Nelson, a former drug addict with a shaved head and piercing eyes, has the arrest record to back up his looks. In 2002, when he was caught with $100 worth of crack, he was out on an I-bond from an arrest two months earlier for possession of $40 worth of crack, a stolen Dodge Neon, and three credit cards that weren’t his. He was looking at several years in the state penitentiary, but after ten months in Cook County Jail, Nelson was sentenced to 24 months’ probation and sent to live in this brick courtyard building on far North Damen. It doesn’t look much different from the other three- and four-flats in Rogers Park: the gate’s not locked, and there are no bars on the windows. Nothing on the outside hints that all the residents are drug offenders doing court-ordered rehab in place of prison time.
“Or baloney,” the woman in the orange jacket adds.
“You can come with me when I go see my dad,” the woman says.
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But the facility on Damen is the only one of A Safe Haven’s ten recovery homes that houses a prison population. And it can only hold 85 people at a time. Drug possession is now the number one cause of incarceration in Illinois–and recidivism is on the rise. Of 44,379 adult prisoners in Illinois in 2003, 11,292 were in for drug offenses, and drugs and/or alcohol played a role in most of the others. A study by TASC found that 82 percent of male and 84 percent of female arrestees screened for drugs and alcohol after being taken into custody by Chicago police tested positive. And incarceration isn’t solving the problem of drug abuse or related crimes: more than half the Illinois inmates released in 2001 were back in jail by 2004.
On November 2, Cook County voters found this question on the last page of their ballots: “Shall the Illinois State Government provide adequate funding for comprehensive and appropriate substance abuse treatment for any Illinois state resident requesting services from a licensed provider, community-based organization or medical care facility within the state?”
When Davis appealed to agencies around the state to gather signatures to get the treatment-on-demand initiative on the ballot, A Safe Haven turned to its residents and was able to raise a small army of canvassers for the cause, eventually bringing in 26,000 of the 118,000 signatures collected. Nelson says he spent weeks in the Loop telling people, “If you lock somebody up and you don’t treat him, he’s just gonna go out and do it again. He’ll get worse, he’ll pump up, and he’s gonna be a monster.”
