Let's Start - a chance for women 'just to be normal' after prison - started by Jackie Toben, a Catholic nun and other volunteers - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, August 29, 1997 by Teresa Malcolm

ST. LOUIS -- Sandra Ware was barely out of her teens, long addicted to drugs, when she showed up at her dealer's house desperate for a fix. She had fenced stolen goods to him to get drugs, but this time she had nothing, and he turned her away.

Ware had come armed. "He turned around and I shot him," she recalled. "I stepped over him and went through the house looking for dope. I looked back and saw blood coming out of his mouth. I didn't call the ambulance. I stayed in the house 30 minutes. I found the dope, shot it, took all the rest and went home."

Ware had been on the streets since she dropped out of school at 15, angry at her chaotic family life. After the shooting, she spent 20 years in and out of prison, seven years of it for that second-degree murder. "During all that time," she said, "I wasn't given any help. Nobody talked to me about my addiction. Nobody told me I was sick, that I had a problem."

It was during her next incarceration, for armed robbery at a suburban mall, that Ware met School Sister of Notre Dame Jackie Toben, a fixture at area jails, doing whatever she can to help women. The two women began meeting while Ware was living at a halfway house. They talked about the problems that women out of prison face: coping with addictions, readjusting to life after prison, restoring relations with families and children.

"We became medicine for one another," Ware said. "Sr. Jackie told me my life could be different."

Soon Toben and Ware decided to open their talks to other women. "If it makes us not want to steal and get high, why not share it with everybody coming out of prison," Ware said. "We found that women empower each other."

The organization they formed. Let's Start, has now helped hundreds of women over the past seven years.

When you've burned all your bridges with your family and friends, where do you go for support?" Toben said. "That's what these women try to provide for one another."

Ware, in her early 40s, now boasts of "eight straight years" of sobriety. She has a husband and three children, ages five to 25. She is a voice of self-knowledge and wisdom sharpened by years on the street and in recovery. She is looked to by many, including Toben, for inspiration and no-nonsense advice.

And in a twist that seems infuriatingly unfair, she is dying of cancer. Short of a miracle, an aggressive form of systemic cancer is expected to take her life by the end of the year.

Seven years of peace

Still, this woman who once took out her inner rage on herself and others finds room for gratitude. What I am most grateful for is that I have had seven years of peace and happiness," she said. "God has shown me and not only that, Let's Start has shown me that.'

She knows she is spending her last years with good people -- "spiritual people," she said -- who care.

On Tuesday nights, an average of 25 women show up for Let's Start meetings at St. Vincent de Paul Church on the city's Near South Side, a parish run by the Vincentian order, one that is know for its outreach. Many women describe Let's Start as family. Others come because they are pushed by relatives or forced by parole officers. Those who are made to come are often hostile at first, but many eventually turn around, said Ware.

"The key thing to making a change is a willingness to be honest," Toben said. You have to have something deep within makes you want something different, something better. The program shows that is possible."

Virtually all who come to Let's Start trace their crimes to drug addiction. Thirty-nine-year-old Karen Robinson -- an anomaly in the group because she's never been convicted of a crime -- said, "We're here to watch out for each other and to help each other stay clean and sober. We don't sugarcoat anything."

Karen's twin sister, Kim, convicted of welfare fraud, tired after 18 years of being in jail, running from the law and going back in, is also in the program They and six other siblings -- a close family, Karen said -- lost their mother when Karen and Kim were 15.

At a recent meeting and in interviews, Let's Start women were clear-eyed, good-humored and straight talking. Although most can point to problems in their homes or in themselves that put them on the street, they are impatient with those who see themselves as victims. Rather, they are survivors -- literate, articulate and, although short on formal schooling, street smart. They are women who knew how to get drugs, whatever it took, but are now driven to self-reform and are varyingly angry at, wary of and grateful for "the system."

Indeed, said Toben, most of the women have in common "a certain rebelliousness or independence, an attitude that says, 'People are not going to tell me what to do."

"They're hard on one another. They challenge one another if they are dishonest," Toben said. "But they often remind each other, 'You know I love you.'"

Robinson joined the group when her addiction threatened her with loss of her four children. She was 22 when she started using drugs after linking up with David, her 'significant other," who is today, like Robinson, a recovering addict