Laurie Welch
The Times-News
COTTONWOOD, Idaho — Twin Falls 28-year-old Chaz Golding has spent a quarter of his life behind bars.
His felony rap sheet includes seven years in prison in Nebraska for burglary and forgery, and possession of a firearm as a felon in Idaho — among other crimes.
Can Golding redeem his life? And at what cost to Idaho?
With a revamped Retained Jurisdiction Program, state officials hope to break the cycle for inmates who continue to commit crimes.
After Golding was arrested for stealing his girlfriend’s mother’s bank card, he took a plea deal. A judge sentenced him in January to the Idaho Department of Correction’s Retained Jurisdiction Program at the North Idaho Correctional Institution in Cottonwood. If he fails to receive a probation recommendation from the Cottonwood staff this summer, he will spend the next two to seven years in prison — instead of raising his three preschool children.
IDOC rolled out its revamped Retained Jurisdiction Program at four Idaho prisons this spring. Now the program requires more in-class practice for new learned skills and role-playing of situations that put inmates at risk to commit new crimes. It’s a military-like regimen, and inmates say changing their criminal and addictive thinking is difficult work.
The program’s overhaul followed an assessment that criticized it last year, and IDOC trained staff in the new program last fall.
The Idaho Legislature bought into the Justice Reinvestment Act two years ago, when the state was at a crossroads: determining whether to build a new prison for an increasing offender population or to spend the money on programs aimed at fixing the root of the problem — criminal behavior and substance abuse addiction. IDOC has had a Retained Jurisdiction Program since 1972, but the program gets more emphasis now with the Legislature asking judges, IDOC and probation officers to use it more to reduce the costs of long-term incarceration.
Golding’s 180-day program at Cottonwood costs taxpayers $10,417. A two-year prison sentence at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution would run $64,356.
High Expectations
The idyllic forest setting of NICI on Radar Road belies reality: It’s where most of Idaho’s male criminal offenders are sent when judges place them in the Retained Jurisdiction Program.
Their crimes range from driving under the influence to first-degree murder.
On a hill above Cottonwood, the 11-building compound is surrounded by pine forest. On May 12, three deer munched grass a few hundred yards away from the parking lot, which looks more like a forest campground than a prison. But the cyclone of wire atop the fences ensures that the 400 men inside never forget they are imprisoned.
Golding, also known as Greg Melton, said the program is hard. Much tougher than serving a term prison sentence.
“People say this isn’t prison. This is still prison to me,” said Golding, nervously perched on a chair pulled up to a long table in the warden’s office. His manner was polite and his appearance neat — buzz cut, jeans and maroon T-shirt with a name badge clipped to the neckline. A tattoo on his right forearm was the only vestige of his personality from the streets. “This isn’t a vacation.”
The program’s inmates are expected to conduct themselves like they are working on turning their lives around and deserve a shot at probation.
“It’s not easy. They have to take a look at their behaviors and see how they created victims and hurt their own families,” Terema Carlin, acting warden at NICI, said as she walked through the compound, past inmates gathered behind wire fences.
Misbehavior or failure to demonstrate progress by participation in the programs means a quick trip back to county jail on “peanut butter and relinquishment day,” Golding said.
The staff gets together at lunch weekly to discuss who isn’t cutting the mustard. That day, the inmate menu is peanut butter sandwiches.
“We are always being watched,” Golding said. “Everybody is walking on eggshells that day. Some people think they are slick and sly, but they are not. It bites them in the butt. Main Street is closed, and they start calling people to the office where they are handcuffed and put in orange jumpsuits.”
Inmates relinquished to serve their full prison sentences — “put on blast,” as Golding calls it — walk down Main Street and immediately board a bus headed for one of the term-sentence prisons. There they wait for transportation back to county jails — and dates with their sentencing judges.
Life inside NICI
Housed in a former U.S. Air Force installation, the prisoners sleep in dormitory-style barracks, use communal bathroom and shower facilities and eat at a mess hall.
They get up at 5 a.m., prepare for the day by 5:30 a.m., stand to be counted four times a day and spend hours in intense programs resembling group therapy. At 8:50 p.m., the lights go out.
Some inmates work on getting their General Educational Development certificates or work at jobs in the compound’s laundry, kitchen or grounds maintenance. All are expected to use any free time constructively.
There’s no messing around.
This time, Golding said, he’s going to make his incarcerated time count. He wants to learn to correct his faulty thinking and make better choices.
“I came from a family that was broken, so before family didn’t mean much to me,” Golding said.
His mother and father both used drugs when he was growing up, and both landed in prison. When he was 11, he was put in foster care; a year later he was adopted.
His brother died in March 2014 of an Oxycontin overdose at a motel; his sister was able to escape her destructive background and is now married and lives out of state.
Golding was adopted into a good family, he said, but old habits die hard and he ran away, drank and smoked marijuana. Later he became addicted to methamphetamine. He believed he could get away with whatever he wanted to do.
“I’m learning how to change those thought patterns,” he said.
He’s learning skills: understanding how a situation makes him feel, identifying others’ feelings and de-escalating confrontation.
As part of the training Golding had to go back and identify all of his risky behavior, every rule broken — including moral rules — all the stealing, cheating and drug use, and why he did it, the consequences and how it affected his family. He wrote a report on each instance.
“I’ve done 80 reports,” he said.
Golding wants to change and said his girlfriend and three children, ages 5, 3 and 17 months, provide the motivation.
“I don’t want to be away from my family anymore,” he said. “I’m tired of being a statistic. I’ve always been a negative statistic.”
