Five Keys Profile: Tijanna O. Eaton, Chair Board of Directors. A Life Interrupted—A New Life, Giving Back

“Three years. Twelve arrests. One shot at redemption.” That’s how Tijanna O. Eaton sums up the loss and longing she experienced during the years she spent homeless, struggling with addiction, and/or behind bars.

An honor student in high school, college attendee, and mother, she was on a trajectory for success before the world crashed around her.

But today, released and recovered from that dark period in her life, the 57-year-old Tijanna has transformed the longing and loss into determination to keep fighting for others who have lost freedoms because of addiction, poverty, racism, and other social justice inequities upheld by white supremacy that have beaten them down and thrust them onto the margins of society.

For almost a year, Tijanna has served as the Board President of Five Keys, following 16 years as a board member. She’s also recently wrapped up a successful 20-plus year career as a Senior Information Specialist in Regulatory at Genentech. In October, Tijanna finished UC Berkeley Extension's project management certificate program. 

She is grateful to be drug and alcohol free for 28 years. She believes the scars she’s accumulated on the inside have made her more compassionate on the outside. As a former recidivist, Tijanna is committed to carrying out Five Keys’ mission.

“I feel electrical impulses of empathy and impatience whenever I listen to Steve Good’s (Five Keys President and CEO) report during our board meetings,” she writes. “Empathy, because every single program we have in place, every single study packet assembled, and every single interaction with students puts them one, two, or twelve steps closer to graduating. Impatience because I want everyone to get free and educated, now!”

Since she’s been at the helm of the board, Tijanna has made it her mission to witness and support the hard work and dedication of Five Keys’ staff on the front lines of the navigation centers and schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and to explore the innovative agriculture and restoration programs in Southern California.

“I’m trying to get my arms around all the amazing programs Five Keys offers to people who need a place to come for support, and to relax, breathe, and rebuild their lives,” she says. “I want to sit down, have fireside chats, and let all the people that work for Five Keys know they have the loyalty and support the need. I’ve been those people they are serving. I know how significant and life-changing their work can be.”

A Life Interrupted

Tijanna’s nightmare began in January 1990, when she shot her first fix of heroin. Three months later, she was hooked and had developed a daily habit. Less than a year after that, she had starting mixing coke with heroin, and by January 1991 she had lost her job and would lose custody of her daughter soon afterward.

Suddenly homeless, she describes descending into full-on addiction—then becoming addicted to crack—and beginning three years of constant drug use, sleeping in alleys and doorways, using sex work to support her habit, and having frighteningly regular police contact. From April 1991 to March 1994, she was arrested 12 times and made 13 trips to jail on charges including possession of drugs and paraphernalia, prostitution, theft, trespassing, and weapons.

Starting Over

Tijanna credits the SISTER Program (Sisters in Sober Treatment Empowered in Recovery) for kick-starting her transformation. SISTERs is a collaboration between Walden House and the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department and was the country’s first in-jail treatment program, which helps women recover from drug and alcohol abuse. Arrested for the 11th time in November of 1993, she spotted a poster that asked: “Tired of going to jail? Want your kids back?” She remembers thinking: “YES!  Yes, I did.” At the time, the program hadn’t even started, and neither the deputies nor other inmates knew what it was. But Tijanna hoped it would be the bridge back to motherhood and the life that ended abruptly after her first arrest.  

She volunteered to enter the program on March 2, 1994. Two months later she was transferred to long-term in-patient treatment at Walden House, where she spent two years completing every phase of the program without relapse. Early in her recovery, Tijanna also worked for two years at SISTERs, where she provided group and individual counseling to inmates through this unique women’s recovery program. 

Upon graduation from Walden House in 1996, Tijanna began a new life. Over the next few years, she regained custody of her then eight-year-old daughter, got a job, an apartment, started a relationship, and began attending—and still attends—12-step meetings.

Tijanna says it is her hope that people who hear about Five Keys, “will feel the same way I felt and will experience the same miracle I experienced when I went to jail for the last time.”

These days, Tijanna is also at work on a memoir, BOLT Cutters, and is a proud recipient of the Unicorn Authors Club's first Alumni Award, which will help her finish her book. Her memoir chronicles the story of those twelve arrests over the course of three years during her descent into heroin addiction, jail, prostitution, and homelessness and her journey back to a brighter future.

