freedom. But to have the same structure that you just came out of, it messes with your mind.”

When we first spoke in 2019, Bustamante was stuck in a reentry facility she called her “nightmare house.” The director of the program was verbally abusive, which was triggering for Bustamante. She had mandatory all-day programming—much of which centered around sobriety and addiction recovery, despite the fact that she didn’t have a history of substance abuse. Residents couldn’t have cell phones or leave the property outside of attending prescribed support groups unless they had a job. Visits were limited to Sunday afternoons, which made it hard for Bustamante to see her daughters. “From 12 to 64, it’s been control by somebody else,” Bustamante told me then. “Being in this program, you don’t have a chance to use your own judgment to make a decision.”

“If you’re expecting to help somebody heal and get the foundation and the resources to build up a life for themselves again, and the way that you’re trying to do that is by taking away self-determination, it’s almost like a bad joke.”

“It’s just so ironic that that lack of control for so many people, the lack of options, are the very reasons that they intersected with criminality in the first place,” Pezzell says. “If you’re expecting to help somebody heal and get the foundation and the resources to build up a life for themselves again, and the way that you’re trying to do that is by taking away self-determination, it’s almost like a bad joke.”

This bleak reality pushed Ma in 2018 to connect with Sunny Schwartz, a seminal figure in criminal justice reform circles who founded Five Keys, an organization that provides educational and vocational classes and reentry services in jails and underserved communities throughout California. (Home Free is a project of Five Keys.) Despite spending decades developing reentry services throughout the state, mostly geared toward men, Schwartz was struck by the lack of consideration for abuse in the legal system and the dearth of services for women getting released after long-term incarceration. After talking to Ma, Schwartz quickly agreed to work on the problem and found partners in community advocates and formerly incarcerated women who were dedicated to creating a safe place for other women—and, crucially, a place tailored top-to-bottom to the specific needs of criminalized survivors, one intentionally designed to help them thrive in a radically different world.

Fundraising and finding a location proved to be a long and complicated process. Some sites were too expensive, while others weren’t accessible for people with physical disabilities (which was a must for residents like Dyer, who uses a wheelchair). Complicating matters further, some California counties don’t allow for multiple formerly incarcerated people to live together in the same place. After more than a year of searching, Schwartz finally secured the complex on Treasure Island, not long before the pandemic hit. Throughout the long and winding process, Schwartz relied on help and advice from formerly incarcerated survivors, including Clubine, Bustamante, and Dyer. “They’ve been my advisers from day one,” Schwartz says. “I may have great ideas, but they may backfire. I want to talk to the people who it really matters to.”

In March of last year, Dyer’s sentence was commuted by the governor because of her “demonstrated commitment to rehabilitation and self-improvement.” Ma picked her up from prison on the day of her release. A few months later, on a windy July day, Dyer got to see her future home for the first time as masked volunteers joined the construction team to kick off work on the about-to-be-gutted apartment complex. “I didn’t want to miss this for the world,” Dyer told me, sitting in her wheelchair and sunhat on the sidewalk, watching everyone at work. “It’s happening. It’s really, really happening. Confirming it is amazing.” She picked out a room on the bottom floor she liked. “I’m just thrilled to death that it has a window. Got to have a window,” she said. “I think it’s part of the freedom thing.”

[Listen to Dyer reflect on her journey since leaving prison 🔈]

Almost every aspect of the physical space at Home Free was designed with the women in mind. A team of professionals from a local design firm, students from a nearby art school, and workers from a city-sponsored construction program donated their time, working to completely redesign and rehabilitate the apartment complex. They met with formerly incarcerated survivors to find out what would be important to them, like greenery and avoiding colors and modern design schemes that reminded them of prison. That’s how the apartments ended up with colorful accent walls in warm yellows and soft peaches. At the building’s entrance, pink, blue, and orange planter boxes each have different trees growing to represent the 

Pink, blue, and orange planter boxes at the building’s entrance each have different trees growing to represent the diverse and unique women who will come through Home Free’s doors. Lizzy Myers

