Many ex-offenders have no driver’s license and no way to get one until they pay back the thousands they owe in court fines and child-support arrears. In some states, people with drug charges are permanently barred from getting food stamps, a holdover from a 1996 federal ban. (Virginia is one of twenty-six states that have eased some restrictions on the ban.)
“Think about it: You can do without a roof, but you can’t do without food,” said Mark Schroeder, a repeat drug-dealing offender and recovering crack addict who successfully opened his own garage-door-hanging business in the Shenandoah Valley in 2016 after a ten-year federal prison stint. He and hundreds like him were given reduced sentences following the 2015 decision Johnson v. United States, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that redefined the status of “armed career criminals.”
“To feed yourself, you’re either going to rob somebody, or you’re going to go back to dealing or prostitution,” Schroeder said. “I’ve been there and done it myself.
“The whole thing is designed for you to come back.”
*
What if Ronnie’s reentry had been managed not by an overburdened and apathetic system but instead by workers from Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, which sends clients to felon-friendlier cities like Seattle? There, jobs and harm-reduction measures are more plentiful, and police divert low-level drug and prostitution offenders who are addicted from prosecution before they’re booked, assisting with housing, case management, and employment services. Such a two-pronged approach not only addresses the need of former drug dealers to find legitimate work but also works to dry up the demand for drug dealing.
“It makes a huge difference,” Stevenson told me. “If we reduced our prison population by twenty-five percent, that’s twenty billion dollars we could save. And if we invested half of that in treatment, we could really increase people’s likelihood of success.”
In the 1970s, America decided to deal with drug addiction and dependence as a crime problem rather than a health problem, “because it was popular to find a new community of people to criminalize,” Stevenson explained. “And everybody was preaching the politics of fear and anger.”
As that narrative of addicts as criminals further embedded itself into the national psyche, the public became indifferent to an alternative response that could have eased treatment barriers, he said. As an example he cited Portugal, which decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin, in 2001, adding housing, food, and job assistance—and now has the lowest drug-use rate in the European Union, along with significantly lowered rates of drug-related HIV and overdose deaths. In Portugal, the resources that were once devoted to prosecuting and imprisoning drug addicts were funneled into treatment instead.
*
Ronnie Jones’s story was tough to fit into a neat arc of redemption, but it seemed to turn on poor decision making fueled by family instability and quick-fix desires. His rap sheet began with a felony grand larceny charge the summer before his senior year of high school. He’d borrowed a car from a girlfriend, then used that car to meet up with another girl, resulting in a catfight and, ultimately, his arrest and conviction for theft. While he was on probation for that offense, he nabbed another felony for driving another car, sans license, that contained stolen goods.
Growing up, he told me, he wanted Nikes instead of Reeboks, steak instead of hot dogs and fish sticks. He wished for a closer relationship with his single mother, a hospital nursing assistant and, later, nurse. But she got along better with his easier-going little brother, Thomas, who was into music and sports and was promoted to his school’s gifted program. “I’d get jealous of my brother, of his attention from my mom. I’d get mad at her and threaten all the time, ‘I’ll go live with my dad.’”
Ronnie was obstinate to a fault, recalled Thomas Jones III, and would talk back to teachers and to their mom. “The weird thing is, he wasn’t a very bad kid; it was more of his total disregard, at times, for authority. I learned that it was best just to try to stay out of his warpath.”
Now a music promoter based in Charlotte, Thomas Jones said his brother had a brilliant business mind and had helped him, when he was younger, with his advanced math homework even as he refused to do his own.
Their family was not without connections. His uncle Petey Jones was a linebacker on the 1971 state-champion team memorialized in the movie Remember the Titans, which was set against a backdrop of racial tensions brought on by the integration of Alexandria’s high schools. In 1990, his maternal grandfather, Thomas “Pete” Jones Sr., was such a fierce fighter for equal housing that then–president George H. W. Bush met with him and other residents to discuss ways to rid Alexandria’s public housing units of drugs.
Ronnie and his brother grew up in Section 8 housing in northern Virginia, moving every few years as their mom worked her way up to better jobs. A no-holds-barred fight between the brothers when Ronnie was fifteen taxed his mother’s nerves to the breaking point. She sent him to live in Alexandria with his father, dropping his belongings on the curb in trash bags and telling his dad, as Ronnie recalled it: “He your responsibility now. I’m done.”
Ronnie’s father and uncle were regular drug users. He remembered them going down into the basement regularly to freebase powder cocaine. Six months after moving in with his dad, Ronnie moved in with his maternal grandmother, Rosie, his favorite relative. Her husband was an Air Force mechanic who took Ronnie to air shows at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, and let him sit in the pilot’s seat. He was fascinated with airplanes and wanted to be an Air Force pilot. It was a short but happy time in a tumultuous upbringing: His grandmother helped him get a dishwashing job at a nearby retirement home, and he sold cookie dough for a door-to-door nonprofit organization on the side, developing an acumen for sales.
His grandmother gave him anything he wanted—as long as he stayed in school. But he had already switched schools ten times before his sixteenth birthday, often butting heads with his teachers. One memorable clash with authority came during a class discussion that spiraled into a debate about who had been persecuted most: African Americans, native Americans, or Jews. The exchange grew so heated that Ronnie was asked to leave the classroom, which he did, forcefully pushing the door on his way out in a way the teacher perceived as threatening. The incident culminated in a fine and his first juvenile probation stint.
“I play those incidents over and over in my head,” he said of his first few legal charges. “If I had never drove that girl’s car and then [the car with the stolen goods], I could’ve been probably in the military now and having a regular life.”
Jobs were hard to get. Because of Ronnie’s felony record, his applications were turned down by Burger King, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Lowe’s. For a time, he worked at Food Lion in Maryland, driving an hour each way to get there. A cousin introduced him to cocaine dealing, he said, whereupon Ronnie realized that he could stock shelves for two weeks and not come close to making what he could dealing drugs in a single day. The math was irresistible.
Ronnie said he hated hard drugs and didn’t want to end up like his dad. So he drank only on his birthday and New Year’s Eve, and eschewed marijuana entirely. But dealing drugs gave him the two things he craved most: money and respect. He says he was profiled in early 2000 when he and a black friend were pulled over on Interstate 66 near Herndon, Virginia, and naïvely consented to being searched, ostensibly for not having a county sticker on their car. (They were driving a car with Maryland plates, he said.) Police found 3 grams of crack cocaine tucked into his sock. “I was guilty. I did have the drugs.”