California prison reform creates thousands of former inmates, one man tackles freedom

When Johnny Placencia left the Correctional Training Facility state prison in Soledad on a perfect fall day last Sept. 29, paroled after 26 years behind bars for murder, he didn't feel excited.

Not even relieved.

"If anything, I experienced fear, anxiety...fear of failure," said Placencia, who is now 45 and living just north of Salinas. "... Not really knowing what to do or what to expect, because I was locked up as a teenager."

Placencia is just one of thousands of people to be released from prison in California since 2008 as the state pursued an aggressive set of policies to relieve overcrowding and handle the work of punishment and rehabilitation outside prison walls. His story, which he shared with The Californian over the course of almost two years both before and after his release, sheds a personal light on a sweeping set of policies.

Placencia isn't a number in a database. He's a person -- and when the doors of the Correctional Training Facility finally opened to him, he was a person with exactly $200 on a preloaded card and the clothes his family had mailed to him.

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Jerry Morales, a pastor he met in prison after he began his reform in 2014, described Placencia as awestruck upon seeing the outside. He was there to pick Placencia up, and he took him straight to Victory Outreach Church in Salinas.

"We got in the van, he wanted to roll down the window and just let the wind hit his face," Morales said. "Reminded me of when I was a little kid, when I loved doing that. He hadn't experienced that in 26 years."

At church, Johnny prayed.

"I prayed for guidance, prayed for direction. I prayed for discernment," he said.

After that, he got his first meal on the outside — a bacon cheeseburger from Carl's Jr. Prison food is bland. The hamburger's flavor was so strong, he got nauseous.

That night, they went to watch Aptos High School's football team play Salinas High School, he said.

"That was a beautiful thing to do," he said. "... We just sat in the stands, just like a normal person, and watched the game. For me, it was amazement. I was amazed to know that six hours ago, I was sitting in prison. And six hours later, I'm sitting at a football game, watching a game with (Morales') family."

Later, in his first bed outside prison walls in more than a quarter-century, Placencia still felt like he was dreaming.

Every day for a week he woke up thinking he might be back in his prison cell.

Life had changed since 1991, when then 18-year-old Placencia had killed Manuel Ortiz, 21, at a house party in Los Angeles.

Smartphones had replaced landlines, people used debit cards, social media platforms were online juggernauts.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t even turned 10 when Placencia was locked away.

Navigating that world has challenged Placencia. He's grateful to many people who've provided support. But his struggles are ones many people paroled after long sentences experience.

And recently, the number of people in that situation has swelled. Under California's prison reform efforts, the rate of successful parole applications has jumped from a few out of every 100 to almost one in six.

In 2017, a congressional committee found that "95 percent of the prison population today will be released at some point in the future."

One member of Placencia's support network, Jordan Jeske, is the director of Cornerstone New Hope Ministry house in Prunedale, where Placencia has been living.

Jeske said his program strives to find work for or employ parolees and help them adjust to changes outside.

"When you don't have employment, you're likely to go back to what you know," he said. "We all got to eat."

Placencia believes that, too. Since being released, he has started a non-profit to provide the newly released their own support network. In addition, he wants to bring the Life Cycle program, a key part of his reform behind bars, to at-risk youth in neighborhoods to deter them from following his path to prison.

The prison program Life Cycle, from which Placencia's non-profit gets its name, focuses on dealing with the source of inmates' anger and showing them alternatives to violence.

That's something Placencia didn't even consider in his youth, surrounded by gangs and violence. He was kicked out of preschool after he attacked a child he says was bullying him, using a knife he'd brought to school. The following year, he was expelled from kindergarten.

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His East Los Angeles neighborhood was filled with violence and gangs. He could tell a friend or foe by their address.

"For me, I was raised in a household where, if you get hit, you better hit back," he said.

When he joined a gang in his preteen years, he expected them to have his back and he would have theirs.

In 1991, Placencia was 18. The high school house parties he went to usually ended in violence, and this one was no exception.

In a fight, Placencia said he fatally stabbed Ortiz, who was then 21. He was convicted and sentenced to 15-years-to-life.

