How does someone move on from being incarcerated? It can’t be easy, but our guests on this episode of “The State We’re In” — Julie McCarthy-Brown, founder, and Cheryll Andrews, executive director, of Dismas Home of New Hampshire — know something about how to do it successfully and why it’s important for the entire community.
By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Melanie Plenda:
Julie, tell us about Dismas Home in Manchester and how it came to be.
Julie McCarthy-Brown:
First of all, I'd like to change “formerly incarcerated women” to “women that are involved in the justice system,” because we serve women throughout the justice system. The state is moving to restoring and helping women grow, and not just from incarceration, but they come from all areas.
The namesake comes from the penitent thief who died on the cross next to Christ. Before he died, he asked Christ for forgiveness and he was given forgiveness, and we want these women to have forgiveness. His namesake is St. Dismas, and it’s called Dismas Home of New Hampshire.
In most of the other states it’s called Dismas House, but we wanted a home, not a house, because these women have never had truly a good home that’s a safe environment for them. We give them the space and the time to recover from the trauma that got them in trouble in the first place.
Cheryll Andrews:
So the state is moving towards a more restorative process instead of just punitive. So we consider women “justice-involved,” and that could mean pretrial services. We get calls from public defenders. We get calls from the drug courts, because they plead into drug court, and they need a partner, a housing partner, and so we work with them. We do take women from the prison. We take women from the jails. We take them from other programs that they might be involved in — a detox, a 28-day program. So they all have levels of justice involvement, probation and parole — any of those connections give us a place to reach out to women. And we have recently extended our service catchment to include women veterans who are justice-involved.
Melanie Plenda:
And, why was it important to go beyond just the people who were incarcerated to these other aspects of the justice system?
Cheryll Andrews:
If I'm really direct, if we can catch them before they're actually sentenced and put into a situation where they're incarcerated for a number of years it serves them better. And, because the state is moving away from long-term incarceration, they’re still justice-involved. They still have all the stigmas and obstacles attached to their re-entry into the community, including their substance misuse, but they haven't had four years in prison or 18 months in jail. It might have been a shorter stint with probation or community service or some other piece that still connects them to the justice system. But it's not directly incarceration.
Melanie Plenda:
Cheryll, tell us more about the programs of Dismas Home. What does it offer, and how does it help women?
Cheryll Andrews:
So one of the things that we are asked often is, “What do you mean Dismas Home? Is this a faith-based organization?” And my answer is we are a 501c3 nonprofit organization and we are not faith-driven. But I will tell you that a whole lot of people who have a lot of faith are behind the scenes helping us move all the pieces forward. But we do not preach doctrine, and we ask women to connect with their higher power and work and find a spiritual place for themselves, but we do not dictate that, and we don't preach doctrine. That's definitely a question that we're often asked.
Our program is a Level 3.1 ASAM (American Society of Addiction Medicine) — it’s a national mental health care standard, and it means that we have a set program. They are required to have one hour with the clinician a week, one hour with the drug and alcohol counselor a week. They have to have three immediate group therapy meetings a week in house, and we take them to several outside community meetings every week. So that's the core of it. Plus we are staffed 24/7 with recovery support workers, meaning if they're struggling with something, they can talk to somebody 24/7 here.
It's a pretty strict program, and residents come to us on a volunteer basis. They have to want to come. I can't make them come, and I can't make them stay. That is key to their ability to move themselves forward, because they're here on their own accord. They can pick up and leave anytime they want, and they can make the choice to stay. It's pretty important.
Then when they move into the transitional living program, they move into heavy case management, where we begin to really help them focus on the plan to leave us, because it's going to come, and we need to help you figure out what that looks like and how to get there. It might be education, it might be a driver's license, it might be finding housing. It's certainly about helping them find meaningful work that's not a get-well job, which is something like Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s. It's a meaningful job where they will earn benefits and wages that will help them move forward to an independent level and all of the surrounding support that needs to happen.
Melanie Plenda:
Julie, how does Dismas Home support itself?
Julie McCarthy-Brown:
We support ourselves in many different areas. We take donations, we do grants, we have corporate sponsors, volunteering — our board, for instance, is totally 100% volunteers — and they give up their time and they’re all ages.
We have volunteers that come in. We have a book club starting right now. We have a woman who just became a professional chef, and she's coming in to work with the women. We have canine therapy. We have equine therapy. We have a lot of different programs in which people can support if they are just able to volunteer. Sometimes we have to find someone to help them get a GED, get them through that paperwork and the process to have that behind them, because there are some that arrive with no high school education.