Everything from the greenery to the furniture and cutlery to the bright colors throughout the Home Free space are the result of deliberate and intentional choices. Lizzy Myers

They converted one of the ground-floor apartments into a common room. It’s snug, simply furnished with a couple chairs, a bench, and a comfy navy couch—an easy set up for a Zoom meeting one Thursday afternoon this spring. As eight women gathered, Beatriz Vazquez, community programs manager for La Casa De Las Madres, an organization that works with domestic violence victims, appeared on a big screen. She started the session—“Healthy Relationships 101”—by asking the attendees a series of “myth or fact” questions about abusive relationships. She went over different forms of control, like when an abuser tries to undermine a partner’s academic or professional success with tactics like “deliberately starting an argument before an exam, work, project deadline, or presentation.”

“My husband literally burned my books one time because he said I was caring more about my classes than I was him,” one woman responded. “One of the things he said was, ‘When you go to school, all you’re trying to do is find somebody better than me’…I wanted to tell him if I ever get out of this relationship, I don’t want another one.”

At the end of the hour, Vazquez asked what they’d like to cover in future sessions. Women suggested “healthy friendships” and “relationships over 50.” All Home Free’s programming is based on what the women want to learn and what they want to do. Understandably, a lot of it centers on unpacking trauma. In addition to the options of group and individual counseling, residents can reach staff at any time for emotional support or accompaniment for things that might be overwhelming at first, like learning to catch the bus.

Programming, though, is expansive. Classes focus on the practical and financial skills which are too often lacking for these women, often in their 60s or older. Dyer, for instance, had never had a cellphone and had no idea what an internet search engine was. She had no credit, and she discovered that the Social Security Administration didn’t think she existed. Others, like Palacios, are further along, though she still needs help in reaching her next goal: saving up for a permanent home for her and her mom. She recently purchased a car and has been researching cryptocurrency investment. At a class on personal finance, Palacios beamed as the financial coach gave her a nod for progress on her credit score and reassured Dyer that they’ll work to build hers up. “We have issues that nobody else has. We’ve been told for so many years by our abusers how stupid we are and how worthless we are. And sometimes, you get told that enough, you believe it,” says Dyer.

When Dyer first got out of prison, she’d never had a cellphone, and the Social Security Administration didn’t think she existed. Lizzy Myers

Autonomy is a central tenet of Home Free’s structure. Every woman has their own room in one of the five two-bedroom apartments, and there is also a lot of free time. The women can have cellphones and decorate their apartments and have visitors. “Especially as a survivor, they need the ability to know that they can make decisions on their own and make good decisions,” says Kelly Savage-Rodriguez, a program coordinator with the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, a grassroots prison abolition organization, who is also a formerly incarcerated survivor of abuse. “A lot of survivors second guess themselves and don’t know that they can do it because they’re beat down so much emotionally, as well as physically.”

This, in fact, was something the women advising Schwartz emphasized again and again. “These are women who have been programmed. They have been locked up and been told what to do their entire life both by their abuser, as well as by the system, and the last thing we want to do is replicate any policy procedure of an institution,” Schwartz says. “It’s a balance. Of course, we have rules, of course we have boundaries, of course we’re creating safety, but it’s not a dictatorial thing.”

This immense amount of work and care built into Home Free’s small program is unusual and hard to replicate at scale, but Schwartz sees the investment as indispensable to the project’s success. “The problem with institutions, among other things, is that they treat everybody as if they’re the same,” says Schwartz. “They’re dealing with thousands and thousands of people. We’re not. We have and should deal with people on a case-by-case basis of what their needs and struggles and wants are.”

“It’s so rewarding to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I like you.”

Fettig, who is not associated with Home Free, echoes this sentiment. “I think you have to do it small in order to be effective, especially when you’re dealing with people with a lot of need,” she says. “When you’ve got so many women who are subject to such long sentences, by and large a lot of them are coming home after being gone for a while. Our prison population is getting older and older. This presents challenges that we have never faced in our history because of our extreme sentencing. This is going to be a new challenge that we have to face, and we have to do it effectively.”

“Quite frankly, every jurisdiction needs something like this,” she adds.

And that’s the idea: to make Home Free a model. Schwartz is currently fundraising and looking at residences in the Los Angeles area for a second Home Free location.

When Home Free opened its doors last November, a few others moved in along with Dyer, including Palacios—though the pandemic, along with the difficult pathway to release from prison more broadly, have slowed the process of filling the house with residents. At my last visit in April, six of the 10 rooms remained empty. But Tammy Garvin, who works as a residential coordinator and reentry coach for Home Free, had identified 66 incarcerated women who may be eligible for the program when they’re released. As of mid-October, two more women were expected to be moving in in the next couple of weeks.

Garvin is also a survivor. She was serving life without parole before her sentence was commuted in 2018. She was sex-trafficked at a young age, and after her trafficker killed one of her clients, she was charged with the crime under the felony murder rule, which allows for a person who is only indirectly involved to be charged even if they didn’t commit the act. Garvin was a domestic violence group facilitator in prison, so she’s well equipped for her role now. “It means a lot to me to be able to help,” Garvin says. “If you have someone who’s been there to be able to help the ladies, it makes a big difference.”

And that’s the key. Home Free is the culmination of a decades-long struggle by women to be seen and supported by a system that has condemned and ignored them. Women like the residents in Home Free spent years inside prison processing their crimes and trauma through support groups that didn’t exist until incarcerated survivors—including some of the women now supporting and living in Home Free—created them. On the outside, they’ve continued that work, growing into their power individually and as a community. Palacios is a case worker at a mental health clinic and wants to get a degree in sociology. Bustamante, who now lives with her daughter in Southern California, recently got her driver’s license and drove up in May to celebrate her 66th birthday with the Home Free team; she hopes to work with the battered woman’s group she helped Brenda Clubine build inside prison, once COVID protocols are adjusted, and has also been part of the reform movement to drop life-without-parole sentencing and a campaign pushing a bill to further amend the felony murder rule that recently passed the state senate. Dyer regularly does talks over Zoom with domestic violence awareness organizations, and she’s working on a memoir that she started writing in prison.

Local designers helped create spaces that feel nothing like an institution, with colorful accent walls in warm yellows and soft peaches. Lizzy Myers

“I get so much out of being of service to others,” Palacios says. “And helping them has helped me.”

Dyer, too, marvels at how far she’s come and what’s she’s accomplished since she first joined Clubine’s support group all those years ago. “When I got arrested, I would not have been talking to you like this. You would not have been able to hear me…I barely whispered. And that’s because I was never allowed to talk. I was never allowed to laugh, I was never allowed to sing, I was never allowed to whistle,” she told me in a conversation shortly after her release from prison. “It’s so rewarding to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I like you.’”

“When he was alive, I never looked in the mirror because I never knew who that person was.” The first time she did, she stood there staring. “I’m just getting to know me.”

More recently, about a year after she’d started her life on the outside, we talked on the lawn of her new home on a sunny afternoon. Dyer, in a bright floral muumuu, was assured and laughed easily. “I’ve had my own personal challenges after coming here, but I’ve gotten over them, gotten past them. There is nothing that I can’t accomplish.”

Read the Original Article on Mother Jones

Serving up a Fresh Start, New Hope for Domestic Abuse Survivor/Thriver

For the last four years, Nilda Palacios and her mom, Lidia, have had to get creative about finding ways to be together. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, separating the geographically distant mom and daughter duo even further.

Thanks to strong internet and smartphones, FaceTime is serving up comfort and a closer familial connection. Several times a week, the San Francisco-based Nilda, 38, and her mom who lives in LA, prepare home-cooked meals together remotely. Decked out in aprons and oven mitts, Lidia is teaching her daughter how to cook culinary classics like shrimp fettuccini alfredo with basil and fresh fish.

But the cooking classes are serving up more than yummy meals; they’re reconnecting and healing the mother and daughter duo after almost two decades of estrangement.  

