In LA, a new vision of incarceration proves rehabilitation works
What does something different look like when your whole life, this is all you've known?
By the time he was 42 and staring down two more decades in prison, Eric Acosta knew all the wrong things, and this question began clawing at the corners of his mind.
Growing up in Reseda, he knew the ugliness of having an absent alcoholic father, living with an abusive grandmother, enduring sexual abuse by the liquor store clerk down the block.
When he grew older, he knew what it was like living out of a van, sleeping behind a dumpster, burying himself in crack to avoid it all.
And when the bottom dropped out of the bottom — out of money, out of cigarettes, out of drugs — he learned what it was like to walk into a Popeye's restaurant, smack the counter, demand the money from the register, then keep robbing stores during a two-week spree until nearly three dozen officers descended to arrest him after a traffic stop.
"I knew when when I walked in that restaurant that I was going back to prison for the fifth time. And I walked in there anyway," Acosta told me recently, sitting under a eucalyptus tree inwhere he is serving his last eight months for those crimes. "I had so much self-hatred."
