Hope after prison

When Jake Dorn’s girlfriend gave birth in prison, Dorn turned to his roommates and sponsor at a Hayden-based transitional home for ex-convicts with a request: Let me care for my baby here three nights a week until her mother gets out of jail.

At first, program director Gar Mickelson said no way, too complicated. But Dorn, a recovering methamphetamine addict, insisted that he wanted to be a good father, said he and his girlfriend wanted counseling, and that she planned to move into a nearby transitional home for women upon her release in a month. Other family members were assisting with the baby’s care as well.

Dorn’s persistence won them over and soon his housemates became “surrogate fathers” to baby Justyce.

“My morals have kinda changed in the last year,” said Dorn, a lanky 21-year-old who has lived at the home since he was released from prison a year ago. “I’m only alive today because I’m here.”

The transitional home, called Twentyfour-seven, offers a regimented, faith-based recovery program intended to teach addicts to shed old habits and learn new life skills, such as responsibility and accountability. The program strives to help them find jobs, reunite with family and eventually become productive members of society.

Homes like these are growing rapidly in Idaho, and the Department of Correction relies on them to help ex-inmates transition back into society.

They’ll grow rapidly in Spokane too if a Boise-based company called New Hope Community Health is successful. The company plans to create as many as 60 faith-based transitional homes in Spokane County within the next few years, and 16 more in Kootenai County. Despite the needed service they provide to the community, the homes also have created controversy, especially when they have surfaced in the middle of residential subdivisions with little neighbor notification.

“The cities a lot of the time don’t know they’re popping up and as a result, neither do the neighbors,” said Jerry Todd, public information manager for the city of Boise’s division of planning and development services.

Last year, about 30 transitional homes existed statewide in Idaho; this year, there are more than 100. Some, like Dorn’s, are faith-based and run by churches. Others are for-profit and run by people looking to make money by providing a service. Residents are charged rent or “program fees” to live in the homes, depending on the services provided.

“It’s something we depend on here,” said Eric Kiehl, the Department of Correction’s manager for Idaho’s five northern counties. “There is definitely a need and a way to keep them in operation and under control. I hope it continues to grow up here.”

New Hope already is working with community members in the Moscow-Pullman area and anticipates opening a home there in the spring. The company operates 16 of the faith-based homes for men and women in Southern Idaho and plans an aggressive expansion into North Idaho, Spokane and Oregon within coming years. Each home would house eight to 12 people, along with a house manager.

Working with affiliated real estate companies, New Hope is seeking investors to purchase single-family homes, then lease them back to the company for the program. The investors are promised a profit of $150 to $300 per month in rental income.

New Hope accepts only recovering substance abusers, but they can’t also have been convicted as sex offenders, violent criminals or arsonists. Residents pay $400 a month in program fees, which includes housing; educational classes, including drug and alcohol counseling, relapse prevention, and anger management; GED classes; case management; and drug and alcohol tests. A full-time house manager helps residents find jobs and New Hope collaborates with outside agencies and unions for training. The company also has started other companies, such as landscaping and painting firms, to provide employment to its clients.

New Hope was founded by Dennis Mansfield, a former U.S. Congress and state Senate candidate who for years headed the Idaho Family Forum, a conservative group known for its anti-abortion lobbying.

“We’re not partners with probation and parole, but we’re trying to do the same thing: help re-introduce someone to society in a controlled environment,” said Larry Durkin, New Hope’s Boise-based administrator, who also lives in an Ada County work-release center as he completes a two-year sentence for grand theft.

Durkin said he previously worked as a developer and stole money when he didn’t feel he was being paid sufficiently for a job. Durkin met Mansfield through a Bible study within the correctional system. After spending time living, working and praying with other inmates, Durkin said he developed a desire to help them become productive members of society. He went to work for New Hope in April.

“There’s a large population of people wandering around unsupervised,” Durkin said. “There needs to be a solution to the problem.”

The company says it has a waiting list of 305 people, which would instantly fill about 25 homes.

Though few people deny the need for transitional homes, New Hope’s houses have created controversy when residents in places like Boise and Nampa have awakened one day to discover a home full of ex-inmates in their single-family residential subdivisions. Neighbors have complained to city officials only to find their hands largely tied.

Though New Hope says it notifies city officials who then are asked to notify neighborhood associations about plans for a transitional home, city officials and neighbors say that hasn’t always happened.

The Americans with Disabilities Act classifies recovering addicts as disabled, and the Fair Housing Act requires municipalities to provide accommodations to people with disabilities, said Todd, the Boise public information manager. The combination of those two laws permits New Hope to open homes in neighborhoods without going through public hearings, Todd said.

“Their perception is that the law is on their side and they have a right to put these up and they’re going about and doing that,” Todd said. “That air and kind of attitude is what caused 150 people to come out and have a community meeting.”

However, Todd said, New Hope has made a renewed effort of late to notify the city about plans for new homes.

Dick Mottram, president of the Maplewood Homeowners Association in Nampa, said New Hope bought a house “under another name” in his neighborhood and “snuck in” on Oct. 17. He acknowledges that ex-convicts need a place to live but feels a single-family residential neighborhood is not the place.

“The thing that really scares me is people are afraid and they’re arming themselves,” Mottram said, explaining that four neighbors have purchased guns. “Pretty much anymore the neighbors are keeping the curtains pulled and the doors locked.”

Durkin counters that other neighbors have brought over cookies, invited the residents of the transitional homes for Thanksgiving dinner, and been delighted when those residents have helped change a tire or completed neighborhood chores.

Nearly 200 ex-offenders are scattered within a five-mile radius of the Maplewood neighborhood, Durkin said. In New Hope’s houses, the ex-offenders have strict rules and everything they do is reported to probation and parole officers.

“They can either live in a house like this, and have a solid recovery program … or they can move across the street and live in their Aunt Lucille’s garage,” Durkin said.

The community opposition has motivated Idaho’s DOC to work with the state Department of Health and Welfare to develop a certification program for opening a transitional home, Kiehl said. The DOC plans to add a section requiring that neighbors be notified when a home will house ex-inmates, he said. If people do not abide by that requirement, he added, the DOC will not refer people to their homes.

“We would not be making the referrals and people would not be living there,” he said.

The DOC currently monitors 2,000 people in Idaho’s five northern counties, including those on probation and parole, Kiehl said, adding that one in 36 adult males statewide has been through the DOC system.

“People that get in trouble up here, they’re part of the community,” Kiehl said. “It’s not so much a Department of Correction problem; it’s a community problem, it’s a community issue.”

That’s an attitude subscribed to by the congregation of Prairie Avenue Christian Center, which opened a transitional home for women in October on the Rathdrum Prairie. Following her first six weeks at Freedom House, recovering meth addict Tara Thompson has a new goal in life.

Thompson said she wants a chance to start fresh and become the mom she was “intended to be” to her three young daughters. She has lived in the home for recovering female substance abusers since Dec. 10, when she was released from the Kootenai County jail.

“It’s really a great program,” Thompson said, wiping away tears. “My kids are very proud of me.”

Thompson is getting ready to go out and look for work for the first time in years and is “scared to death.” But with the support of mentors and volunteers from the church, Thompson thinks it’ll work out.

As with Twentyfour-seven, which is run by Hayden Lake Evangelical Friends Church, dozens of congregation members support the home and residents by donating food and money, conducting Bible studies, or helping with renovations.

“You don’t even know how much it’s needed,” said Jenny Stark, a Freedom House organizer. “We probably get three calls a day. They want a fresh start.”