Larry Thibodeaux was home from prison just 40 minutes when the drugs were offered.

 

Standing outside his mother's home on Houston's northeast side, he was catching up with a neighbor when an old friend pulled up and talked through the open window of a rundown pickup. "You all right?" she asked. "Fine," he said. They talked a little more and then she asked again, "You all right?" It was not so much what she said, but the way she said it, with each word over-emphasized, that told Thibodeaux the question was about more than just his well-being. It was about his need to get high. A hunger he had no intention of awakening. Thibodeaux turned down the offer with a warm smile and the same cryptic code of the street. "Fine," he said. "I'm fine." Thibodeaux, 47, was released Oct. 30 from the Huntsville Unit prison after serving 13 years of a 25-year sentence for burglary. He is one of the nearly 36,000 people the Texas prison system releases into the community each year.

His experiences are typical of what officials say many parolees go through. They leave prison with every intention of living clean, only to return to the same troubled neighborhoods where drugs are readily available and opportunities for crime are rampant. Factor in the difficulties that come with trying to earn a legitimate living as an ex-convict, and see why many parolees succumb to temptation, commit new crimes, and go back to prison. Studies find 40 percent or more wind up back in prison within three years of their release. Thibodeaux's story helps show why.

In a little more than a month, Thibodeaux encounters numerous opportunities to return to drug abuse and is given plenty of excuses to do something that would get him sent back to prison. Jobs are hard to come by, his parole schedule is demanding and tough to maintain without money or a car. Life on the outside is demanding. Still, Thibodeaux is determined to succeed.

For a hardened criminal, he appears a rather soft man. His hair is salted with white, his eyes are warm, his smile quick, his body decidedly middle-aged. He is an ex-convict today, he is sure, because when he was 13 years old he saw the lipstick-red Cadillac of Buster the pimp. Buster had everything an adolescent boy wanted: money, women, clothes, charisma. Thibodeaux chose the money that could be made hustling on the streets over the stability of working at his parents' stables or any of the other businesses they owned: the convenience store, washateria, the beauty shop or the apartment complex. Thibodeaux never became a pimp like Buster, but he wonders how his life would have turned out if he had. "Buster never went to jail," he muses. Instead, Thibodeaux sold marijuana and PCP and broke into other people's businesses. On good days, Thibodeaux could make as much as $9,500. He also went to prison three times.

That's all behind him now, Thibodeaux insists. In prison the third time, he fervently embraced the Christian faith. By the time he was released, he was leading a Bible study for 39 men. Since his release, he volunteers as a minister to prison inmates. Thibodeaux said religion empowers him to do the right thing when temptations arise. And they seem to arise around every corner.

Inmates leave prison with a check for $50 and a bus voucher home. The Greyhound station is a two-block walk up a tree-lined 12th Avenue from the Huntsville Unit prison. The station will cash those checks for free and, inmates say, anything a man who has been locked up for years might desire can be bought in the neighborhoods nearby. There is no advertising in the black market; information is passed from inmate to inmate by word of mouth. Thibodeaux avoided these pitfalls.

He was met outside the Huntsville prison by someone from the Methodist Church near his mother's house and given a ride home. Thibodeaux returned to a neighborhood teeming with trouble. As he sat on the front porch of his mother's house on busy Lockwood Drive, he knew drugs were being sold a block or two away. He could tell by watching the flow of traffic. The neighborhood is full of shotgun shacks and shanties that sit back from the road and behind crooked chain-link fences. The businesses that are not boarded up have bars on the windows. The mailboxes are locked in cement to keep drug addicts from stealing them to recycle the aluminum. When Thibodeaux's parole officer visited his house, he told him, "You're in a bad neighborhood." Not to worry, Thibodeaux responded, "I was the worst one here."

Thibodeaux has much to do to get his life back in order. His mother's house suffered in his absence. The wood siding needs to be stripped and repainted, and the wooden windowsills are rotten and must be replaced.

Paying jobs prove more difficult to find. Like all parolees, Thibodeaux gets help from the Texas Workforce Commission's Project Rio. The commission gives Thibodeaux vouchers for nice clothes to wear to interviews, bus tokens and leads on companies amenable to hiring ex-convicts. But the commission cannot give him what he most wants: a job where he can use the computer-aided drafting he studied in prison. Every week, Thibodeaux begs a ride from his uncle, a friend, someone, to an employment office near Northline Mall. There, he searches a computer database of jobs and makes it a point to fax at least one résumé every week. In a month and a half, he has not received a single telephone call back. Money is tight. In addition to the $50 he received when he left prison, Thibodeaux got another $50 for contacting his parole officer within 24 hours, but that is quickly used up, most of it on fees he must pay to comply with parole. He is required to attend drug counseling sessions twice monthly. He had to pay $35 to enroll in the class and each meeting costs him $15. He had to pay $15 for a state identification card, $11 for a copy of his birth certificate, and then $24 for a driver's license. He has to beg a ride to each of these appointments, and he likes to at least chip in for gas or maybe pay for lunch. He has to rely on his mother and others for help making ends meet. Thibodeaux considers working as a day laborer. The work would be hard, particularly for a 47-year-old man with a bum shoulder, but a friend told him he could earn $34 a day and that would help with expenses.

The desperate gray of the job search is broken by the brilliance of Thanksgiving. Thibodeaux spends the holiday at his aunt's house near Conroe. He is the only man in the house, so he sits at the head of the table, says grace and has the honor of carving the turkey. It was the first time in his life he has led a Thanksgiving dinner.

The next week, his uncle sends him to a company that might be willing to hire him. The company shuttles railroad employees around Texas. He interviews with six other men, and all seven are hired. The company will provide Thibodeaux with a van and ask him to alternate 12-hour shifts five days a week with another employee, who happens to be a neighbor. The job pays 14 cents a mile, which is fine since trips can require him to drive a railroad engineer from Houston to San Antonio. When he is working, he has to be prepared to pick up someone at a moment's notice. It's not ideal, but it is a start. Thibodeaux is disappointed he did not find a computer-aided drafting job, but he is pleased to be working. He thinks he will be able to save enough money in a month to put a down payment on a used car. Nothing fancy, as long as it has a good transmission and four good tires, he says.

Thibodeaux has his eyes set on something more. He has an application pending for a factory position that will pay $9.50 an hour to start. The man at the plant told him they may have something for him after the first of the year. "It's going to be all right," he says.

 Houston Chronicle 12/8/02