An inmate’s release from prison never unfolds quite like it does in the movies. In “The Shawshank Redemption,” the elderly Brooks Hatlen is decked out in a suit and fedora, carrying a briefcase as he shakes hands with guards and walks out timidly with no one to greet him.

It’s something you think about while you’re sitting in a 15-passenger van in the Soledad prison parking lot for nearly two hours, as I was in August, waiting with the Stillman family for their father to be released after 23 years. We were allowed to leave the van only to visit a Porta-Potty 20 yards away.

When I first met Fred Stillman three years before, in California State Prison Solano in Vacaville, he described how his family “brought me out of the darkness.” He’d been locked up for two decades for second-degree murder for stabbing and killing one man and assault with a deadly weapon for stabbing another in a 1995 fight outside a Clearlake bar. His eldest daughter, Jennifer, who was 16 at the time, and his then-wife, Luanne, also were convicted for their roles in the fight.

When Fred first went to prison, he was sent to Pelican Bay, where he fell back on what he knew best: brawling. “I thought I was king of the ring and no one could beat me up,” he said. “I hated the world. I didn’t care about my own life. You want to kill me and put me out of my misery? Go ahead. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

He quickly wound up in “the SHU” — the infamous Secure Housing Unit, a solitary confinement block where inmates staged a hunger strike in 2013 to protest inhumane conditions. After relocating to High Desert State Prison, then New Folsom and Salinas Valley prisons, it would be six years until he had a contact visit with his family. His seven children were living with his parents in San Bruno. Because of visitation restrictions, only four children were allowed to visit at a time.

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On the day I met Fred, I was accompanied by his daughter Jessica, 32, who was working with Project Avary, a Bay Area nonprofit that supports the children of inmates while helping them break family cycles of incarceration. Jessica was observing Solano prison’s Long-Term Offender Program, a voluntary curriculum that requires inmates to dig deep and focus on anger management, substance abuse, their impact on victims, criminal behavior and their often-dysfunctional upbringing.

After the classes, I filmed a sit-down conversation with Jessica and her father as he talked about watching his children grow up from behind bars and all the ways they tried to keep in touch over the years. They both remembered a visit at Folsom prison more than a decade ago, when he was wearing only underwear and sporadically talking to himself. Jessica hardly recognized him. “This is not the Dad I remember,” she thought at the time.

If this story were written two decades ago, it would tell the tale of a born street fighter: A blue-collar tradesman who was taught to fight by his father, who was taught to fight by his father, and on and on. Fred Stillman was a fiery-tempered man who grew up drinking hard and getting into bar fights. But that was a lifetime ago.

This is now the story of his seven children — Jennifer, Julie, Jessica, Janice, Jackie, Frank and Joe — all minors when their father vanished from their daily lives. Now adults, they made it their mission to get their father out of prison, no matter what he did to get in there.

It’s the unlikely story of a family that stuck together, with each child playing a different role. Jennifer was the only one present when the crime happened, so she was able to share what she learned in juvenile detention classes, motivating her father to look at the crime in a different light. Julie is the rock in the family, often playing the role of mother when their mother wasn’t around. She brought her young children on prison visits, inspiring Fred to want to get out and bond with his grandkids.

Frank was the one who finally stopped the cycle of family violence. Having been taught to fight by his father, he got into trouble with his fists at an early age, but eventually learned to channel it into martial-arts competition. A plumber in Marin County, he also offered hope — the idea of starting a new plumbing company with his father when he gets out.

Jessica, with a master’s degree in public health with a focus on violence prevention, played the mediator. She saw things in her father he didn’t see in himself. Janice, who recently graduated from UC Hastings College of the Law, helped him work with his attorneys. Jackie, who was 7 when he went in, worked really hard to build a relationship with a father she barely knew. And the youngest, Joe, who was only 2 at the time, is the one who Fred still hopes to mentor and parent — a role he never got to live out with most of his children. Joe has spent time in jail, and Fred is trying to pull from his own experiences to keep him out of trouble. So far, it’s a work in progress.

Together, in their own ways, they all persuaded their father to do the work — to take the classes and face the demons of shame and guilt that still paralyzed him and kept him from admitting wrongdoing and truly understanding how he impacted his victims and their families. It was the rehabilitation work he had to do to have any chance of one day getting out of prison.

“I would still be in there if it weren’t for my family,” Fred Stillman tells me a little over an hour after his release. We’re walking back from his first breakfast on the outside, a hearty meal of biscuits and gravy, two eggs, potatoes and a side of toast at the First Awakenings Café in Salinas.

