Oklahoma, too, has its success stories. While in Tulsa, I attended a graduation ceremony for Women in Recovery, a pioneering outpatient-treatment program launched, in 2009, with funding from the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The program offers intensive addiction treatment to women in lieu of long prison terms, with the goal of disrupting the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Oklahoma has the highest female incarceration rate in the country, and nearly thirty per cent of female inmates in the state have parents who did time. Participants generally enter Women in Recovery on nonviolent charges tied to the state’s substance-abuse plagues—crystal meth, crack cocaine, prescription drugs. If they complete the requirements, their sentences are deferred or suspended. The program is situated on the second floor of Tulsa’s Family and Children’s Services building, and has four pastel rooms for addiction treatment and trauma counselling; a bustling employment lab; and a parental-coaching room filled with plastic tea sets and Tinkertoys. (The coaching room has a two-way mirror, so that when a mother reunites with her kids an observing therapist can offer tips through a bug in her ear.)

On the morning of graduation, families made their way across an icy lot toward the sleek Aloft Hotel in downtown Tulsa. The lobby smelled of brownies and fruit; the graduates, trained in a culinary-arts course offered in Women in Recovery’s kitchen, had assembled box lunches for some three hundred attendees. The women lived in semi-independent housing, and all were graduating with jobs—mostly service positions at hotels and chain stores like Panera or Bath & Body Works, but also some higher-skilled jobs, like welding and electrical work—that might help pay off whatever court costs and penalties they owe. Those costs can be substantial: in Oklahoma, strict mandatory sentences are often combined with steep statutory fines, in the tens of thousands of dollars.

The hotel auditorium buzzed as the graduates took the stage in groups of three. Duelling photos were projected onto a screen as each woman stepped to the microphone: on the left, a recent mug shot, some red-eyed and ratty-haired, and, on the right, a program portrait bathed in prairie light. The graduates knew that they had been lucky to land where they did. “I started using meth when I was fourteen,” a woman named Sarah told the crowd. “I was in a high-speed chase, hit a tree, and learned that I was pregnant at the hospital.” Her arrest didn’t bring panic so much as relief, she explained: she could finally stop running. Being admitted to Women in Recovery meant that she wouldn’t have to give birth in a prison or a jail. (More than sixty per cent of women in the program were abused as kids; more than a third have been sexually assaulted; and most fled home or foster care in their teens.) “I’m sixty-two years old, and I’ve spent eighteen years in prison, forty-five years in my addiction,” another graduate, Diane Boyd, said. For the first time in nearly half a century, Boyd went on, she had a system in place to stay clean.

“It may be cheaper to move people out of prison, but that has to be the beginning, and not the end, of the conversation,” Amy Lerman, a Berkeley political scientist and the co-author of a new book about crime and citizenship, says. “There’s a really big set of questions that we don’t have good answers to.” Halfway houses and private probation are both under-researched and poorly understood, in her view. The alternatives-to-incarceration industry “isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so we need to be thinking about what kind of role private companies play.”

If a national debate about the future of halfway houses is starting to arrive at the legislative level—in part owing to revelations of abuse and negligence in recent years, which, as of March, have spurred new regulations of federal facilities—the private-probation industry can expect some scrutiny as well. Last month, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama held a hearing to address the claims of three plaintiffs with cases similar to Harriet Cleveland’s: all had been unable to pay court costs and private-probation fees associated with traffic tickets, and all three had been jailed by the city of Montgomery as a result. The judge made a preliminary ruling in the debtors’ favor—he issued an injunction banning the city from “collecting or attempting to collect all outstanding fines, fees, costs, surcharges, or the outstanding balance of any monies owed to the City or to Judicial Correction Services, Inc. (‘JCS’) associated with traffic tickets.” He also wrote that the plaintiffs “have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of its claim that the Defendant City of Montgomery (‘the City’) violated their Fourteenth Amendment due process and equal protection rights.” He asked the city to submit a plan detailing how it intends to assess a debtor’s ability to pay, and what alternatives to jail, such as community service, it will provide the indigent. At a hearing on June 30th, the judge is expected to make a ruling about how Montgomery will be allowed to collect court debts, including its use of J.C.S.

“See that man sitting right over there? He gives me fever.” Facebook

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In the meantime, a habeas petition filed by the attorney Sara Zampierin and her team got Harriet Cleveland freed from jail, and the process of discovery in her suit against the court yielded some surprises. It turned out that Cleveland had actually paid one of the tickets that had landed her in jail; sloppy accounting is commonplace in understaffed courts. What’s more, J.C.S. officers had sometimes placed Cleveland’s payments directly into its corporate accounts, with hardly anything applied toward her actual court costs. According to internal company records, Cleveland once made a two-hundred-dollar payment that went straight to J.C.S.

Although suits like Cleveland’s are humble in scope, they have implications for the hundreds of thousands of defendants who appear each year before municipal courts tied to private-probation firms. Zampierin is alleging violations of her client’s most basic rights—to counsel, to due process, and to equal protection. On our walk to the day-care center, Cleveland told me that our discussion of her time “on the program”—she still spoke of J.C.S. as if it were a cousin of Weight Watchers—made her think of “Stone Fox,” a children’s book she’d picked up recently at work. It features a young Wyoming boy who lives with his grandfather, a potato farmer, until the old man falls behind on his property taxes and takes to his bed. The boy vows that he’ll save the farm from foreclosure. “He tried everything, but he just couldn’t pay,” she said as we walked our final quarter mile. Eventually, the boy enters a dog-sled race with his dog, seeking the cash prize.

Suddenly, Cleveland began to weep. “That dog, it just ran and ran,” she said. “And then it ran its heart out.” In sight of the finish line, the dog collapses of exhaustion, dying on the snow.

Cleveland took me to the jungle-themed reading room at the day-care center, where “Stone Fox” was on a shelf beneath a string of lights. She opened it to a sketch of a shadowy “tax man,” who had come to collect from the reed-thin farm boy half his size. “ ‘I’m warning you, if you don’t pay, we have our ways,’ the man said, derringer on his hip. ‘And it’s all legal. All fair and legal.’ ”

A district-court judge will soon issue a decision about whether Cleveland’s own treatment has been fair and legal. Cleveland says she prays that her case in Montgomery will be successful, if only because she has hardly anything left to hand over to the authorities. “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip,” she told me.

When we spoke one recent afternoon before her day-care shift, Cleveland still had “Stone Fox” on her mind, so I bought a copy. The tale of the boy’s attempt to hold on to his grandfather’s potato fields turned out to be every bit as grim as she had recounted. In the book’s final chapter, the boy manages to carry his dog’s carcass across the finish line, helped along by a fellow-racer, thus winning the cash that will ultimately save the family farm.

Harriet Cleveland prays most nights for a simpler twist—maybe divine intervention, or some cash tucked under a sidewalk flagstone, or, better yet, a full-time job at one of the twenty local businesses where she has left her freshly typed résumé in an attempt to keep her small pink house. “I know it’s raggedy,” she told me. “But at least it’s mine.” ♦