Insidious Addiction
Thomas Ryan Fitzgerald, 45, of Rupert, was arrested in his driveway in March 2015 on his third felony charge of driving under the influence in 10 years.
He pleaded guilty, and the day of his sentencing hearing he expected the inconvenience and costs of an ankle monitor and probation.
Instead, he was handcuffed in front of his wife and placed behind bars. He was transported to IDOC’s Receiving and Diagnostic Unit in Boise and then to Cottonwood for the six-month Retained Jurisdiction Program.
The Legislature allows a judge to retain jurisdiction for 365 days, which gives the inmate time to make his way through the intake process where he is given a battery of tests and transported to one of the four Idaho prisons that provide the program. After completion, the inmate is bused back to the RDU, then waits for a ride back to county jail.
Fitzgerald spent 19 days in county jail before he was transported to the RDU. After six months in Cottonwood, he’ll spend another two to three weeks at the RDU before making it back to jail and his judge.
“I was lucky to get a rider. I didn’t know it at the time,” said Fitzgerald, a meat cutter by trade. His easygoing demeanor and curly hair seemed more congruent with the local grocery than the warden’s office. “I didn’t know if my wife would be able to keep the house or the car and keep the bills up and not be on welfare while I’m here.”
A “rider” is an informal term for the Retained Jurisdiction Program.
It takes a while to grasp the luck.
A week later in his office, Michael Crabtree, 5th District Judge in Cassia County, said offenders are often angry when he retains jurisdiction.
“I tell them when I sentence them that they are going to be mad. I tell them to view it as a positive and put aside their anger and start working their program,” Crabtree said. “Some have a harder time putting aside their anger. If they do it and learn to control their thinking and re-engage in the correct process, it is a good sign that I can then put them on probation afterwards.”
Crabtree flipped through case files from a silver rolling cart in his office. About 90 percent of them were drug- or alcohol-related charges or stemmed from substance abuse.
Addiction is rampant and knows no boundaries, he said, and elements of substance abuse are in “virtually every crime.”
Shifting criminal thinking from blame and immediate gratification to personal responsibility and caring about actions’ effects on others is no small feat.
“You have to turn around a lifetime of bad thinking,” Crabtree said.
Inside the NICI warden’s office May 12, Fitzgerald said he developed a problem with alcohol after his son was killed in a car crash. His ex-wife, he said, “drank herself to death.”
“I was dealing with a lot of issues and tried to put a Band-Aid on it with alcohol,” he said.
He now uses the few dollars a week his wife is able to send to purchase phone time with her and his 3-year-old granddaughter.
It keeps him connected to his life on the outside — and sane.
“You can see the ones in here that won’t make it by the way they treat the staff,” Fitzgerald said. “I just want to tell them to wake up.
Tell them you’ve been given a chance to be here, and if you can’t obey them while you are in here how are you going to take it to the streets?”
‘A Change in Society’
Fitzgerald, who has a sixth-grade education, was assigned to the substance abuse program and is working on getting his GED at the prison school.
One risk factor for recidivism is lack of education, Carlin said, so Cottonwood inmates have access to a library and computers, and they learn resume writing and job-seeking skills.
Twenty inmates a month get their GEDs at the prison.
“We have an opportunity with this population to really make a change in society,” Carlin said.
Along with the school building, the Cottonwood compound includes a library and computer room, a medical building and a chapel. It has 80 staff members — including 16 case managers — plus eight contract medical staffers.
Medical care is provided 16 hours a day, including dental and mental health services, and inmates must fill out a request prior to receiving treatment.
As inmates move from one program to another, to lunch or to their dorms, guards stand at attention in the roadways between buildings.
The inmates walk when told and stand still when told.
They are fed 2,900 calories a day. Breakfast might be sausage and eggs or coffee cake. Lunch might be a sandwich, chips and dessert; two times a week, lunch is hot soup made from leftovers. Inmates’ favorite dinner: hamburgers and french fries, salad and dessert.
On holidays they are served traditional meals. On the Fourth of July they are given disposable plates and picnic lunches and allowed to take them outside.
When Fitzgerald arrived at the compound and observed the communal quarters, he said, he thought: “What have I gotten myself into now?”
There is no such thing as your own space or free time, and there is no sleeping until noon or lounging around. You can’t do those things and function well in society anyway, he said. “But if you didn’t have those skills before, you’ll have them coming out of here.”
When you live among so many inmates you have to watch what you say, not only with words, but with facial expressions, Fitzgerald said, and you have to stop and think about what you’ll say before you say it.
You have to remain on guard all the time, he said, and the stress level is high.
Fitzgerald realizes he will always be an alcoholic, even if he stays sober. And he’s willing to use what he’s learned to maintain his sobriety — even if it means an inquisitive stare as he places a forefinger to his temple as a cue to remember the thought process he’s been taught.
“I don’t want to come back,” he said.
The thought of returning makes him work harder when he’s called on to get up in front of the nine other inmates in his substance abuse group and role-play an alcohol drinking trigger scenario from his life.
In class May 12, Fitzgerald wrung his hands and fidgeted in his chair as his turn grew closer. When it arrived, he identified one of his triggers: his father calling and inviting him for a day of fishing. For the pair, fishing always means beer.
In front of the class, with another inmate playing the role of his father, he worked through the program steps: identifying his feelings and finding ways to deal with the trigger rather than succumbing to the booze.
The sweaty palms were worth it, he said.
“I’m too old for this stuff. I’m learning my lesson. I don’t want my granddaughter to see this.”
Copyright 2016 The Times-News