In her book she describes how “before addiction, I had been a ‘responsible member of society,’ having graduated high school with honors, attended four years of college, become an anxious but devoted mother, and was a budding hard rock musician. I drank socially, never exceeding my two-beer limit. Until one day, I did. But how did I make the jump from simple alcoholism to homeless junkie crackhead prostitute?”
Getting clean and sober “opened my eyes to the daily onslaught of discrimination faced by Black people, women, and queers.”

She adds: “My unique experience at this intersection gives hope both to people who have been handled roughly by law enforcement as well as the people who love—or hate—them.”

Today, the words that best describe her are:  Advocate. Change maker. And tireless freedom fighter.

Welcoming three leading social entrepreneurs to Stanford

The 2022 SEERS Fellows (left to right): Anthony Chang, Steve Good, and Joi Jackson-Morgan.

We are thrilled to welcome Anthony Chang, Steve Good, and Joi Jackson-Morgan as the 2022 Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford (SEERS). Each of the fellows is leading groundbreaking work in their sector, looking for innovative ways to address social inequities to help individuals and our community.

Starting the first week of spring quarter, each fellow will spend Thursdays on campus:

• engaging with Stanford students, faculty, and staff

• taking time to reflect and generate new ideas

• diving deep into research

• building new partnerships, and

• co-teaching a Cardinal Course—URBANST 135: Challenging the Status Quo: Social Entrepreneurs Advancing Democracy, Development, and Justice alongside Kathleen Kelly Janus, senior advisor on social innovation to California Governor Gavin Newsom.

With a core focus on work happening here in California, we are eager to connect you with the fellows. Please reach out toPaitra Houtsto learn more about how you can share your work, learn from their work, and build partnerships.

Read More on Standford Haas Center for Public Service

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

New York Times: After Lives Fraught With Pain, Housing That Says ‘You’re Worthy’

Rosemary Dyer on her patio at the transitional housing complex Home Free, where she has lived since her sentence for killing her abusive husband was commuted. Credit: Talia Herman for The New York Times

By Patricia Leigh Brown

Published Oct. 8, 2021Updated Oct. 11, 2021

Nestled on her Chesterfield sofa, her electric wheelchair close at hand, Rosemary Dyer surveyed the glittering peacock figurines she had snapped up on her first solo trip to San Francisco’s Chinatown after leaving prison, and admired the bright tablecloth with silk flowers in her new living room.

Dyer, an effervescent woman with a mischievous sense of humor, brought these and other prized possessions to Home Free, a new complex of transitional apartments in San Francisco. It was designed for women who have been imprisoned for killing her abusive partner or being at the scene of a crime under the coercion of an abusive spouse or boyfriend. Dyer was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1988 for the 1985 shooting death of her husband of eight years, who had abused and tortured her, in an era when expert testimony related to domestic violence and its effects was not permissible in court in most states.

The insidious viciousness that defined her life included being repeatedly beaten, and sodomized with a loaded handgun. Her husband had dug a grave in the backyard, saying he intended to bury her alive.

The interior design for the apartments on Treasure Island, the former home of a naval base, was the work of students at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and other volunteers. Retailers donated furniture and linens to the renovated units. Credit: Talia Herman for The New York Times

In an apartment ready for re-entry, paintings were donated by students of the Academy of Art University. Credit: Talia Herman for The New York Times

Home Free — where Dyer’s 2020 commutation from Gov. Gavin Newsom hangs proudly on the wall — was created by Five Keys Schools and Programs, a statewide nonprofit that provides education, vocational training, therapeutic programs and housing for incarcerated people and the newly released. The complex of five two-bedroom apartments is the result of years of advocacy by survivors of intimate-partner violence, and organizations working with them. Their efforts allowed women like Dyer to achieve release through clemency or by retroactively introducing evidence of their abuse to the state parole board or the courts.

“That women who had unspeakable violence committed against them were not allowed to bring in evidence of the abuse is the quintessential injustice,” said Sunny Schwartz, the founder of Five Keys. “We were committed to making a vibrant, dignified and safe home, a place that says ‘you’re worthy.’ ”

Previous transitional housing options for women were largely limited to those treating addiction. Home Free, on Treasure Island, a former Naval base in San Francisco Bay, was forged during the pandemic last year on a tight start-up budget of $750,000, including staff. The formerly grimy apartments were renovated with the help of nearly 100 volunteers — architects and landscape architects, flooring and cabinetry installers, plumbers, haulers, electricians and city construction apprentices. They all gathered on this somewhat bizarre island originally built for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition.