For the first time since she was in high school, Nilda, who spent almost two decades in prison and years before that on the streets, has found a place to call home. She is one of the first group of women who are receiving transitional housing at Home Free, an apartment complex on San Francisco’s Treasure Island. Opened in 2020, this safe sanctuary is a place for domestic violence survivors who served unfair prison terms for killing their abusers to rebuild their lives. It is believed to be the first of its kind in California.

“I had given up hope,” says Nilda. “Now, my life is starting again.”

Nilda and the others are women who have “endured unspeakable violence and painfully and unjustly ended up in prison because they weren’t allowed to bring in evidence of their abuse,” said Five Keys co-founder Sunny Schwartz.

Now, Nilda and her mother, who are only allowed by the parole board to see each other in person once a year, are embracing the chance to heal their once-severed relationship. Nilda works a full-time job and is looking forward to completing her college degree. She graduated high school and earned an associates degree while behind bars.

Like many women who killed their abusers decades ago, Nilda ended up in prison with a decades-long to life sentence. Many receive life without parole. That changed in 2012 when a new California law allowed the women to go back to the parole board or court and show evidence that they were defending themselves from abuse. Now, one-by-one, in a very slow trickle, these women are queueing up — hoping for their own shot at freedom.

For 17 years, Nilda served time behind bars, ending up in prison and sentenced to 27-years-to-life for killing a man who was abusing her physically and very cruelly emotionally during the time she was homeless and spending some nights at his motor home. She wasn’t allowed to bring into court evidence of abuse. Nilda was released in 2017 from the California Institution for Women in Chino, CA. Her sentence was reduced to involuntary manslaughter and she was given credit for time served. For 16 years prior to that, she spent 16 years in Central California’s Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, the largest women’s prison in the state. 

Life hiding in the shadows and suffering, of domestic violence

The road to prison for Nilda at just 17-years-old is pockmarked with years of domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse and homelessness.

Born on Nov. 27, 1982, she was raised by her single mother in Los Angeles. But after being sexually abused repeatedly by her stepfather and then a high school teacher, Nilda ran away from home, dropped out of school and “abused drugs and alcohol to numb myself,” struggling to survive as a squatter in homeless shelters, the streets and eventually a motor home.

The trauma of those agonizing years has lasted for life, she says. She’s the first to admit, that without the leaders at Home Free and advocates who have fought for change, it’s hard to heal in a culture that stays silent or looks away from people who have experienced sexual violence. Sometimes, rather than acknowledge their pain, others, often the legal system, side with the perpetrator. During her trial, lawyers tried unsuccessfully to introduce Nilda’s childhood and teenage years of violence and the resulting PTSD as a defense.

When the laws changed and she was released, Nilda found temporary housing at a program for substance abusers, which didn’t fit her circumstances. After almost two and a half years, her parole officer discovered Home Free and she found “my first home,” she says. At Home Free, she lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her dog, Milo.

These days, she’s excited about her relationship with her mom and her work as a certified community health worker (lay health advocate) at Omi Family Outpatient Center in San Francisco.

“It’s hard to describe how wonderful it feels to take my dog on walks to the park,” she says. “To ride my bike is heaven. And I’m loving cooking with real pots and pans. I’ve only used plastic bags (microwave) before.”

At Home Free, Nilda is exploring all opportunities for the next phase of her life.

“I want to be accountable and to invest my finances in long-term housing,” she says. “I hope to help clients who are struggling with depression and other mental health issues. I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did.”

ABOUT HOME FREE

San Francisco’s nationally recognized restorative justice organization, Five Keys Schools and Programs, is leading Home Free, a new program that created a residential community in San Francisco and plans to open a second transitional housing site in Los Angeles offering access to life skills and survivor empowerment programs, as well as training and job placement, to criminalized survivors of domestic violence. The women of Home Free are formerly incarcerated domestic violence survivors who spent decades behind bars for simply defending their lives, or being at the scene of a crime under the coercion of their batterer. However, the unfair treatment continues as too many of these women are placed in inappropriate halfway homes, most often residential drug treatment programs, where their unique struggles and untreated trauma continue to go unaddressed. 

www.fivekeyshomefree.org

Please support us at our Virtual Fundraiser on September 30, 2021.

https://www.fivekeyshomefree.org/new-home-for-dinner

Battered Justice: Brenda Clubine advocates for women imprisoned for killing abusive husbands

From her living room in a sunny, safe and quiet neighborhood surrounded by scenic desert landscapes and views of the Sandia Mountains, Brenda Clubine spends most of her days on ZOOM or her cellphone connecting with and advocating for women unjustly locked away in prison for defending themselves against their abusers. 

