Chapter 7: Do You Have Housing
I reported at 3:40 on the day I got out, because that is a rule, and it took nine minutes and consisted of a woman photocopying my release papers.
The real meeting was the following Tuesday, at 900 Halloran Street, third floor, room 312.
Waiting room with sixteen chairs bolted in rows of four. A television bolted up in the corner playing a home renovation show with captions on and no sound.
I counted the chairs. There were sixteen. Eleven of them had somebody in them.
My officer was Kandace Pruitt. Forty-ish. Braids pinned up. A desk with two monitors and a coffee cup with a chip in the rim.
She had ninety-four people on her caseload. She told me that in the first minute, not as a complaint, as a schedule.
“You get fifteen minutes a week for ninety days,” she said. “After that, twice a month. Don't be late. Late is a violation.”
She turned the conditions sheet around so it faced me and put a pen on top of it.
I read it. All of it. Both sides. She noticed that I read it, and she stopped talking while I did, which I appreciated more than I let on.
Obey all laws. Report as directed. No alcohol. No firearms. No association with persons engaged in criminal activity.
Do not leave the county without written permission. Maintain verified employment or verified job search within thirty days.
No contact, direct or indirect, with the family of the victim.
I read that line twice. Then I read the last block, which is the one about residence. Maintain an approved residence. Report any change of address within seventy-two hours.
“Questions,” she said.
“The victim's family. Does that include letters.”
She looked up. “Have they written to you?”
“Yes.”
“Have you written back?”
“No.”
“Then don't start,” she said. “In or out, doesn't matter. Any contact goes in the file and the file goes to the board.” I said I understood.
She typed for a while. “Education,” she said.
“I have a paralegal certificate.”
Her hands stopped for about half a second, which is the longest anybody's hands stopped over that certificate for the next four months.
“From inside?”
“Correspondence program through the library. Ninety-six weeks.”
“Huh,” she said, and typed it in, and that was the end of it. Then she said, “Somebody called this office about you on Wednesday.”
The chair I was in had a metal arm and I had my hand on it. “A woman,” Pruitt said. “Said there was an incident in the lot on your release date. Said you put your hands on her.”
“What did she want.”
“She didn't file anything. She wanted to know what would happen if she did.”
“What would happen.”
“You'd go back,” Pruitt said. “That's what would happen. There would be a hearing in about six weeks and you would sit in county until then.”
She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “Is there anything in the lot on your release date I should know about?”
There was an officer named Halbert forty feet away who wrote nothing. “There's no report,” I said.
“That's not what I asked.”
“No,” I said. “There's nothing you should know about.”
She looked at me for four seconds. I counted them. Then she went back to the screen, because she had ninety-four of us and it was 10:20 in the morning.
“Employment,” she said.
“I'm looking.”
“Looking isn't a job. Thirty days.”
“Yes.”
Then the last one, and she asked it the way you ask the ninety-fourth version of a question.
“Do you have stable housing?”
Bertrand House had me on a re-entry grant with twenty-two days left on it. After that it was ninety-five dollars a week and I had four dollars and sixty cents.
If I said no, she would open a residence review. A residence review with no residence is a technical violation.
Sabine had explained this to me at a kitchen sink four days earlier, in about nine words, better than any book ever explained anything to me.
“Yes,” I said.
That is the whole lie. One word. I have never dressed it up since.
“Address the same? Anselm Street?”
“Yes.”
She clicked something, and on her screen a box went from empty to checked, and the label on that box said residence verified.
She had not verified it. She was never going to verify it. Nobody in that building had time to verify anything.
I watched the box get checked, and I understood, sitting in a plastic chair with a metal arm, that the entire machine runs on people writing down what they were told.
That is a thing I already knew. I had known it for six years. I had just never seen it from this side of the desk.
“See you next Tuesday,” Pruitt said. “Ten fifteen. Don't be late.”
I was on the stairs before I let myself do the arithmetic.
Twenty-two days.