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Recovery in the News
Fresno Parolee Left Addiction for a Passion
Don Mayhew
The Fresno Bee
September 25, 2008
Every two weeks, like clockwork, scores of new parolees fill the training room of the parole office in Fresno.
Under the watchful eyes of parole officers, ex-convicts sit and listen to representatives from drug rehabilitation centers, government agencies and adult schools offer their services. The parolees are required to be here. Many scowl and fidget.
It's a tough crowd, in more ways than one.
Despite all the help offered to them, about 80% will be back behind bars before their parole is up. With California's prisons overcrowded to the point of bursting, repeat offenders cause a fiscal and psychological drag on the state's judicial system.
A solution to the problem has been elusive. Success relies on the parolees' readiness to change their lives.
Which is why a little-known program called VIP Mentors, which pairs lawyers and judges with parolees to offer guidance and friendship, calls on Sherian Garvin to tell her story whenever possible.
Garvin, 52, spent decades addicted to heroin and methamphetamine, winding up in prison for 4 1/2 years. But she's also one of VIP Mentors' greatest success stories, a Fresno graduate of the program who now sits on its board of directors. The voice of experience doesn't get any more authentic than hers.
"I lost my kids," she tells the parolees. "I didn't see them for a long time, because I was a heroin addict. [But] I have it all back, because I changed my life."
Garvin's story is a dramatic example of what can happen when the right help is applied at the right time. According to VIP Mentors director Joanne Michelson, 70% of the parolees the organization matches up stay out of prison for at least a year. Four of five who don't enter the program are likely to be reincarcerated.
The organization was founded in 1972 as an all-volunteer program, in response to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger's challenge for the legal community to improve the criminal justice system. It became a nonprofit in 1991, now funded by grants, donations and a contract with California. Statewide, about 400 judges and attorneys volunteer as mentors.
The program doesn't work for everybody. But for parolees who are ready, it offers encouragement and guidance available nowhere else.
"It reassured me that there are people that do care," Garvin says.
Meggin Boranian, Garvin's mentor, says being a lawyer -- but not being Garvin's lawyer -- encourages open communication.
"It must be a pretty lonely place when you first get out of prison, if you've been in for a while," she says. "You really question your own ability to talk to anybody outside, let alone a lawyer."
Some mentors offer financial assistance -- buying a bus pass for someone who has no other means of transportation, for example. Others help with clothing or job contacts. But mentors mostly offer friendship and a nonjudgmental ear.
"I'm impartial," Boranian says. "If Sherian wants my opinion, she'll ask for it. But I don't have to give my opinion. I would just listen."
She wasn't the only one in Garvin's corner. But getting to the point where Garvin could gain anyone's trust took a long time -- and a detour through hell.
A life unraveled
Garvin recites the details of her 30-year drug addiction stoically, perhaps to soften the toll they took. It's a story she'll retell Saturday at Soberstock, a free music festival at Fresno's Manchester Center that celebrates National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month.
She was born and raised in Fresno, began drinking and using drugs at age 12, then first tried heroin at 16. By then, she had a year-old baby. A year later, she was arrested for the first time.
Thievery, selling drugs and prostitution became the means to the next fix: "I'd do whatever it took to get the drugs. Whatever it took."
Fresno County Superior Court records indicate a steady string of arrests for drug use and prostitution. In between stints in jail, she married, had two more children, and divorced. Through it all, she remained an addict.
"I'd get out of jail, and I'd have nowhere to go," she says. "You'd go straight back to the [drug] connection or to the same people you ran with, because you need a place to stay."
She spent most of her time in Fresno. But a decision to move to North Carolina late in 1997 changed her life forever.
Garvin, then 41, got involved in running drugs between Virginia and Florida. Realizing she was in trouble, she returned to Fresno in March 1998. But it was too late. She was indicted in Georgia on various counts related to drug trafficking two months later.
Police began looking for her in Fresno, going so far as to search the home of her younger daughter, Renee Fouquet.
"I told her to run," Fouquet says. Instead, Garvin called authorities and arranged to surrender at her other daughter's apartment the next day, June 18, 1998.
Garvin remembers police cars pulling up to the building, lining the streets in both directions. At least 10 officers entered with guns drawn. She'd been arrested plenty of times. But she found the force and numbers the police used that day stunning.
