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A Parolee's First Days of Freedom --
Racing the 90-Day Phantom

By Joe Salazar

Date: 11-22-96

Close to 80 percent of all prisoners released on parole return to prison, and more than half return within the first 90 days. Far from feeling exuberant, the released inmate often finds him or herself feeling weighted down by a stultifying oppression, unable to adjust to the pace and overtaken, finally, by the 90-day phantom. PNS commentator Joe Salazar was recently released from federal prison and is working in southern California.

"What does freedom feel like?"

Curious people ask me this because I was recently released from prison. I rarely tell them the truth: It is scary and I have bad dreams.

Adjustment is a bitch to manage, especially with a hard recidivism statistic breathing down my neck. Something close to 80 percent of all released inmates return to prison; more than half return within the first 90 days of parole.

My nightmare is always the same. I find myself back in prison walking the yard -- without a clue of what I've done to merit returning. I'm convinced, however, that I've earned the ticket back -- along with several men I saw leave prison. "Slim" is always walking with his head down while another friend, Rob, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched, walks twenty paces behind. Both men have presumably failed their freedom. Each shuffles around the yard alone, vacant-eyed, treadmill-like. The dream ends with all of us making eye contact but quickly turning away, never acknowledging one another. Shame. Then I wake up.

I began having that nightmare within two weeks of my release. I wake up to an immediate state of depression. Eight years behind bars conditioned me to waking up sick and full of dread in a dreary cell. But now I am free and supposed to be enjoying my liberty. So why does my emancipation sometimes resemble a more terrible bondage?

The simple answer is that I keep thinking of my friend Slim who, in reality, returned to prison within a few months of his release. His failure to adjust on the outside inspires my sense of impending doom.

The more complex part of my fear has to do with the speedy and reckless pace of the world. I am accustomed to the opposite -- the methodical, movement-regulated-for-security prison pace. Mindless rapidity startles me and leaves me feeling off-balance.

On the day of my release, I got a check for $150. and was shown to the gate. The change of pace was immediate. The prison's parking lot was full of traffic -- a honk here, a tire screech there. The friend who picked me up at the prison is a monk, the Abbot of his monastery. But even this usually reverent man was a terror on the road. Charging ahead in fits and spurts, he wove maniacally through highway traffic, cutting off slower drivers.

A cliche from Alcoholics Anonymous says something about "staying in the car" when the road of life gets bumpy and the steering wheel in our hands gets tough to control. Today's road is a four-lane highway where the ex-con can feel like the panicked man in a runaway vehicle.

I drove down a neighborhood street a few days ago and saw a dead squirrel in the middle of the road. It was a recent kill. Its small spine was clearly broken. The fuzzy corpse was oddly arched, its head turned in an unnatural direction. The shape of the body was remarkable in that it wasn't the usual crushed or smashed mush of carnage.

In prison, when I was in one of my notorious dark moods, Slim -- an avid attender of AA meetings -- used to tell me, "Hang tough, Salazar. Stay in the car."

But Slim could not heed his own advice. Slim discovered on his release that -- like the squirrel -- he could establish nothing on that road of life. After two decades behind bars he found only irony, an emancipation that seemed nearer to stultifying oppression. One night, right around the 90 day mark, the anxiety got to him.

Full of promise, with plenty of friendly support beyond prison walls, not unlike me, Slim couldn't cope with his adjustment to society. They say pressure can bust a pipe. He finally decided that the only freedom he could conceive of was the free-fall moment when a self-destructive man opts to barter his future away for a quick fix of china-white heroin. A phony momentary high not unlike Icarus who, thinking he was the son of sky, soared to the sun, only to get his wings and soul seared before he came crashing back to earth.

Today I identify with the squirrel. It had the audacity to believe it could safely impose its will on the flowing stream of traffic, but the ruthless pace of that highway determined otherwise. Splat! There go the best laid plans of squirrels and men.

One way or another, I have a rendezvous with that recidivism rate. That 90-day mark is fast approaching, like a belligerent driver tailgating me, flashing its high-beam lights, taunting me to go faster. I peer in my rearview mirror and will that 90 day phantom to pass, leaving me to my slow precarious pace. I'm clutching my steering wheel with trembling white knuckles.

I fear becoming roadkill.