From life in prison to out on parole: One group easing the transition

During the time he was serving 18 years to life for second-degree murder, Joe Calderon would reflect on an incident from his childhood in which he and his cash-strapped parents were living in the family station wagon. They pulled into a Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner, but there was only enough money to feed “little Joey.”

While the attendant was distracted, little Joey’s father burst in, jumped over the counter, threw 20 or so pieces of chicken into a bucket, and ran out. Mr. Calderon remembers being overjoyed that there was enough chicken for everyone. In his young mind, it was the beginning of “the little linkages between survival and crime.” 

Those linkages would eventually lead to gang involvement and the fatal shooting of a security guard during a botched robbery attempt. His gun was perpetually hot and ready. “I was a knucklehead,” Mr. Calderon says of his turbulent past. 

On a recent morning, he was scribbling the words SELF-LOVE on a whiteboard in front of a boisterous roomful of former knucklehead criminals like himself. A disciplined type with the biceps to prove it, Mr. Calderon now serves as a peer mentor and Yoda of sorts to some 50 men, and a smattering of women, who meet on the second Tuesday of every month at the parole office of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in San Francisco. 

They’ve gathered for a pioneering program designed to support the singular needs of “lifers” who are returning to “the free world,” as they tend to call it, after decades in prison. Nearly all did time for murder. At one point, they figured out there were 1,462.5 years of prison time in the room.

“I was addicted to the hustle,” says Mr. Calderon, who is also a senior community health worker for a network of health clinics for the formerly incarcerated. 

The parole group, which has a rotating cast of characters and a new theme each month, is officially called the Peer Reentry Navigation Network (PRNN). The program was launched five years ago in response to the unprecedented number of lifers being released in California, which has the largest number of inmates with life sentences in the world, just over 34,000.

For years, the

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