On a rainy fall day almost a year ago, an aging convicted drug felon named Ron Menzie clutched a notebook to his chest and talked, grinning like a grade school boy excited about a new year of classes.
He would go back to Chicago when he left prison, he said. He would find a job. He would look up his family and his friends, who would help him embark on his new life. The notebook was his journal, in which he had scribbled down these hopes and dreams in his childlike script.
“I’ve got to remember where I’m headed,” Menzie said that day, about his plans to head back home to Chicago. “If I forget that, I’m going to end up nowhere.”
A cloud of witnesses gathered around Menzie, only a few days before he would leave the Downstate prison called Southwestern Correctional Center just a few miles from St. Louis.
To his face, they predicted nothing but the best for him. Menzie had excelled in the best drug treatment the Illinois prison system had to offer, a program begun at the Downstate institution just one year before. Menzie had done so well he had been named one of a few mentors to the other inmates.
But deep down, they all dreaded the worst. And the life Menzie went on to lead over the coming year would offer heartbreaking evidence of the truth they already knew: that drug addicts, particularly those who turn to a life of crime, display a miserably poor ability to stay clean when they are on their own.
In fact, some legislators have come to question whether such expensive, state-of-the-art drug rehab programs are worth funding at all, especially since the state has no money or plan to track the graduates.
Less than two days after he walked out of the former Catholic boys’ school where Southwestern is housed, Menzie was dealing drugs on Chicago’s South Side to finance his rekindled heroin habit. It is a story of bad choices, bad luck and of deep, abiding illness that dates to Menzie’s time as a combat medic in Vietnam.
But whether his story is reflective of what has happened to other Southwestern inmates like him is open to question: Prison officials simply don’t know. Though the program has been widely praised within drug treatment circles, the state has conducted no studies to see how its 350 graduates have fared upon release from prison.
In the meantime, though, the state spends an additional $1,700 each year to send drug addicts through the program instead of locking them up at $16,700 a year in standard prisons.
If not for a series of interviews conducted by the Tribune with Menzie last fall and then again this month, they would not even know the fate of one of their most promising graduates.
In a sad way, advancing to Southwestern was a little like a scholastic achievement for Ron Menzie. He was 45 years old and a wisp of a man when a drug-dealing conviction landed him in the state prison system, for the second time, in 1995.
At the ironically named “reception center” at Joliet Correctional Center, the maximum-security sorting station for inmates, a desk clerk took a long look at Menzie’s record and noticed his lifelong relationship with heroin. A board of prison officials took a look, too.
“They thought I had potential,” Menzie recalled this month, with a tinge of pride in his voice. “I was hooked up with the (gang) organization, but they saw I had been trying to take some classes and better myself.”
So they chose him for their first class at Southwestern. And he did well. He attended all the classes and therapy groups and, unlike the reluctant inmates who inevitably hunkered down in the back row, Menzie sat in the front and was the first to raise his hand.
His counselors soon named him a “Pacesetter,” a member of an elite group who would guide and counsel other inmates.
In the past, Menzie had been in at least four treatment programs and even had managed to hide his continued heroin use while working briefly as an “addictions specialist” at Chicago’s Haymarket halfway house for substance abusers.
But something was different at Southwestern, Menzie believes as he looks back on his life. He had never lived in a round-the-clock treatment program before, nor stayed clean for an entire year.
“I was 45, and all these other guys were calling me `Pops,’ ” Menzie said. “I would look at the younger guys in the organization, and I would think, `Man, I wish I had your chance. I would change my whole life.’ “
He recalled how his friends watched him pack his clean clothes and smooth out the $20 bills before he put them in his wallet on the day he left.
Then he was by himself on that Greyhound bus headed back to Chicago. He began to shake and chill, as he had done so many times in withdrawal.
A day later the $20 bills were gone, and Menzie said he was selling drugs to support his new habit.
Southwestern was opened two years ago with inmates like Menzie in mind. Faced with a growing population of drug-addicted inmates and very high rates of recidivism, the Illinois Department of Corrections decided to take a whole new approach in 1995. Prison officials estimated 57 percent of its inmate population had a substance abuse problem.