The landscaping is largely in the form of container gardens of flowers and trees because the land is tainted by chemicals. Mithun, a design firm, help get the trees donated. Credit: Talia Herman for The New York Times

Interior design students from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco devoted a semester to the project, joining mini-charettes on Zoom with Irving A. Gonzales of G7 Architects. They also brainstormed with the women, whose desires included full-length mirrors (they had been deprived in prison of eyeballing their shape for years).

“We wanted color!” said Dyer, who visited the construction site while she was still in temporary housing. She and others had a particular aversion to gray, a shade associated with metal prison bunks and lockers.

A 69-year-old cancer survivor with congestive heart failure, Dyer has used a wheelchair since she injured her hip in prison. A huge pirate flag — a nod to the Treasure Island theme — greets visitors upon arrival. Her accessible apartment adjoins a patio where she grows pots of tomatoes and radishes.

The landscape itself was designed by Hyunch Sung, of the firm Mithun, who chose 10 different tree species. (Because Treasure Island’s soil is tainted by industrial chemicals, the trees are planted in brightly-painted containers.) Sung said she approached her work there as if she were designing for high-end clients. “The idea of beauty is underplayed for disadvantaged communities,” she said.

Nilda Palacios, 38, who lives upstairs, said it was “emotionally moving” to join the complex. She grew up with a history of abuse: She was molested as a child by an uncle and stepfather and then raped as a 15-year-old by a high school teacher. The stressful trial of the teacher led her to rely on drugs and alcohol (“I was trying to sleep my life away,” she said). Palacios became distraught and suicidal. When a panhandler cornered her one day, she said, she thought he intended to attack her and “lashed out,” strangling him. She was convicted of second-degree murder. Incarcerated for 17 years, she benefited from therapists in prison who helped her understand “how the depth of my crime was related to my history,” she said. “I confused someone who wasn’t a threat with someone who was.”

Nilda Palacios, 38, with her dog, Milo, in their Home Free apartment. Therapists helped her understand the relationship between her own traumas and the violent act that led to her imprisonment for 17 years. Credit: Talia Herman for The New York Times

Palacios was released on parole. She has benefited from a more expansive vision for Home Free, which now welcome women like her, whose crimes were linked directly to their abuse.

Moving in, she was “shocked” at the prospect of a private bedroom after years of sharing an 8-x-10-foot cell and cramming all her belongings into a six-cubic-foot box, with, as a current inmate puts it, “your panties right against the noodles and peanut butter.”

“No way, this is my room?” Palacios recalled. “It felt to me like a real home.”

A Path to Humane Housing

The idea for Home Free was born during a conversation between Schwartz, its founder, and the California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, then a state assemblywoman. Ma’s legislation, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2012, allowed women who had suffered domestic abuse and been convicted of violent felonies related to their abuse the opportunity to have their cases reheard using Battered Women’s Syndrome (as it was then called) as a defense. The legislation also gave them the right to present evidence of abuse by intimate partners during the parole process. It applied to those convicted before August 1996.

From left, Tammy Cooper Garvin, residential coordinator of Home Free, and Sunny Schwartz, the founder of Five Keys Home Free, the group behind the project. Credit: Talia Herman for The New York Times

The number of Rosemary Dyers still behind bars is unknown. About 12,000 women are currently incarcerated for homicide offenses nationally, said Debbie Mukamal, the executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School and the director of the Regilla Project, a three-year effort to study the frequency with which women in the United States are imprisoned for killing their abusers. Small studies, including one in Canada, suggest that 65% of women serving a life sentence for murdering their intimate partners had been abused by them before the offense. The link between abuse and violent crime was underscored by grim statistics in a 1999 U.S. Department of Justice report showing that a quarter to a third of incarcerated women had been abused as juveniles and a quarter to almost half as adults.

Despite increased public awareness, “there are still a vast number of criminal attorneys who don’t understand how intimate-partner violence creates the context for a crime,” said Leigh Goodmark, director of the gender violence clinic at the University of Maryland School of Law.

