And with the turn of a key, everything changed.
Stanley Butts walked out of Cayuga Correctional Facility April 11, a free man for the first time since his 1987 conviction on robbery charges in Cortland and Tompkins counties.
He carried $40 and his Social Security card in his pocket and a canvas bag of clothes over his shoulder. Another inmate had given him a pack of Marlboros before he left.
He was wearing his lucky yellow shirt.
Correctional officers processed him out and hustled him into a green prison van that went careening up Route 41A, through Skaneateles and down Route 690 to the bustling Syracuse bus station.
The van stopped, and when Butts stepped out it drove away.
No one was watching. That was it. Freedom.
“I’ve been doing this 25 years, one day at a time,” he said.“But right now it’s all in slow motion. It’s a whole new world.”
•••
A released inmate’s first responsibility upon release is to check in with his parole officer at a regional field office.
For those released from Auburn and Cayuga correctional facility, the nearest field office is in Syracuse. That means that many newly released inmates’ first day of freedom is spent studying bus schedules and finding their way in an unfamiliar place.
Butts, for instance, was released from CCF to Cortland, but he still had to go to Syracuse first.
The prison van dropped him off at the main bus terminal, leaving him to catch a city bus to the parole office 2.5 miles away.
After that appointment, he had to catch the same bus back to the terminal in time for a Greyhound bus down to Cortland.
There, he would sign up for social services benefits and, late in the afternoon, find out where he’d spend his first night outside a cell.
A spokeswoman with the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision defended the complicated travel arrangement, calling it “a policy question” and saying it was the parolee’s responsibility to get to appointments.
“Mr. Butts agreed to live in Cortland prior to being released, knowing he’d have to report to Syracuse (the first day),” the spokeswoman, Carole Weaver, said. “The choice was made by Mr. Butts.”
At the bus terminal, Butts turned right toward the Greyhound bus window, where he cashed in a voucher for a ticket to Cortland later in the day.
The woman behind the desk offered to hold his canvas bag while he was gone. He got a cup of coffee to make change and stared, perplexed, at the bills he got back.
“This looks like Monopoly money,” he said. “Are you sure this is real? What happened to good old-fashioned greenbacks?”
Back outside, a storm was ready to break from the overcast sky. City buses pulled in and out, in and out, the bus he needed not among them.
Butts paced and smoked, squinting to see the numbers on the buses as they came down the lane.
“My stomach’s doing flitter-flatters, man,” he said. “I don’t look out of place? I look like a regular Joe?”
Finally it came, 20 minutes late, and he boarded with a hesitant nod to the driver before settling into a seat toward the back.
The bus jerked into motion and the wind blew through a vent. Butts grinned.
“It seems like a bad dream,” he said. “I woke up after 25 years and I’m back in the real world.”
***
The key to a successful reintegration is a detailed plan of how to do it.
Jim Haid, executive director of Peace Prints Prison Ministries in Buffalo, said too many inmates leave prison without a firm idea of what they’ll do in the weeks and months ahead.
“Rather than just catching the Greyhound bus to wherever, it’s helpful to have a plan set in place, and a plan that’s going to support them in having some direction and finding the services they need,” he said. “Otherwise, they’re just going to fall back into the same old habits.”
The three most important aspects of such a plan are housing, work and support programs, he said.
Peace Prints, a non-profit organization that houses about 35 released prisoners in Erie County, provides those services and sends volunteers into Orleans Correctional Facility to help people before they hit the street.
What most guys need when they’re released is some solid footing,” Haid said. “The world is different from when they first went in, no matter how much time they spent.”
A failure -- or inability -- to handle that process sends thousands of men and women back to prison each year, often for avoidable parole violations.
Of the 24,921 people released from New York prisons between 2004 and 2007, nearly 40 percent found themselves back behind bars within three years, according to a study by the Pew Center on the States.
That is 22nd among the 41 states included in the study, and slightly lower than the national average of 43 percent.
About three fourths of those New Yorkers were recommitted for a parole violation rather than a new crime, the study showed.
***
Butts did not look like a regular Joe in downtown Syracuse.
He stepped carefully, eyeing traffic with suspicion and checking at every intersection to make sure he hadn’t lost his way to the parole office.
“There’s a lot of jaywalkers in this town,” he said.
He found the building and went inside for a 90-minute interview, his first contact with parole outside prison.
They filled out forms, photographed his tattoos and laid down the law: no leaving his residence between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. No drugs, no alcohol. No weapons, no hunting, no driving without permission.
Outside, there was music in Clinton Square and a group of children slapping a rubber street hockey ball back and forth across the blacktop.
Butts retraced his way to the bus terminal -- this time, more confidently -- and fetched his duffel bag from behind the counter.
He hadn’t eaten all day; the thought didn’t seem to cross his mind.
The bus to Cortland was about to depart. There, he was to check in with the Department of Social Services; his first regular parole meeting was scheduled for 8 a.m. the following Monday.
“I left all the animosity behind at Cayuga,” he said. “Now it’s stepping forward, getting my life back a little bit at a time. That’s all I can do.”
Staff writer Justin Murphy can be reached at 282-2237 orjustin.murphy@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter at CitizenMurphy.
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