Although the murder occurred more than 20 years ago and more than 300 miles from Salinas, the theme of gang violence involving young killers and victims is all too familiar here.

Monterey County has topped the state for youth homicides in recent years, and the vast majority of homicides in Salinas involve gang-related shootings and young Latino victims. It's also common to hear about a young man in his teens or early 20s being sentenced by Monterey County Superior Court judges to life in prison for violent crime.

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But in recent years California has seen a wave of criminal justice reform — case law and legislative changes have translated to the state's parole board signing off on more releases.

The share of parole hearings that ended in a recommended release jumped from under 3 percent in 2007 to 19.1 percent in 2014, according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation data.

More "lifers" are being released too: Between 1990 and 2003, anywhere from five to 43 "lifers" were released annually, according to data from Gov. Jerry Brown's office. In 2009, 217 lifers were released.

In 2016, the prisons released 728 lifers. Last year, the state had about 35,000 inmates serving life sentences.

Contributing to that change were new laws and a 2008 California Supreme Court decision, In re: Lawrence, which ruled that parole could not be denied solely on the severity of the crime. The decision must now be based on whether the person continues to pose an unreasonable risk to public safety.

Prisons also pumped up the amount of programming they offer, leading to an "increase in hope among the inmates," said Vicky Waters, CDCR press secretary.

"Before the Lawrence decision, inmates had little hope of receiving a grant of parole from the board," she said. "Now that they see it is possible to receive a grant if they do the work to rehabilitate themselves."

Some of California's best-known efforts are the most far-reaching: AB 109, which diverted low-level offenders to local custody rather than state prison and parole, and Proposition 47, which made drug possession and some property crimes involving less than $1,000 misdemeanors.

But other laws have targeted more serious offenders and made them eligible for parole in an effort to meet court-mandated reductions in prison population.

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Two of them, AB 260 and AB 261, targeted youth offenders who had served at least 15 years of their sentence.

AB 260 and 261 didn’t affect Placencia, who was paroled at his sixth hearing, he said. But since Jan. 1, 2014, the parole board has held hearings for 3,956 offenders eligible under those laws statewide, according to CDCR records. About 1,042 parole requests were approved, the records show.

CDCR records do not break down those numbers by county.

It's not yet clear how many go on to commit new crimes. That's because CDCR defines these backslidings, or recidivism, by three-year periods (a parolee who stays straight for two and a half years, then commits a crime, is counted into the recidivism statistics). So the agency is still taking stock of those released at the program’s inception and won't consider them successfully restored to society until three years have passed with no new crimes.

Upon release, parolees are typically sent to the county of their last legal residence, said Luis Patino, a spokesman for CDCR. But some exceptions are made.

Placencia stayed in Monterey County because he built a support network here during his final few years in prison as he reformed.

One critical part of that network is Jeske, whom Placencia had gotten to know through the prison’s fellowship and the Life Cycle program, he said.

That program tries to walk inmates through their life and decisions, to show them how anger and a troubled childhood led them to crime and gangs and spiraled out of control.

It's what led him to reconsider his entire worldview and decide to change, he said.

Change isn’t easy, though.

“I had to give up the lifestyle, everything I thought was true, my friends and associates,” Placencia said. “I had to question my own beliefs and look at where some of those beliefs came from.”

Growing up, violence and crime seemed normal. Skipping school to drink and get high, he thought, was how most people live.

It's how everyone he knew lived.

Conflict was inevitable – and always someone else’s fault. That thinking continued in prison, he said.

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“I’d blame society, law enforcement, (prison guards). I’d blame everyone except myself,” he said. “Based on my perceptions, (I told myself), ‘The world is against you.’”

In 2014, after a long stay in solitary confinement, he began to feel shame for his actions and to reconsider that mindset. Teresa Verdesoto-Webber, then a corrections counselor, helped him.

"When are you going to get tired of doing the same bad things over and over?” she asked him.

Verdesoto-Webber said some of her colleagues didn't see Placencia's potential, but she persevered. Both she and Placencia credit the other with driving a large part of his transformation.

Placencia is also quick to list others deserving credit for helping him: inmates, prison staff including an associate warden, and members of the community.