So they decided to open a “therapeutic community” at one of the Downstate prisons, where addicts would live completely isolated from the influences of the rest of the prison population and work solely on their recovery 24 hours a day.
Such programs had shown promise at other penal institutions. According to one U.S. Justice Department study, New York state inmates who had lived in behind-bars therapeutic communities returned to prison at a rate of 27 percent–much better than the untreated addicts, 40 percent of whom returned to prison after release.
That suggested Illinois prison officials had a good chance of improving on the overall record: roughly 45 percent of all Illinois inmates released from prison return to the system. Similarly, as a rule of thumb, addictions specialists expect that 40 percent of those treated for substance abuse will relapse at one time or another.
Already, the results at Southwestern reflect some improvement. Prisoners are sticking with the program longer. A year ago, the average inmate stayed in the program for four months before dropping out. Now, the average stay hovers above six months.
But prison officials don’t know the rate-of-return for program graduates, or how many of them stay straight once they’re out on the street, said Louis DiFonso, director of substance-abuse services for the Illinois prison system.
One reason is that it’s hard to conduct valid studies so early. Because the first two years of such a program are so volatile, they would tend to skew the overall results, he said.
Besides that, studies cost money that the prison system doesn’t have right now.
“We are looking for federal money, and will conduct an evaluation when we get the money,” DiFonso said. “Of course, the state legislature is one source of money, too.”
The department is conducting a study of a separate drug treatment program at the Sheridan Correctional Center, which officials said is seeing some success.
But some critics of the system said the department should closely monitor every rehabilitation program it operates.
The state should pay extra money only if it keeps the inmates from going back to their old ways, said state Sen. Edward Petka (R-Plainfield).
“It doesn’t seem like it’d be a lot of work to see if they work or not,” said Petka, a former prosecutor and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Meanwhile, some say the answer may be simply incarcerating hard-core criminals during the periods of their lives when they are most likely to reoffend, suggested Petka.
“The chances are, after they’re 60 years old, they’re not going to be violent with anybody,” Petka said.
But rehabilitation advocates said that approach won’t work, in part because prisons already are overcrowded. DiFonso acknowledged, though, that his programs probably will never do well enough to suit Petka and other critics.
Even if an ex-convict stays sober for only a few months before relapsing, said DiFonso, at least that’s fewer victims who suffer at his hands before he returns to crime to support his habit.
As dismal as his story is, Menzie offered some support of DiFonso’s theory, as well as some hope for the future.
When he arrived back at 45th Street and Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago’s South Side, where he grew up, there were people back home waiting to help him, including a godmother, who let him live in her home, and an aunt. Menzie especially hoped to earn the pride of his father, a 72-year-old retiree who repeatedly has put his own reputation on the line to help his son secure jobs over the years.
But Menzie said the lure of heroin was stronger even than the desire to please his father. He continued to deal drugs for two months, frantically peddling to keep up with his mounting craving.
Things were different, though. All along, Menzie said, he wasn’t enjoying the drugs like he used to.
“Everything I had told those guys back at Southwestern would haunt me,” he said. “I knew what I was doing was wrong. What I was doing was not what I really wanted to do.”
And even though he was dealing drugs, Menzie said he did not resort to violent crime during that time.
“I had a new moral sense of values since Southwestern,” he said.
Also, his father was coming by to see him regularly, each time gently urging him to check himself into a hospital for help.
One night shortly after Christmas, when Menzie found he could no longer even find a vein that his needle could penetrate, he decided to take his father’s advice. The next day, he walked into the Veterans Administration Hospital on Chicago’s West Side and checked himself in.
That single act represented the first time Menzie had ever gotten fed up with his problem and decided on his own to do something about it.
Today, Menzie is in a Milwaukee VA hospital that specializes in treating veterans battling substance abuse and other remnants of their time in combat. He has neither dealt nor taken drugs since January.
Menzie thinks the program has opened his eyes to the roots of his decades-old addiction. He never thought about the trauma of Vietnam when he did drugs.
He keeps his old Pacesetter handbook nearby.
His journal reflects that new hope.
“I feel safe in my new environment and with the guys here,” one recent entry reads. “I keep coming back to realize: I have to let go and let God. All I can do is turn it over. And I must concentrate on myself. Only I can help I. If I do, things will be better this time.”
