From Prisoner to Phd: Reflections on My Pathway to Desistance from Crime and Addiction

By Anthony Baxter

A first-person account of self-realization, From Prisoner to PhD combines narrative and analysis to elucidate the role personal commitment plays in successfully fulfilling one highest potential. Consisting of three sectionsWhen My Life Caused Me, When I Stopped My Life from Causing Me, and When I Caused My Lifethis book poses a very important question, how does an African American man with a prison record and history of addiction transform his maladaptive and dysfunctional behaviors into positive and productive ones even when his socialeducational background militates against him successfully doing so? This book describes the transitions, turning points, and transformations in the life course of a black man from a disadvantaged background who transcended his acquired oppositional-defiant character to create his own identity, one that is more in line with what he envisions as his higher potential self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524500139

Anthony Baxter

A high school dropout with a criminal record and a history of alcoholism, in 1979, Anthony was inspired by his dream of being a psychologist to transform his identity. Committing himself to realizing his dream, Anthony quit his welding job and enrolled at San Francisco City College. Graduating with honors, he earned his AA in mathematics. In 1982, graduating magna cum laude, he earned his BA in psychology at San Francisco State. In 1986, at Harvard, he earned his MEd in psychology. In 1989, he earned his PhD in educational psychology at Stanford. Dr. Baxter’s hard-won professional skills in conjunction with his social background commits him to using his professional skills and talents to serve something greater than himself: the less fortunate and vulnerable members of society. A self-actualized human being, Dr. Baxter’s career path sees him intentionally serving in diverse contexts, including schools, communities, and the military. Dr. Baxter currently serves as a special staff officer for the Marine Corps, researching and developing the effectiveness of instruction aimed at reducing the behaviors that undermine marines’ fitness and readiness to defend freedom. A former marine, one discharged early because of persistent alcoholism, Dr. Baxter has come full circle, advising marine commanders on how to prepare marines to bounce back from the setbacks that can lead them to seek relief in maladaptive behaviors. That rare individual for whom the most compelling theme of his story is more about what he overcame and less about what he accomplished, Dr. Baxter believes that his narrative of the transitions, turning points, and transformations that led to his self-realization show how people can transcend the need to engage in criminal, addictive, and other maladaptive behaviors and live free and productive lives.

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Copyright © 2016 by Anthony Baxter.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016907804

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-3509-0

                Softcover        978-1-5144-3508-3

                eBook             978-1-5245-0013-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 05/10/2016

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CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chronology of the Events that Shaped My Life Course

PART I: WHEN MY LIFE CAUSED ME

Chapter 1: Origins and Background

Chapter 2: Coming of Age in the Place Called Coatesville

Chapter 3: The Analysis

Chapter 4: Looking at the World through Rosy-Colored Paradoxes

Chapter 5: Rehabilitation the Second Time Around

PART II: WHEN I STOPPED MY LIFE FROM CAUSING ME

Chapter 6: Doing Good to Make Up for Bad

Chapter 7: Migrating West to the San Francisco Bay

Chapter 8: Embarking on Self-Realization

Chapter 9: The Dream, the Dreaming, and the Dreamer

PART III: WHEN I CAUSED MY LIFE

Chapter 10: The Pearl of Great Price

Chapter 11: Elucidating the Concept and Process of Commitment

Chapter 12: Lessons Gleaned

Synthesis

Epilogue

Reference List

About the Author

PREFACE

Emblazoned across my hometown newspaper was my picture beneath the headline Man Climbs from the Mean Streets to College Halls. The caption beneath my picture read, Dr. Anthony G. Baxter: ex-con 'Iron Man' earns doctorate. When I graduated from Stanford, my oldest brother, George, insisted on notifying the newspapers of my accomplishment; as he emphatically stated, They put your name in the paper when you went to jail, so it is only fair that they put your name in for earning your PhD at Stanford! Because of my brother's persistence, a reporter contacted and interviewed me, and subsequently, the article appeared, and according to my best friend, I became a hero, the one providing inspiration and hope for black males who hail from disadvantaged backgrounds. I successfully bucked the odds, moving from society's margins up the hierarchy and into its mainstream.