For 26 years behind bars, and now free, Brenda has been the advocate and voice and ears of women who ended up in prison for life and many without the hope of parole because they weren’t allowed to bring into court evidence of their abuse. Brenda was sentenced to 16 years-to-life was, but  released in 2008 when her sentence was reduced to involuntary manslaughter and she was given credit for her time served. She has been instrumental in recent California laws that allow these women to present that evidence and potentially be released from prison.

Following her own release from the California Institution for Women in Chino, CA in 2008, Brenda spent several years returning to the prison to attend the support group she started while behind bars more than two decades ago. Convicted Women Against Abuse, (CWAA), helps victims of domestic abuse like herself. She also runs Every 9 Seconds, a non-profit devoted to the prevention of domestic violence and is one of the key champions for Five Keys’ Home Free, a transitional housing program for newly-released convicted abuse survivors housed on Treasure Island, San Francisco.

“These are women who have endured unspeakable violence and painfully and unjustly ended up in prison because they weren’t allowed to bring in evidence of their abuse,” said Five Keys co-founder Sunny Schwartz.

Their ranks are on the rise.

Homicides by intimate partners are increasing, driven primarily by gun violence after almost four decades of decline, according to a recent study looking at gender and homicide. 

The number of victims rose to 2,237 in 2017, a 19 percent increase from the 1,875 killed in 2014, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist and professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University and an author of the research. The majority of the victims in 2017 were women, a total of 1,527.

In California alone there are 5,900 women in state prisons. Many internal survivors have disclosed that 90% of women incarcerated are survivors of child and/or adult abuse.
A not-yet-published preliminary study suggests that 75% of women who are serving a life sentence is directly related to intimate partner violence.

Brenda, almost 60, knows firsthand that a little bit of compassion and structured support — and lots of zealous advocating — can go a very long way. She also knows the struggle of getting back on her feet after years in prison. 

Facing life in prison without parole

Brenda spent 26 years in prison for killing her husband. For years, Brenda endured broken bones, skull fractures, and nights in hospitals. Her husband, a cop, had 11 restraining orders against him. But, after enduring never-ending beatings and emergency room visits, she says, it finally ended in a locked motel room where he told her to give him her wedding ring so that authorities wouldn’t be able to identify her body after he beat her to death. While he came after her, Brenda hit him on the head with a wine bottle where he died of his injuries as unbeknownst to anyone, he had an unusual thin skull, but nonetheless she was sentenced to 16 years to life, because volumes of evidence of his abuse were not allowed into evidence. 

She knows the pain hundreds of women across the country still behind bars continue to endure as they hope that one day, too, they will get a fair day in court and be released to find a new lease on life at a place like Home Free.  

“I will never forget,” she says. "I knew that because of what I went through, if I could save one person from going through what I went through it was worth it," she said.

Championing for change

Brenda, who today lives on a street ironically called Playful Meadows Drive in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, is passionate about supporting and lobbying for the release of women who have survived horrific abuse from their husbands and the court system that silenced their voices. With a no-nonsense demeanor, and despite chronic health challenges including a debilitating case of MS, Brenda advocates tirelessly.

She strongly believes the heartbreaking, complicated, tragic stories like hers and theirs need to be heard during parole hearings. States need to give women a fair chance to convey their innermost thoughts and feelings about the events that altered the course of their lives. 

Brenda’s plight, along with the stories of other women in her CWAA support group, are featured in a documentary about incarcerated battered women called Sin by Silence. 

