Earning another chance

Jake Dorn looks the part of the all-American kid with his blond hair and broad shoulders in a Billabong surf T-shirt.

But this earnest 18-year-old high school student has seen more trouble and hardship than many men his senior.

Dorn is a former methamphetamine addict. He first smoked pot in third grade and tried meth in fifth.

“After being up for a couple days on meth – it’s basically all these chemicals that messes with your brain – I didn’t think that in a couple days I’m going to be lying to my parents and stealing from them,” Dorn said. “I’m afraid of living the rest of my life like that.”

Dorn doesn’t have his high school diploma yet – he’s making up for lost time now – but he is a graduate of New Directions, a Department of Correction program he credits for helping him straighten out his life.

He’s resisted the addictive pull of meth for more than a year.

On Friday nights, he goes home, he said, instead of to a party where he might encounter alcohol or drugs.

“Now I know I don’t want to keep using,” he said.

Today, 10 men will graduate from the second class of the New Directions “after-care” program, which helps convicts fresh out of the Idaho Department of Correction boot camp in Cottonwood, Idaho, successfully re-enter society.

The state is looking to duplicate the North Idaho pilot program across Idaho. If it works as well for others as it has for Jake, it will help reduce the crime rate, save the overcrowded prison system money and turn more lives around.

New Directions is a program at Cottonwood for felons sentenced to two to three years in prison; it begins with a six-month “rider” program. After the six months at Cottonwood, they go before a judge who decides whether they can be released on probation.

Once released, if they violate their probation, they may end up serving out the rest of their sentence in prison.

The after-care program that started last summer in Coeur d’Alene continues the New Directions programming in the community, reinforcing the lessons on how to recognize and avoid criminal thinking, how to establish and maintain a support network, and setting personal goals, among other personal skills. The probationers also develop relapse and recovery plans and are held to them by their probation officers and peers.

The participants meet every Saturday morning to go over the lessons, hold each other accountable and help each other cope.

“If it’s coming from a peer who has proved they’re doing well, it has more impact than a probation officer saying, ‘Yeah, you can do that,’ ” said Cindy Boyle, Dorn’s probation officer.

The Department of Correction is committed to programs that help probationers and parolees successfully reintegrate into society, agency officials say. Part of that commitment is motivated by overcrowded prisons – the state set a record this month when the number of people incarcerated climbed above 6,400.

State statistics show that 98 percent of all inmates are eventually released back to their communities. Eleven percent of Idaho’s inmates released last year came to Kootenai County.

“The rider program … is a premier program for us,” said Teresa Jones, Idaho DOC spokeswoman. “To have someone spend six months of prison time instead of two or three years, think of the cost savings and think of the life savings.

“You’re saving them a lot of heartache, but you’re also saving $48 per day for a prison bed.”

David Rollins, who graduates from New Directions today, was busted for eluding a police officer in 2003. Rollins, 24, was a North Idaho College student who threw a party to celebrate the end of a semester. He’d been drinking, left the party and when a cop tried to initiate a traffic stop, Rollins “stepped on the gas and took off.”

While on probation, “I didn’t do anything my probation officer wanted me to do,” he admitted. “I got back into drinking. So they threw me in Cottonwood.”

The New Directions program lived up to its name. Rollins found that 180 days in prison resulted in a 180 degree change in attitude. He now considers his probation officer, Chris Jensen, a friend when “before she was the enemy out to get me.”

Rollins said he’s learned to take care of his responsibilities before seeking excitement. As soon as he was released from Cottonwood on July 23, he got his driver’s license reinstated and started looking for a job.

Now he works at a rental outlet, is planning to open a computer business, is engaged to be married and has a baby boy on the way.

“Before I hopped from job to job,” he said. “Now I go to work on time, I pay my bills and I put off everything else” until they’re paid.

And he hasn’t touched alcohol or drugs. His proud probation officer said he’s one of her only probationers who has never relapsed.

But not everyone is as successful as Rollins and Dorn. Rollins’ class started out with 16 men, but only 10 made it all the way to today’s graduation.

One of the graduates, Dale Readel, has a job and a good girlfriend, but he still has problems. The difference now is, he said, “instead of getting high and drugged up, I deal with it.”

Dorn said that at first he dreaded getting up early every Saturday for the group session, but then came to “cherish” it. At group he picked up a crucial tip – to occupy himself and his hands somehow whenever he got the urge to use, and the craving would pass.

Now Dorn sometimes finds himself sharing advice and tips to friends who face similar temptations.

“There are rewards to being good, and drinking isn’t going to help,” he said.

His reward is a second chance at a normal teenage experience that he’d lost to drugs and jail.

He needs to take just one test to earn his GED and move on. But Dorn wants to play football and wrestle. That means he needs to get decent grades at Mountain View Alternative School in Rathdrum this year in order to go out for football in the fall.

“I’ve been locked up for four years altogether,” Dorn said. “I missed my childhood life.”