After waiting more than an hour and a half in the prison parking lot, a van pulled up and Fred got out, wearing a worn gray beanie pulled down to his eyes and carrying a bulging knapsack over one shoulder. Everything he owned — all the letters his family had sent him over 23 years — was in the bag. He had until dinnertime to check into the Taylor Street Center — a “residential re-entry center,” or what once would have been called a halfway house — located in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. He’ll stay there for at least six months, continuing to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and other programs, while working on getting a job and returning to society.

Across the state, thousands of families like the Stillmans are struggling to maintain relationships with loved ones in prison. Some of the most common obstacles to family reunification are poverty, often caused by the loss of the inmate’s wages, and extreme distances from home to prison.

“We know that the families that do really well, and also do well when the person gets out because the relationship is so strong, are the ones who have been able to serve their sentence right here in San Quentin close to their family,” said Zach Whelan, executive director of Project Avary. “And it’s not just to be able to visit, but what’s the quality of the visit? Can we do more inside the institutions where a real relationship can be fostered?”

For the past several years, Project Avary staff and volunteers have held parenting accountability workshops in San Quentin, Avenal and Salinas Valley prisons. They spend several months with incarcerated fathers, deconstructing how their actions and behaviors have affected their children.

“There are Third World countries that allow incarcerated mothers to spend substantial amounts of time with their children, and that’s unthinkable here,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi. “The idea of punishment has been prioritized to the extent that it includes now punishing your family as well.”

A 2015 Prison Policy Initiative report looked at the frequency of inmate visits based on relative distances from their homes. Gleaning data from a U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of inmates in state prisons nationwide, it found that 49.6 percent of those imprisoned less than 50 miles from home, received a family visit the previous month. Forty percent imprisoned 50 to 100 miles received a family visit the previous month. And 25.9 percent imprisoned between 101 and 500 miles received a visit the previous month. And only 14.5 percent of those living between 501 and 1,000 miles from home received a visit the month prior.

If the insurmountable distance from home to prison is one of the biggest barriers, then one would think video calls would help bridge that gap. But they’re increasingly expensive and can be detrimental when used as a permanent alternative to in-person visits. Last year, the state Senate passed legislation preventing prisons from substituting video visitation for in-person visits in response to an alarming trend that has happened in prisons in Tennessee and Louisiana.

Back in the van, on the way from Salinas to San Francisco, I ask Fred if he feels like he paid his debt to society. “That I did 23 years for a man dying?” he asks. “You can never put a thing on a human life. At first I thought I was railroaded and all that. I was very bitter. But see, look, I’m able to enjoy this, whereas he can’t enjoy nothing, and his family will never be able to enjoy him.”

It’s not something he would have ever thought to say in the early days of his incarceration. Now, at 60, the weary pugilist at rest wakes up every morning with an aching back and neck that probably needs surgery after years of playing prison-lot football. Every morning, he washes down a cocktail of medications. Learning to live with diabetes, he’s too tired to fight anymore. But he’s not too tired to go to AA meetings religiously, even seeking out a non-required AA meeting at St. Michael’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church in San Francisco on advice from another parolee. “People ask me, ‘Why do you go to all those meetings?’ And I tell them this is a life-or-death situation. If I drink again and I go to prison, I’ll die in there. It’s that simple. I’d rather be out here with my kids enjoying life.”

How the third chapter of his life will turn out is anybody’s guess. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, recidivism rates are so high that an estimated 68 percent of released prisoners are arrested within three years, 79 percent within six years and 83 percent within nine years. Being released to a halfway house in the middle of the Tenderloin is an immediate trial by fire when you consider the drugs, street violence, homelessness and prostitution all around him.

“People get up in your face out there,” said his prison buddy, Billy High, who was in the long-term offender program with Stillman at Solano State Prison. Also doing time for second-degree murder, High was released after more than two decades, and spent a year at the Taylor Street Center in 2016. He worked in the Mission and Tenderloin as a public bathroom attendant before moving to Mississippi, where he now lives with family.

“Fred’s gonna need to keep his head down and do the work and mind his own business and not be tempted by everything going on around him. I told him it’s not gonna be easy,” High said.

But just like the past 23 years in prison, his seven kids will be looking out for him every step of the way.

“I’m sure there will be challenges,” said his daughter Janice, who knows the Tenderloin well after attending Hastings law school on McAllister Street. “But since he has the tools to deal with it — and he truly does have those tools now, and especially since we’re adults and not little bratty kids anymore — we’ll get through it as any family does.”

John Beck of Benicia is a filmmaker. He is working on a documentary called, “Invisible Bars,” about the lives of children growing up with parents in prison. To learn more, go to facebook.com/invisiblebars. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters