American Consequences - June 2018

school. Gotten job training. Even lined up employment. Some, of course, didn’t make it. But McKenzie’s numbers were good, and it cost the state less to put an inmate into her program than it did to keep one in jail. Like Prouty, McKenzie was an incorrigible optimist. She had high expectations and demanded accountability from the women she called “ladies.” This probably came as a surprise to the parents, boyfriends, and children left in the wake of their addicted lives. She was almost guileless in her enthusiasm, and with her many years of addiction- counseling experience, you wondered how she could not have given into cynicism, or even nihilism. She encouraged me to talk to her ladies and listen to their stories, which I did. And I found them... boring. In the essentials, every down-and-out junkie’s legend is the same. The great first high. Then the quest to replicate it. Then the desperate effort to satisfy the craving. Then the one to kill the pain of withdrawal... the degradation... hitting bottom. I’ve always thought that the famous Tolstoy epigram, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” stands truth on its head. And the same is true for the tales from the land of the junkies. Their stories all sound the same, striking all the same chords of self-pity and narcissism. Prouty and McKenzie, on the other hand, have real stores to tell. I had been hanging around for a couple of days when McKenzie asked if I would like to sit in on one of her “staff meetings.”

I rode with Prouty to one of the worst areas in the city. It was also the neighborhood where he lived in a handsome, 100-year-old Victorian with his wife, his four children, his parents, and a brother. There were drug dealers living on the same street, three or four houses down. On another street, when he parked to point out something, a fat, tattooed woman wearing filthy clothes screamed at us from her porch. Something about always coming around and hassling people. “We get a lot of that,” Prouty said. He was calm as evening prayers. Through the entire ride-along, Prouty talked about the importance of staying visible and not giving the druggies any relief. The police would “fight the blight.” First, through sheer police presence, and then by rehabbing or tearing down crumbling buildings and bringing in new residents. The kind of residents who’d make it a neighborhood that didn’t need a constant police presence. I wished him luck and went my skeptical way. I wanted to talk to someone whose job was to rehabilitate the junkies, not the neighborhoods they’d ruined. Dr. Cheryl McKenzie ran a program called “Mandala House” which took some 10 female addicts out of the corrections system and put them in a living environment where they received intensive counseling, job training, and close – almost relentless – supervision. After many weeks – even months – in the program, most were ready to make another try at normal life. They’d gone back to

52 June 2018

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