"It was such a shock to realize, 'Oh, my gosh -- they're coming for me like this,' " she says. "It was overwhelming. There was an awakening. ... You realize, 'Wow, I'm a criminal.' "
That moment, Garvin decided she would come out of prison a different person.
"I was tired," she says. "I was done. I was 42 years old, and I was looking at going to prison for however long."
The original charges Garvin faced could have put her in prison for 64 years. Some were dropped, others reduced. She was sentenced to 30 years -- 10 in a Georgia prison, 20 more on parole.
Being incarcerated 3,000 miles from home turned out to be a mixed blessing. She had not one visitor the whole time. But in her loneliness, she learned independence.
"I had to do things on my own," Garvin says. "One of the things I learned is to forgive yourself. I had to forgive myself to let go of the guilt, because the guilt always makes you use. Guilt can kill you."
She tried to take advantage of every educational opportunity she could in prison. She went through drug rehabilitation. She earned a GED. She took computer classes.
Garvin's hard work paid off, and she was released in October 2002 after serving 4 1/2 years. When she arrived back in Fresno, her daughters and some of her grandchildren went to the bus station downtown to greet her. They didn't recognize her when she first walked past.
"We'd never seen my mom with short hair," Fouquet says. "She had put on weight. She looked healthy. She wasn't real skinny and sucked up. She had her teeth fixed.
"I used to see my mom walking Belmont [Avenue], strung out on heroin. That's what I was used to. It was a completely different person."
But her transformation was far from complete.
Helping hands
Garvin didn't make much of an impression on parole officer Ron Hill when they first met. She was just another parolee, one among 75 or 80 he's typically assigned at any one time. Hill had no idea whether Garvin would take her situation seriously.
"She was very leery of what was going to happen with parole," he says. "One of the things I remember her saying to me is, 'Is there a way you can help me?' I said, 'Only if you can help yourself.'
"She said, 'Yeah, I've already done that.'
"I said, 'I'm not talking about what you've done inside.' ... A prisoner locked up will say or do or tell you anything to get out."
It was months before Hill felt confident enough in Garvin that he recommended her to VIP Mentors. She was paired with Boranian, who'd been a mentor to a half-dozen other parolees over the years.
As is common within the program, they got to know each other slowly, spending a half-dozen hours a month talking over coffee or attending VIP-sponsored outings.
"Every time I saw her," Boranian says, "she looked different. She had her hair cut. She had her nails done. She looked like she was moving forward. She had goals."
In the meantime, Garvin had gotten a job with Salvation Army as a store clerk. She worked her way up to store manager, then shipping supervisor in the organization's Fresno headquarters.
At the beginning of this year, Garvin took over as manager for the Salvation Army's rehabilitation residence for women in west-central Fresno.
It was a nice fit. Garvin believes sharing her experiences with the women in her house not only benefits them but keeps her focused on what's important to her.
"I've taken a lot from this community for a lot of years," she says. "It's exciting for me to give back."
Hill now is one of Garvin's biggest fans.
"Before you can be successful, you have to give to someone else," he says. "Sheri gave to other people, and that's why things are coming full circle back to her."
The story continues
Garvin has gone from taking drug tests to administering them to the 14 women who live at her facility. She's gone from being shackled in the back of a van headed to Georgia to driving the van her residents ride across town. She's gone from being mentored in the VIP program to serving on its board.
Ten years ago, she couldn't have imagined any of it. Drug abuse narrows your life to one thing -- the next hit.
"You don't see a future," Garvin says. "You don't see that much ahead. You only see the next day, or if you're going to have a place to stay for the next month. You don't know where your future is -- or if you have a future."
Now she has one, and it involves helping others find their own. VIP's Michelson says Garvin's willingness to share her story uncensored, good and bad, touches lives.
She does a very good job of turning something very negative and very horrible into something positive," Michelson says. "She can put that very concisely, in a way that people can understand."
Michelson says successful parolees decide they must change on their own: "But that determination doesn't do it without having some support along the way."
Talking to the ex-cons at the parole office downtown, Garvin urges them to accept the help she knows is there. Most won't. Still, she can't help but hope what she says will click with someone.
"My story's not over," she tells them. "I'm back on parole until Jan. 11, 2028.
"But I'm not scared today. I'm not scared when I pull up in a neighborhood and the cops are all surrounding where I live or something, because I know they're not there for me.
"I'm legal today."
The reporter can be reached at features@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6457.