In New York State, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, enacted in 2019, was put to the test in the much-publicized case of Nicole Addimando, a young mother of two in Poughkeepsie who fatally shot her live-in boyfriend and father of her children in 2017 after years of harrowing abuse (the case is dramatically captured in the documentary film “And So I Stayed.”)

Cooper Garvin (left) and Schwartz (right), outside the apartment building on Treasure Island, renovated naval housing. Credit: Talia Herman for The New York Times

Sentenced to 19 years to life for second-degree murder, Addimando was entitled to a subsequent hearing under the Act, where her claims of abuse might be factored into a reduced sentence. The county court judge rejected those claims, believing she “had the opportunity to safely leave her abuser.” In July, the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division reversed that decision, reducing Ms. Addimando’s time behind bars to 7 ½ years.

To Kate Mogulescu, an associate professor at Brooklyn Law School and director of its Survivors Justice Project, the case illustrates “the impossible burdens we put on survivors to prove their victimization.” Women are scrutinized in court in ways that are very different from men, she added. “With women, they’re a bad mother, or promiscuous. Tropes get trotted out on women and the punishments reflect that.” Nevertheless, so far, 16 women have been resentenced in New York.

By far the most common reason women who have been abused by intimate partners wind up in prison is the so-called accomplice laws, in which a victim is coerced into being at the scene of an abuser’s violence, such as driving the getaway car, said Colby Lenz, a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a national advocacy organization.

That was the case with Tammy Cooper Garvin, who 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 and she was hired by Home Free as its residential coordinator.

Rosemary Dyer, 69, outside her apartment in the garden she calls “Freedom Forest” provided by Five Keys Home Free. Credit: Talia Herman for The New York Times

Another advocate — and a guiding force behind the founding of Home Free — is a fellow survivor named Brenda Clubine, who started a weekly support group at the California Institution for Women. Some 72 women soon joined. Dyer was one of the original members, though until Clubine encouraged her, she was so terrified of life that she could hardly speak.

Clubine herself had sustained years of abuse, including fractures and stab wounds, by her husband, a former police detective. She hit his head with a wine bottle and he died of blunt force trauma. She served 26 years of a 16-to-life sentence. Her fierce retelling of the stories of the women in the prison group — which she sent to state legislators and governors — led to public hearings and the 2009 documentary “Sin by Silence,” which in turn inspired the California laws.

Clubine’s close friendship with Dyer has continued and is pivotal to Dyer’s rebounding confidence. At Home Free, Dyer now revels in making homemade noodles with chicken from her grandmother’s recipe. Clubine, her BFF, observed that a safe and fortifying place for her “sisters” has been a long time coming. “I can’t say how full my heart feels that it’s available to them now,” she said.

Original New York Times Post

"He’s My Main Man:” Woman granted freedom after 34 years in prison thanks Gov. Gavin Newsom at the Polls

““I never thought at the time that this would be the man, my main man, who would be responsible for changing my whole life.””

— Rosemary “Rosie” Dyer

Recently released after spending 34 years in prison on a wrongful life sentence, Rosemary “Rosie” Dyer powered up her electric wheelchair shortly after 8 a.m. Tuesday to make a beeline four blocks to the Ship Shape Community Center. First in line, she  cast her ballot in favor of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in his recall election.

Rosie Dyer joined the millions and millions of Californians that exercised their fundamental right to vote. The governor's victory serves to vindicate his leadership of the state. 

But just a year-and-a-half ago, Newsom vindicated Dyer, offering her freedom from behind bars for the first time in three decades. Newsom commuted the 68-year-old abuse survivor’s life without parole sentence for shooting her husband with the same gun he was using to threaten, rape and brutally abuse her physically and emotionally for years. Laws prevented her and about 100 abused women in California serving similar sentences from offering evidence of their abuse at their trials. When the laws were changed, Newsom granted her the freedom she had only dreamed about. Since then,  Dyer has lived at Home Free, a transition shelter on Treasure Island.

“I just wanted to say thank you in a big way to a man who never even knew me, but took a chance on me and set me free,” says Dyer, who has not voted since she cast a ballot in the 1984 presidential election, shortly before she was sentenced to life behind bars. “Even though we could only hold mock elections in prison, I campaigned heavily for Gavin in his run for governor. He was the candidate we wanted hands-down. I never thought at the time that this would be the man, my main man, who would be responsible for changing my whole life.”