Current CDCR staff cannot comment on individual inmates or their cases, said Krissi Khokhobashvili, a public information officer with the agency.

When she retired in December 2016, Verdesoto-Webber told Placencia to take care of the Life Cycle program, which he had come to lead more than a year before.

They wouldn’t see one another again until about three weeks after Placencia’s release.

Before retiring, Verdesoto-Webber told Placencia he should try In-N-Out Burger for his first meal if he was ever released.

He went with Carl's Jr., but that sick feeling was just the beginning of learning how to live again.

“You’re really like an infant, you don’t know anything,” he said.

He initially stayed with Jeske, who helped him with the necessities – getting a driver’s license, a bank account.

He’d texted Verdesoto-Webber several times but never picked up her calls. She wondered if he was ignoring her on purpose.

He wasn't.

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“It took me three days to figure out how to answer a (smart)phone,” Placencia said. “I kept pushing the button but it kept ringing.”

Eventually, he realized he had to slide the on-screen button to unlock the phone and answer it.

He also often simply wanders into grocery stores without buying anything, overwhelmed with the vast options of unfamiliar items and the complicated checkout process. Instead, Placencia takes pictures of the items, prints them out and sends them to friends who are still locked up and will understand why that seems so amazing.

CDCR uses programs, such as re-entry facilities, to try to help that adjustment to the outside, said Khokhobashvili. But it's still tough — the variety of choices of shampoo and conditioner overwhelmed one paroled woman on an organized shopping trip.

"In prison, there are one or two choices for shampoo," Khokhobashvili said.

Finding a job proved even more difficult. Even with recent legislation that bars an employer from asking applicants upfront about their criminal history, there's still the background check.

Once its results come in, so do the rejection letters, Placencia said.

He’d received them from several companies before UPS took a chance and hired him as a delivery driver in the Bay Area.

“We knew it was like that, difficult to find a job,” Verdesoto-Webber said.

Jarret Keith was paroled about two weeks after Placencia's release from a 15-years-to-life sentence at Soledad CTF.

Keith had earned an associate's degree and certification as a substance abuse counselor while serving a 15-years-to-life sentence for second-degree murder.

He and Johnny knew each other from serving time at Soledad CTF and reunited at Cornerstone.

"I'd spend four to six hours a day filling out applications," Keith said.

"And then he'd help me with mine and that's another four hours," Placencia said.

They were rejected once the employers conducted the background check, Keith said.

"I went to one interview. They wanted to hire me and then, once they found out about the nature of my crime, did a 180-turn," Keith said. "They almost had police escort me out."

That stream of rejections erodes the will to push on, leaving former inmates ready to give up, Placencia said. Many offenders who've served long sentences have no support when they're released.

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“Most people on parole have no family after 15, 18, 20 years,” he said.

Besides employment, they need a support network for encouragement "to keep doing the right thing," said Jeske, director of Cornerstone.

Placencia was more fortunate, because he had built his own network. He and Verdesoto-Webber finally met again at a gathering of people interested in criminal justice issues about three weeks after his release.

“I knew he was on the right path,” she said.

He also shared his goal to help others leaving incarceration by finding them work through his new nonprofit.

Since then, he's already found an office and provided support, such as aid with finding a place to live or work, to 10 people, he said.

Placencia left the UPS job after a few months, in early 2018. He wanted to focus on the Life Cycle nonprofit as well as a for-profit prison-life consulting business, and he began bringing in enough income to sustain himself that way, he said.

Verdesoto-Webber now sits on the Life Cycle board of directors.

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“For me, she gave me hope,” Placencia said. “She believed in me more than I believed in myself.”

Placencia is also trying to use Life Cycle to reach out to at-risk youth in Monterey County schools, he said. He wants to help them discover for themselves the source of the anger. He's already spoken to some youth at area high schools, he said.

Beyond the support network, and his faith in Jesus Christ, Placencia has something else: motivation.

He's already gone back to prison — not as an inmate, but as a still validated gang member — to show others an alternative path.

He testified before the state Assembly's Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color in California.

He's driven, he said, to make up for killing Ortiz, ending that young man's potential.

"I have to work extra hard to pull my weight and to pull his," he said.

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