The film's director/producer, Olivia Klaus, sent a copy of the documentary to California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Domestic Violence. After seeing the film, Ma wrote legislation she called the Sin-by-Sin Silence Bills.  One of the statutes allowed incarcerated victims of domestic violence to refile for a writ of habeas corpus.

Clubine's devotion to helping victims of domestic abuse is unwavering. After years of advocacy and exhaustive lobbying, she works with the leadership of Five Keys Home Free to free women from “death by prison” and create a place for them to call home when and if they are released and experiencing freedom for the first time in decades.   

Currently, there are hundreds of these women awaiting the hope that their sentences will be commuted and slowly, some of them are getting out. 

“Helping build Home Free and getting women safely there is a passion of my heart,” says Brenda. “I try to offer support because there is a guilt no one understands and a heartache in taking the life of someone you loved so much but who did not love you in return. You grow up thinking you would have this perfect June Cleaver life and never imagined for a moment anything like this. I know my personal experience and knew there had to be something I could do. There has to be some way we can eventually break the cycle of domestic violence. I certainly will never stop trying. “

About Home Free

San Francisco’s nationally recognized restorative justice organization, Five Keys Schools and Programs, is leading Home Free, a new program that created a residential community in San Francisco and plans to open a second transitional housing site in Los Angeles offering access to life skills and survivor empowerment programs, as well as training and job placement, to criminalized survivors of domestic violence. The women of Home Free are formerly incarcerated domestic violence survivors who spent decades behind bars for simply defending their lives, or being at the scene of a crime under the coercion of their batterer. However, the unfair treatment continues as too many of these women are placed in inappropriate halfway homes, most often residential drug treatment programs, where their unique struggles and untreated trauma continue to go unaddressed. 

www.fivekeyshomefree.org

Please support us at our Virtual Fundraiser on September 30, 2021.

https://www.fivekeyshomefree.org/new-home-for-dinner

Leading Lives Forward

“I will hold your hand the first time for new appointments. When you start to walk on your own, I will be right behind you and when you become like a rebel teen, I’m here if you ever need me.”

— Gilda Serrano, Home Free program services coordinator.

For Rosemary “Rosie” Dyer, it is the simple things. The sunsets. The smell of the ocean and hearing the waves. And she enthuses, “shopping.”

Last spring, Dyer, 67, was released from prison after serving 34 years of a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the fatal shooting of her abusive husband. Her sentence was commuted by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Thanks to San Francisco’s nationally recognized restorative justice organization, Five Keys Schools and Programs, she moved into new home on Treasure Island — Five Keys Home Free.  “I finally had a home,” she says.

 When she got out, she had a lot to catch up on — like, the digital age.

That is where Gilda Serrano stepped in. As the Program Services Coordinator for Home Free, Serrano facilitates programs for the five women who live at the Home Free transitional apartments, encouraging them on the journey from decades in prison to a new path into the 21st Century. Like Dyer, the other Home Free women were unjustly serving anywhere between 15 to 40 years in prison for either defending themselves against their abuser or were at the scene of the crime under the coercion of their abusive spouse or boyfriend. As part of the Home Free team, Serrano ensures that yoga classes, healthy eating habits and treks to Muir Woods and the beach play an important role in the physical, emotional, and spiritual rebirth for Home Free women.

Gilda provides technological resources so the Home Free women can catch up with current knowledge. Serrano spends much of her time supporting women as they navigate the system — registering for address changes, applying for social security cards, birth certificates and other needed entitlements. She also focuses on finding permanent housing, creating realistic budgets and provides support to apply for jobs online. In many cases, that means escorting women to government offices, health clinic/doctors’ appointments and ensuring needed support.

“We take for granted that everyone has these documents,” says Serrano, a single mother of three grown children and three grandchildren who was born in El Salvador, Centro America and came to the United States when she was 16 years old. Her first challenge: She got a job cleaning houses and learned to speak English so she too, could support herself. “But try finding a job when you have been in prison and are in your sixties, and are expected to upload it on an employment web site. One of the first questions the women ask me is ‘what can I do?’ One of my biggest roles is listening.”

For Serrano it is a mission. A survivor and “thrives” she is passionate that Dyer and other women at Home Free are treated with safety and respect and with great dignity.