Successfully completing my PhD had profound consequences for not only understanding what obstacles people face when they struggle to realize their highest potential but also learning how to overcome them. What the news article did not report was the most interesting and intriguing part of my story: it did not say that my PhD was inspired by a dream wherein I envisioned myself as a psychologist. Believing that a human being's potential can express itself in dreams, I made a personal commitment to realize the psychologist then spent ten years fulfilling it: my journey from being a Prisoner to being a PhD was both self-inspired and self-directed.

Criminologists generally define desistance in terms of the cessation of criminal and other antisocial behaviors (e.g., Maruna 2001; McNeill et al. 2012). The long-standing research on crime seeks to understand how and why people stop committing such behaviors; this science can benefit by knowing the determinants of successful desistance (Laub and Sampson 2003). This book represents a first-person account of the events and circumstances surrounding my successful desistence from crime, addiction, and other maladaptive behaviors.

I had no idea that I was a desister until I participated in a local TV forum on how individuals and organizations can help ex-offenders successfully reenter the community. It was during the forum that Al, an activist for ex-offender rights, who, when I used the term ex-offender to refer to him, corrected me, insisting that he was a former offender, not an ex-offender. When I asked him about the difference, he said that his mind-set was no longer the ex-offender's mind-set; he no longer identified with the things that define ex-offenders. Al's assertion left me to ponder the role identity plays in desistance.

How frequent is it that offenders and former offenders become desisters by changing their identities---that is, by no longer identifying with the things that define the criminal or the addict? Having transformed my identity from prisoner to PhD, I realized that I could begin to answer my question by looking closely at the transitions, turning points, and transformations that shaped me as I traversed the pathway to my own desistance.

It was not easy to write this book; I put it off for years. The reason I did so was that many of the experiences in my life course remained emotionally painful, so much so that I did not want to remember, much less recount them. Still, when I began thinking about how my story might benefit the people who are hopelessly suffering incarceration and addiction and thus in need of inspiration and support, I felt compelled to revisit even my most traumatic moments. I also wrote this book because, as a scholar, I wanted to contribute to our understanding of what it takes to overcome the adversity of being convicted of a serious offense, serving time, and being released back to the community strapped with a felony conviction record.

My hope is that my story will inform the researchers, practitioners, and laity who are committed to helping offenders and former offenders become desisters, positive and productive citizens who are no longer identified with the things that define offenders. Above all, I seek to open a path by which those who are under judicial supervision or burdened with felony conviction records can improve their chances of fulfilling their highest potential. I think my story shows them how it is possible to overcome even the worst of life's circumstances and realize their full potential, and this to the great benefit of society. I want to share how fulfilling my personal commitment to realize my own identity transported me beyond the need to continue engaging in maladaptive and dysfunctional behaviors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of my colleagues, a scholar who studies how some people succeed when the odds weigh heavily against them, once told me that I succeeded because my parents inoculated me against failure by imparting two beliefs: he said they first taught me that, with hard work and effort, I could achieve my dreams, and second thing they taught me was that no one could stop me from being successful. I said to him, Most American parents tell their children that. It's the 'American dream ethos. His reply was an emphatic disjuncture, Yes, but unlike most children, you believed them!

I dedicate this book to my parents, who inoculated me against failure. I also dedicate this book to Gerry, who, when I was leaving the alcohol rehabilitation center in 1970, challenged me to stay sober for ninety days, a challenge that, by God's grace, has stretched into forty-six years and counting.

