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1 Introduction Shorty D1 was a thirty-eight-year-old African American mother of two. Her younger son was five and living with her mother; the other was nineteen and at a work release center. As a child, Shorty D was involved with school and extracurricular activities. She described her childhood as a good one and herself as having “had dreams” of a career. She was close with her father, who “was an alcoholic, but he wasn’t an abusive alcoholic .You know, he was the type that would take a drink and give you all his money.” In her teen years, she felt unloved by her mother.“I know the reasons why I felt like that today. My mother had six kids and some of her kids were going to jail and all that, so she focused on the ones that needed some help more so than the ones that was all right.You know, she had to give up a little more time to help the ones that needed the help,but,see,I didn’t look at it like that. I used to look at it like, they always in trouble, why are they getting all the attention? When do I get a pat on the back?” She was “thrown” when she got pregnant with her older son when she was nineteen. She said that having a baby “played a part in me getting caught up, too, you know.” Shorty D had recently been released from prison after serving sixteen months.This was her only time in prison,though she had been arrested several times before, had spent short stints in jail, and had been on intensive probation . From prison, she went to the Mercy Home, a voluntary halfway house for women returning from prison. She first learned of the Mercy Home from her sister Lauren, who had stayed there several years earlier.All of Shorty D’s law enforcement and criminal justice system involvement stemmed from drug use and selling. Prior to her incarceration, she had been “using drugs every day all day.” Still, she did not begin using drugs until after the birth of her first child.“My mother never did drugs, you know what I’m saying? None of that, right. Everything I did, I did by choice.You know, when people say that it’s somebody that—it’s in a family? Drugs were never in my family. Matter of fact, I was in my twenties, early twenties, when I started getting high. I didn’t know what cocaine looked like, you know, until I got on the street and hang, started hanging with the wrong crowd.You know,which my mama,you know, didn’t approve of. . . .You don’t even look at the time you wasted or how many years that went by, you know.” Of Shorty D’s five siblings, three had histories of drug use. One brother was in and out of the penitentiary.Another brother 2 Th e E x - P r i s o n e r ’s D i l e m m a continued to use drugs, though “he’s the type of person that get high once a month.You know, he don’t be out there every day all day.” A few months after her release, she “gave up for a few days” and relapsed. Although she was ashamed of this,“it’s all about if you fall you ain’t gotta stay down. . . . I refused to let my pride and my guilt keep me out there, ’cause see that’s what had me in my addiction.” She spoke to her case manager at the single-room-occupancy (SRO) building where she was living at the time, and went into treatment. A few months after this, she said,“To be totally honest, I got high one time . . . it wasn’t like I can really blame it on anything. I just got high for that day, but you know, it messed my nose up, my throat was all messed up, you know, so every time I make a decision that ain’t right, you know what I’m saying, I always get disappointed out of it.” This time, she talked to her sponsor. Over the course of her first year out of prison, she participated in two job-training programs, and was looking for work at the end. Shorty D’s sister, Lauren, was forty years old and had stayed at the Mercy Home...

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