 She will never forget the day and time, about 4 p.m., March 27, 2020, during count, when her housing officer and warden at the California Institute for Women in Corona tapped on the wicket of her cell, keyed the door open and said, “Rosemary, you’re going home. Gov. Newsom has given you your freedom.” 

But getting her vote to the ballot box was no easy feat. A cancer survivor who suffers from congestive heart failure and recently had heart surgery in August, Dyer cannot lift her left arm (which harbors a blood clot) and therefore cannot hoist herself up and into the Home Free van. 

“I was determined to put the ballot in the box myself and ripped up my mail-in ballot because I wasn’t going to take any chances with that,” she says.  “I just revved up my buggy (electric wheelchair) and was going to head over. But Home Free leadership, Dorick Scarpelli, insisted he would drive me, so in the end I took him up on the offer.”

“I felt so empowered and filled with joy to be able to exercise my right to vote for Gavin,”  she says. I hope someday I can meet him in person and express how tremendously grateful I am to him.” 

 

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

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

Five Keys Launches Custodial Maintenance Training for Formerly Incarcerated

California Prison Industry Authority offers nationally recognized certificate program that promises to get former inmates back to work 

LOS ANGELES, CA- In partnership with The California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA), Five Keys is launching a custodian training program that will provide opportunities for formerly incarcerated men and women to join the statewide organization’s team of 300-plus custodians and get immediately back to work. Through this training, five people in Five Keys’ re-entry program will train for the next five weeks in this nationally recognized accredited certification program and are slated to begin work in September at three hotels in Redondo Beach.

“This is an exciting opportunity for those in our re-entry population to start a career with the State of California with permanent jobs that offer great benefits and even a retirement plan,” says Sindy Pardo, transitional coordinator for the Five Keys, who pioneered the partnership with the California Prison Industry Authority’s Custodian Certificate Training Program (CCTP) for Five Keys. The goal is to keep rolling out the program to Five Keys re-entry members in the months and years ahead.

The Five Keys training is being held at Los Angeles Mission and the Asian-American Drug Abuse Program (AADAP, Inc. - Youth & Family Programs) in Los Angeles is contributing the supplies and janitor car with brooms and mops. The hotel jobs are in partnership with 70 Million Jobs program, a database of jobs for people with criminal records.

Students in the five-week training will be trained in all the necessary job skills they need as housekeepers and building custodians including safety about cleaning chemicals, floors, and floor care equipment, maintaining floors and other surfaces, restroom care and carpeting and upholstery care.  At the completion of the courses, they will be tested for their certifications.

About Five Keys Schools and Programs

Dedicated to getting people’s lives back on track, Five Keys Schools and Programs currently serves 24 million people or 60% of the California population of 40 million in The San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. 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 its efforts have grown exponentially. The organization interrupts the cycles of homelessness, substance abuse, violence, literacy and incarceration through our 80 community learning centers, transitional housing shelters, career centers, and community-based workforce networks by investing in their humanity so that they can be self-determined to change their lives. Five Keys also hires people directly into our transitional employment positions for formerly incarcerated individuals and people currently or formerly experiencing homelessness, while also employing over 300 formerly incarcerated individuals in full-time, benefited positions. www.fivekeys.org.

About The California Prison Industry (CALPIA)

The California Prison Industry (CALPIA) is a self-supporting, customer-focused business that provides productive work assignments for approximately 7,000 incarcerated individuals within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) institutions. CALPIA manages over 100 manufacturing, service, and consumable operations in all 35 CDCR institutions throughout California. The goods and services produced by CALPIA are sold predominately to departments of the State of California, as well as other government entities. CALPIA’s goal is to train incarcerated individuals with job skills, good work habits, and basic education and job support in the community, so when they parole, they never return to prison.www.calpia.ca.gov.

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

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Statement

It’s both traumatic and tragic that the number of deaths of black and brown people at the hands of the police continues to climb with what we could mark as almost daily anniversaries. It is just one month shy of a year since George Floyd was killed by police, 13 months since Breonna Taylor’s death at the hands of police, and mere days since Daunte Wright was killed. Even after the spark of anti-racism movements and protests, the list of names is prolific. We have heard about the deaths of Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude, Atatiana Jefferson, Tony McDade, Stephon Clark, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Tansiha Fonville, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, and countless others.

