The land of 2d chances
WOBURN - Shelton Prince is one of my new heroes. Not that long ago he could have been one of my worst nightmares.
His is a story of redemption. It is the story of a drug addict, hooked on heroin and cocaine and alcohol, who was living in shelters when he wasn't living on the streets. When he needed money to feed his addiction, he went out and took it, and he has a rap sheet to prove it: possession of drugs, armed robbery, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and on and on over a lost decade. He estimates he was in jail 10 times, including a three-year stretch in Concord and Walpole.
It was, he says, all about the drugs. "It took everything I had," says Prince. But then he says: "I always had the desire to have something different."
Now at 45, he has that something different, something very different. He has a good job, he has a new wife, and he has a promising future. We desperately need a lot more Shelton Princes - the man of today, not yesterday - and a lot more companies like the one that was willing to give him a second chance.
Prince works for Calloway Labs, a fast-growing little company that has built a niche doing drug testing, something Prince knows all too much about. But rather than urinating in a cup himself in some halfway house, Prince now manages Calloway's fleet of cars used to pick up the samples from treatment centers and doctors' offices and bring them back to Calloway's labs.
In just four years Calloway has grown from three employees to 170, and operates in 23 states from Massachusetts to California. And, remarkably, nearly half its employees are in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction and many, like Prince, have criminal records.
That includes Patrick Cavanaugh, Calloway's chief operating officer. Cavanaugh once worked for a small Gloucester tech company, but an addiction to painkillers took away everything he had, too: his job, his home, his wife, his son. He eventually broke into a drugstore, and paid for it with a year in jail. But Cavanaugh, like Prince, has recovered. He remarried the woman who divorced him, and they now have a second son.
Arthur Levitan started Calloway after years of running drug and alcohol rehab houses. He and Kim Mayyasi, the company's president, say they hire recovering addicts because they understand what their clients are going through and are less likely to be hoodwinked by junkies and drunks. Not everyone works out; everyone is subject to random drug testing. "But it is amazing the loyalty you inspire in people if you give them a second or third chance," says Levitan.
Prince works two jobs, at Calloway and as a counselor at a Boston halfway house. He got an associate's degree in substance abuse counseling at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He was married in August and is about to move to Atlanta to lead the build-out of Calloway's Southeast operations.
Says Prince: "People look at me and say, 'You don't look like you were homeless.' What does an alcoholic look like? What does a homeless person look like?"
America has 2.1 million people behind bars, including about 22,000 in Massachusetts. As a nation, we have the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. Black Americans like Shelton Prince represent half the country's prison population; one in three black men in their 30s have a prison record. The nation's annual corrections cost exceeds $60 billion, including nearly $1 billion in Massachusetts alone.
Nationally, about 600,000 people will get out of prison this year. In a state where the resident workforce grows not at all, ex-prisoners can be an opportunity - or a cost. Crime is one industry that is always hiring. No experience required.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.
