Life After Murder: Five Men in Search of Redemption by Nancy Mullane

Author:Nancy Mullane [Mullane, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Fiction, True Crime, Criminals & Outlaws, Murder, Criminology, Violence in Society, Penology
ISBN: 9781610390293
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2012-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

It has now been more than an hour since Phillip finished shaving the stubble off his deeply dimpled chin. He looks around. “Where is that parole officer?” His wide blue eyes begin to turn from raw anticipation to veiled fear. He has never been this close to getting out before, but that doesn’t mean he’s out.

“Don’t worry,” Sam says. “I’m sure he’s on his way. It’s only eleven-thirty. It takes a good hour or more to drive from Sacramento.”

“Yeah, sure. I know,” Phillip says, looking at his watch, then out the office door at the dozens of new arrivals in bright orange jumpsuits locked up in large cages waiting to be processed. It’s been a long twenty-year journey from the day he wore one of those jumpsuits.

“While we wait, tell me: How did you get to where you are today?”

“San Quentin has more programs than all the other prisons,” Phillip says. “There’s nothing at the other prisons. You just sit in your cell, walk around the yard, and do time. I didn’t graduate from high school, so when I got to the county jail in 1988, I began taking classes and got my high school diploma. Then I kept going and once I got here, there were programs.”

He enrolled in Patten University, an inside-prison satellite branch of a local Christian institution offering college-level courses to inmates. He joined IMPACT (Incarcerated Men Putting Away Childish Things) and Squires, a national organization that brings troubled teens into prisons to hear from the other end of the road they are traveling on. Phillip says if he couldn’t be there for his own locked-up sons, he would be there for the boys he could reach.

By 1998, after serving five years at San Quentin and a total of ten years behind bars, Phillip became eligible to appear before the California Board of Parole Hearings, for what’s known as the initial hearing. The commissioners gave him a two-year denial, meaning he would have to wait two years before going before the parole board again.

Over the next two years he joined IPP, the Insight Prison Project. He attended counseling sessions with a group of men dedicated to turning their lives around by taking a head-on look at the psychological walls and emotional problems that led them to their acts of violence and the impact their crime had on the victims.

In 2000, Phillip says, the Board of Parole Hearings was so backlogged, he had to wait not two but three years to go before the board again. Again the commissioners found him unsuitable for parole and gave him another two-year denial.

Then, in 2003, after presenting his case to the Board of Parole Hearings for a third time, the commissioners determined Phillip was no longer a threat to society and found him suitable for parole. One of the commissioners, Carole Daily, was on the board that had denied him parole back in 2001. This time she said he was ready to go home. “The board doesn’t go from a

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