INTRODUCTION

Happening from the inside out, expressed in the natural world, self-actualization pushes the caterpillar to become the butterfly, the larva to become the moth, and the acorn to become the oak. In the social world, self-actualization pushes the boy to fulfill the fireman role, the student to fulfill the teacher role, and the apprentice to fulfill the master role. In the moral order, to borrow from Nietzsche's (1909) three transformations of the spirit metaphor, self-actualization sees the camel, beset by the dragon Thou shalt, become the lion. The lion slays Thou shalt and becomes the child. The child becomes the spontaneous creator at one with the Divine. Let me use this perspective to clarify the difference between self-actualization and self-realization.

Although both pertain to human growth, the difference is the same as the one between the essential and the existential dimensions of human development. The essential dimension is about becoming oneself; whereas the existential dimension is about being oneself (Sartre 2001). The essential describes our spiritual growth, while the existential describes our material growth. Self-actualization is infinite, but self-realization is finite. Still, even as the two processes differ, they share learning in common (Maslow 1958). Learning unifies the essential and existential dimensions of human development. Helping me appreciate the power of learning, my father once told me that learning was the only activity in human life over which the individual has complete control. As he put it, If a person does not want to learn, no one could make him, and if he wants to learn, no one could stop him.

Drawing on the life course theory (e.g., Elder, Johnson, and Crosnoe 2003), I constructed a chronology of life-shaping events. Following the theory's sociohistorical and geographical location and the timing of lives principles, I articulate the transitions, turning points, and transformations that describes my existential journey from prisoner to PhD. The chronology then shifts as I narrate how I transcended my need to anesthetize the pain endemic in living a meaningless life (Freud and Strachey 1961) by making my life more meaningful---an existential necessity and challenge, meaning fuels the human spirit (Frankl 1985). Together, the chronology and accompanying narrative describes the context in which my early childhood and adolescent development unfolded.

CHRONOLOGY OF THE EVENTS THAT SHAPED MY LIFE COURSE

I was born in 1945 at the dawn of the Atomic Age and beginning of the Cold War into the care and concern of working-class African American people. My parents were the second and third generation of migrants who fled the oppressive conditions of the South during two different periods of the Great Migration (Wilkerson 2010), the mass movement of African Americans out of the Southern states to the Northern, Midwestern, and Western states. My birth was timely for witnessing and participating in the ongoing struggle of progressive Americans for civil rights and social justice. Not removed from my persistence in, cessation of, and eventual desistence from maladaptive behavior, my participation in civil rights protests helped me to recover the self-esteem I lost by being a convicted felon.

The Historical Events

After migrating North in 1865 with the Union army, during the Great Migration I (Wilkerson 2010), my maternal great-grandfather, a fifteen-year-old boy who was liberated from slavery in Savannah, Georgia, by the troops of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, found himself in a post--Civil War integrated society in Burlington, New Jersey. With the help of his future in-laws and Quaker friends, he became literate, married his benefactor's daughter, and was ordained as a minister (Williams 2000; Wills 2008, 2010). Relocating from New Jersey to Chester County, Pennsylvania, to spread the Gospel, my maternal great-grandparents and their generations founded some of the religious, business, and civic institutions that formed the basis for the African American community's system of informal social controls. Being fundamentally religious, their society was a guilt society, one focused on morality, the enforcement of norms, and socialization of children that relies on the Word of God to teach the difference between right and wrong.

Upon their arrival in Chester County, Pennsylvania, my maternal great-grandparents stepped into a system of informal social controls established by my indigenous mixed-race forebears who lived in the mountains on the border that divided Pennsylvania and Maryland, respectively a free and a slave state. Participating in the Underground Railroad, my indigenous forebears adopted beliefs, norms, and values that protected them from the incursions of local, state, and federal authorities seeking to capture and return runaway slaves (Wills 2012). I must note here that many of these runaway slaves were free persons of color who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery (e.g., Northup 1853, 2014). Like mountain people everywhere, theirs was an honor society: they fiercely defended their borders, maintained a healthy mistrust of the authorities, and swiftly and severely punished disloyalty with death or exile (Gladwell 2008).