We grieve, for their loss and all others who have been wounded or killed by police, including Dijon Kizzee, shot by LASD and Mario Woods, shot by SFSD; who both received their diploma as part of Five Keys class of 2015. We recognize and support the communities who show strength and courage in the struggle to reform and reimagine our criminal legal system (Impact Justice) and the very meaning of public safety; we also acknowledge our relationships with the systems we critique.

As we watched the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict being read yesterday for the murder of George Floyd, Minnesota Attorney General-elect, Keith Ellison verbalized a profound truth, the outcome is “not justice, but accountability.” So, the verdict stands for more than just the holding of one jury, but the urgent desire and push to see even the smallest degree of continued accountability for the police taking lives, where historically violence perpetrated at their hands has been exercised with complete impunity.

Before we could even get this email distributed, we were notified of the killing of yet another child at the hands of the police. Weeks ago, we saw the news of Adam Toledo, and just yesterday, we were notified of the killing of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant who was killed by the police in Columbus, OH mere minutes before Chauvin’s guilty verdict was read. While I don’t have all the details there is absolutely no justification. While writing this response, CNN just announced that another unarmed black man, Andrew Brown, Jr. who was shot 4 times and killed by police this morning in Ohio.

The Five Keys DEIB Council has shared our feedback on the verdict which is being incorporated into this email. We must respect our individuality as each of us takes in what happened yesterday and more importantly what we have experienced over the last year in the midst of a pandemic. Ma’Khia Bryant and Andrew Brown, Jr’s deaths have already launched protests and outrage in communities across America. In that vein, our Council thought it useful to share our perspective and resources that we hope will be helpful in your work.

As we embark on another day of senseless murders against BIPOC communities, I want us to fuel ourselves with the importance of supporting our students and clients on being safe, being aware, and being advocates for their own civil rights, while also identifying ways to stay safe. The goal of education is to prepare students for the world they navigate each day. In reaching this charge, we must equip them with strategies that will successfully impart knowledge about race and justice while providing them a safe space to process the everyday injustices we face.

Feedback from your DEIB Council

Our call to action is next in our fight for social justice. An article posted online stated, “America occasionally extends justice to black people who are victims of police brutality because extending that justice in a few instances keeps intact the racially oppressive nature of the system” (The Undefeated).

Five Keys has been founded on principles of restorative justice. This verdict, though providing some much-needed accountability, cannot take the place of all the restorative work that must be done to heal our communities and all of the families that have been and continue to be harmed by racial injustice. We are grateful for some accountability and believe it is the foundation of repair and change. We are also deeply saddened thinking about all of the Black families who have lost loved ones at the hands of police, where no accountability has been served. May we both celebrate accountability, stay committed to our fight for true justice, and honor those whose killers were not held accountable.

This article explains that change derives from a commitment to accountability. Simply put, accountability is essential for change to occur so we must strive for it consistently. Another good resource on the topic of a culture of accountability and change is: Inclusion, Diversity, The New Workplace, and The Will to Change by Jennifer Brown. Without this commitment to accountability, organizations and systems will continue to suffer making change extremely difficult and prolonged.

Here are some additional resources shared by the Council that you can use with your students and your teams. This website is a valuable tool and also includes resources for our AAPI community experiencing racial hate.

As you may already see, the road ahead is long and winding. We have so much to do as a society but yesterday, someone was held accountable for his actions and that is a step forward. Still, the nation is in need of healing and so while we can take this moment as respite, still the fight goes on until police are truly here to protect and serve ALL.

We must continue to work as a public institution to exercise our power to change society for the better, to transform the institutions we frequent that sometimes promote systemic racism and to advance the values of justice and peace. You have all chosen to be members of the Five Keys community and have embraced this work and we are so grateful.

It is our hope that everyone in our community asks themselves, “Where is my influence in creating a more just society?” We cannot be bystanders on such crucial issues of racial justice and live up to our mission to ensure the transformation in society as leaders, staff, students, clients and partners.   It must be a collective approach. 

In Solidarity, 

DEIB Council 

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.”