We also work with colleges. If a woman wants to become a vet tech, we find a scholarship for her so that she can fulfill those dreams and have a very meaningful life — something she loves going forward. Because, if you enjoy your job, it's not work.
Melanie Plenda:
Here’s a question for both of you — why is a place like this needed? Let’s start with Julie then to Cheryll.
Julie McCarthy-Brown:
You need long-term help overcoming what you've grown up with and how you've lived in your life. Sometimes our women come with 25 years of addiction — selling drugs, being on the street, you don't know. We don't ask them their story — they’ve learned never to trust anybody, and they really just can't fathom the fact that people that don't know them personally would support them financially and would care enough to come and help them. It's very important to have that underpinning.
When you see them succeed — I equate it to a rose blooming. When they bloom and it's fully fragrant, it is gorgeous to watch — very, very fulfilling to work with this population. I'm blessed to be able to have somebody like Cheryl who runs around very diligently for us.
Cheryll Andrews:
The personal connection for me is this:I have a sister who spent some time in jail, probably more than 20 years ago now, and when she came out, I had no way of helping her. I had no resources. I had nobody to tell me how to help her get herself moving. She was fortunate enough to find a program that helped her, and she is now living her most beautiful life with her family. So when I came to Dismas Home, I wanted to help somebody else's sister, because maybe family isn't the right place for them to go, or they certainly don't have the clinical skills.
Women don't know how much help that they need because they built this steel cage around themselves of no trust. It's survival mode. But what they want is what the rest of us want — a normal, healthy, happy life, free of addiction, free of all this craziness that goes on because of the addiction, and to move forward to be able to have their children and enjoy going grocery shopping and have a home, the simple things in life that we all take for granted. They don't take any of it for granted, and there are so many of them — on average, over the course of a year, it's about 2,000 women in the state of New Hampshire who are justice-involved, and we can help right now.
Melanie Plenda:
I’m sure people understand how Dismas Home helps these women, but let’s talk a little bit more about how it can also help the community.
Cheryll Andrews:
The argument is the humanity, right? The human side of things. I want to help her. She deserves help. She shouldn't have to live this way. It helps her. It helps her family. It helps break that cycle of recidivism and substance misuse. It keeps her from teaching those bad habits to her children. It helps her to find new ways to be successful, and that helps the community at large.
It offers her an opportunity to go to work. Our unemployment rate is really low, and there are boatloads of jobs out there, so if we can help someone get back into the workforce — we're helping the community on that foot. If she’s also a taxpaying citizen, she’s also contributing to society by paying her taxes. We're also helping save the state money on the other end because she's not in and out, in and out, in and out of the jail system relentlessly, or she's not living on the street where she could freeze or where she could die from anything. So if you're looking at it from the human perspective, we're helping a small chunk, a very small drop in the bucket, of people who need help. But if we can help one, and then she can help one, then we're helping more than one, and we're hopefully making that ripple effect in the community.
Melanie Plenda:
Julie, what are your plans for the future of the organization?
Julie McCarthy-Brown:
Cheryl always laughs at me when I talk about this. The dream 11 years ago was to have a home in every county in the state for women, and probably some for men, too. We've been asked to do it for men, but right now, the women have nothing — and that's where we're concentrating our efforts. We’ll eventually have one for men, but we'd like to have at least 10 homes.
Melanie Plenda:
And for those who would like to offer help or support, what do you need and how can they do it?
Cheryll Andrews:
Anyone who wants to help us in a wide variety of ways can send an email to info@Dismashomenh.org. Visit the website, do a little research, pick up the phone and call us.
We're always open to lots of ideas and possibilities all the time. We have a group of volunteers that come to us from the Manchester Area Human Resources Association, and that organization has about 180 members, and they come once a month. There's a group of women who come once a month, and they do interviewing skills and resume-building skills, and how to dress for an interview, talking about what kinds of work they might want to do when they leave here or eventually, and trying to help them sort out what do I need to get there? Sometimes the conversations are pretty short, but they're planting seeds all the time to help them move themselves forward.
You know, our motto is, “You can always make another choice.” So if today you're not making the best choice, you can make another choice today. You can make another choice tomorrow. So it's important that they know that their future is in their hands.
Melanie Plenda:
Julie McCarthy-Brown and Cheryll Andrews from Dismas Home of New Hampshire, thank you for joining us today.
“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visitcollaborativenh.org.