Almost sixty years later, in 1923, during the Great Migration II (Wilkerson 2010), my paternal grandparents arrived in the North and were challenged with adapting to the existing system. Finding themselves in a society that was rapidly changing from a predominately agrarian to an industrial economy (Baxter 1989), my paternal grandparents broke away from the existing system and participated in building churches, businesses, and civic institutions that were more responsive to the demands of industrialism. The system of informal social controls into which I was born and to which I was exposed as a child coming of age in my family, extended family, and community was a layer of beliefs, values, and norms that my forebears adopted to meet the demands of a rapidly changing social, economic, and physical environment. These informal social controls included hard work, interdependence, self-sacrifice, obedience, morality, and devotion to God. Like that of my maternal great-grandparents, the society my paternal grandparents adopted was also a guilt society; the Word of God was viewed as the absolute truth, to which everyone was required to adhere. They severely punished wrongs because the stakes were high: indulgence in sinful behavior eternally damned the soul to suffering.

I was thirteen in 1959 when Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, thereby establishing the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere, a significant turning point in the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, acting out of a severe identity crisis, one characterized by my rabid opposition to and defiance of authority, I was adjudicated as incorrigible and committed to reform school. In 1960, while I was in reform school, in a significant Cold War event, France exploded its first nuclear bomb, becoming the fourth nation after the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain to possess nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, to the delight of young people and the high hopes of minorities, liberals, and progressives, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard M. Nixon to become the youngest person ever elected to the US presidency, while a young boxer named Cassius Clay won a gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

Released in March of 1961, two months after John F. Kennedy's inauguration, I returned to live with my family, who had relocated from South Coatesville to the Southside of Reading after I was sent to reform school. My father was angry at the county and school authorities, but my mother was angry at my father for not getting an attorney to represent me, and they were both embarrassed that I had been sent to reform school. In the face of these issues, they reacted by moving to a different county, one that was close enough for my father to commute to work but outside the jurisdiction of Chester County authorities.

Living on the Southside of Reading, my household still seemed tumultuous, although it was more orderly without the chaos of our former one. With my father, my brother, and my sisters coming and going, even without my two older brothers, both of whom had escaped to military service, I felt lost in the shuffle, not getting the attention I needed. My solution was to move in with my favorite auntie, my father's younger sister, who had recently lost her husband and who welcomed me to help out with her infant daughter and eight-year-old stepson. The only downside to this arrangement was that my auntie, a staunch Christian, required me to refrain from drinking and smoking and to attend school and church. In March of 1961, I was a ninth grader who was soon to turn sixteen and new to the neighborhood and Southern Junior High School (SJHS).

I was only at SJHS for three months before I graduated. I note that I was the same oppositional character as before I was sent to reform school, perhaps even more so. I recall, when I entered my algebra I class and handed my schedule to Mr. Grebe, he read my name and asked, What part of the Baxter clan are you from?

Feeling that he was attacking me, trying to make me look bad, my response was to snap, What part of the ape clan are you from?

Hmm . . . he uttered (I think he knew where I was coming from in that instant) and turned to quiet the titters and oohs of my classmates. Turning back to me, he calmly said, I only ask because I have a Baxter in another class.

Now sorry that I reacted as I did, I sheepishly took my seat as Mr. Grebe directed.

It did not take long for my teachers and classmates to notice that I was an advanced student; the discipline of studying for two hours every evening in the boys' home had put me ahead academically. Although I actively participated in all my classes, science was my favorite. It was my favorite because Mr. Bordner, my science teacher, made learning science interesting. I could not wait to get to science class, hearing my classmates asking, Wonder what he's going to do to us today? In the style of Mr. Wizard, Mr. Bordner always had a surprise for us, some experiment that got us involved in the learning, causing us to puzzle over some process.

I excelled academically at SJHS; when I sat down with the guidance counselor to plan my high school courses,