“I joke that I have a PhD in domestic violence, meaning I can relate very personally to what they are going through,” she says. “One thing I can also relate to is what it is like not having much, then suddenly you can have things. One of our challenges here is helping women understand not to buy everything they see and stocking up on everything they like. I try to help them understand that they are free now and things are not going to go away. It is important to understand the relationship of wants and needs.”

Teaching the lesson of independence is at the core of everything Serrano does.

“I’m a strong believer that these women need to learn to do these things themselves,” she says. “I tell them, ‘I will hold your hand the first time for new appointments. When you start to walk on your own, I will be right behind you and when you become like a rebel teen, I’m here if you ever need me.”

Serrano also has tremendous respect for Dyer and other survivors. “People have weird misconceptions about what people who are leaving prison are like. But I respect them so much. Even though they were told they never would be able to be free again, they still educated themselves and kept jobs and cared for each other.”

When she’s not working long days at Home Free, Serrano runs her own foundation, the Ribbon Dream Project, which closely parallels the work of Home Free. Its mission is to offer dignity, empowerment, and hope for victims of domestic violence so they can lead healthy lives for themselves and their children. The organization provides dignity bags with basic personal necessities, community resources, and a handwritten card with a quote to bring hope to a survivor of domestic violence. These dignity bags are given to first time incarcerated survivors due to domestic violence upon release from the San Francisco county jail.

“Often when police are called to a home for domestic violence, the women are scared to speak out when the police come because their abuser is right there … so they are then the ones arrested because they’ve done something else to defend themselves,” she says. “I know desperate, scared and lonely. So when they are released, we give them a folder with community resources and other things like toiletries and a handwritten note to say we care.”

Helping others is an avocation for Serrano who joined Five Keys five years ago as a data entry specialist and became a restorative justice community services coordinator. Prior to that, she was a crisis manager for a couple of San Francisco organizations.

“I understand what it is like and I know I could have never survived if others didn’t help me,” she says. “Now, it is my passion to help them.”

Above and Beyond the Call of Duty: Officers lauded as heroes for coming to the rescue of a 68-year-old formerly incarcerated abuse survivor tasting freedom for the first time in three decades

Recently released after spending 34 years in prison on a wrongful lifetime sentence, Rosie Dyer powered up her new electric wheelchair and set off through the streets of San Francisco to meet friends in Union Square and celebrate her new freedom. That Sunday afternoon, after tooling around the city she remembered fondly from her childhood, the brand-new wheelchair broke down, leaving the 68-year-old stranded. She was just one block from the transition home on Bush Street where she has found safe shelter since Gov. Gavin Newsom granted the freedom she had only dreamed about. 

“I was terrified,” says Dyer, 68, who is a cancer survivor and suffers from congestive heart failure. “I didn’t know what I was going to do.” 

That’s when Dyer, who is just learning to navigate daily life much less modern technology, remembered her cell phone and dialed one of her advocates she had just celebrated with. She’d promised to be there as quickly as possible to push Dyer home. But Dyer warned her: “That’s not going to work. This thing weighs more than 200 pounds so there is no way you can push me up this hill.” 

Fast-forward … while the advocate, Sheila Von Driska was sprinting back across the city, she saw a couple of police officers, explained the complicated situation, and asked them for help. Underscoring their motto to protect and serve, the officers sprang into action to help Dyer. Sergeant James O’Malley and Officer Chris Quiocho from the Northern Station were the first to arrive. But they also quickly realized the steep hill and heavy wheelchair called for a backup team. Officers Simon Hoang and Anthony Quimbo from the Tenderloin Station raced to their aid.

During these times when police officers are rarely told they are valued, Dyer and her advocates, along with city leadership, did not want their compassionate response to care to go unnoticed. 

After hearing of the good deed by the lawmen, Damali Taylor, Vice President of the Police Commission for the City and County of San Francisco Police Department, gave the officers a shoutout at a recent commissioner’s meeting to ensure their exemplary actions did not go unnoticed. 

“This woman is incredible, in a wheelchair and using it for first time, after experiencing so much time in prison, she just wanted to spend some time to see the city,” says Taylor. “It’s an incredible story and shows how we do not do enough to thank the heroes who serve us every day. I want to thank them and shout them out. I want to take my time to thank those officers who helped this woman who has experienced incredible horrible things. They dropped everything they were doing to make her feel special. Thank you.” 

At the commission hearing, Taylor read a letter written by Von Driska thanking the police officers:

“I’m so happy to hear these officers will be commended. Rosie has been through enough in her life — it was poetic. But, I understand these amazing peace officers are also going through quite a bit of injustice, too, due to the ripple effect of what happened in Minneapolis. O’Malley and Quiocho were telling me about the horrible experiences and name-calling they have been enduring because of it … based on the color of the uniforms they wear … not at all who they are, as people, evidenced by yesterday.

“Well, for whatever it is worth … they are my heroes. They stepped up in the absolute most kindest way possible to help me and Rosie with the most unusual request … a broken down brand new electric wheelchair on Jones Street for a woman who had spent 34 years in prison (unjustly) and on one of the very first days she ventured out on her own with her new “wheels” to celebrate six months of freedom with me and you for lunch in Union Square … one block from home … she got stuck. And of all the people in the world … San Francisco’s finest responded with such grace and gentle care. What an escort home!

“Last week Rosie said she was looking forward to an adventure. And what an adventure it was … with superheroes in blue coming to the rescue and the happiest day and ending possible. Thank you to our heroes.”

Using her voice for change

Dyer was one of about 100 abused women serving life or life without parole for killing their abusive husbands or partners.

In 1985, Dyer shot her husband with the same gun he had used to threaten and rape her. When she testified about the abuse, prosecutors used her words as evidence that she had a motive for the killing. After decades, and new laws, Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted Dyer’s sentence. She was released in April.

In addition to binge-watching her favorite book series, Outlander, now available to her on Netflix
(she read the series seven times during her imprisonment), Dyer has been opening up about her experience and about domestic violence to lawmakers, college students and others on ZOOM meetings dedicated to helping others gain a greater understanding of the intricacies of domestic violence. She also meets regularly and pens letters and emails to dozens of victims looking for help and survivors trying to do as she is, navigate their new worlds of freedom. 

In November, Dyer will be among the 12 women who will move into one of a set of two-bedroom apartments on Treasure Island, thanks to a new transitional housing program started by the Five Keys Home Free program dedicated to helping survivors of wrongful convictions transition back in the San Francisco and Los Angeles communities.  

“Rosie is one of the women who has endured unspeakable violence and painfully and unjustly ended up in prison because they were not able to introduce the evidence of the horrific abuse they suffered at the hands of their husbands or partners,” said Sunny Schwartz, founder and board member of Five Keys and Home Free. “We are trying to right a terrible wrong committed against these women.” Schwartz was with Von Driska and Dyer at the Little Skillet Fried Chicken lunch celebration just before the wheelchair breakdown. 

Like Dyer, these are women who killed their abusive partners decades ago and ended up with prison terms for life. That changed in 2012 when a new California law allowed the women to go back to the parole board or court and show evidence they were defending themselves from abuse. 

As a result, women like Dyer are receiving commuted sentences or early parole. Many need a place to call home.

“This is righting a terrible wrong that was committed against these women,” Schwartz said.

Besides rent-free housing, subsidized in part by the City of San Francisco, Five Keys partners with other agencies to help the newly freed women navigate daily life, from using a cell phone to finding
a job.

“God has blessed me, bringing heroes like this into my life,” says Dyer. “Now it is my turn to help others understand the horrors of domestic violence and to reach back to help women who are experiencing it and tell them they can get out. They don’t deserve to live like that.” 

About Five Keys Schools and Programs 

Five Keys Schools and Programs is leading Five Keys Home Free, a program seeking to create residential communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles providing life skills and survivor empowerment programs, as well as training and job placement for convicted survivors of domestic violence whose prison sentences have been commuted. Learn more: https://www.fivekeyshomefree.org/