CMC provides support as former inmate settles into his own apartment

October 11, 2024  0  19   

For 30 years, Salvador Rodriguez’s home was a cramped prison cell, a place of confinement rather than comfort, a space that was anything but his own. Salvador was paroled in 2022, at which point he moved in with his niece in Stockton. But he knew he wanted more. He dreamed of the day when, finally, he would have a place of his very own.

“I wanted to be on my own,” Salvador says. “I don’t want to depend on nobody.”

Salvador’s big day finally came in the spring of 2024, when he moved into his own apartment in a senior-living facility in downtown Stockton. The first two nights, he didn’t have a bed. He slept on the floor while awaiting delivery of the furniture he’d ordered. The first item to arrive was the bed, and now, Salvador says, “I’m sleeping good.”

Salvador spoke while sitting in the West Lane office of Community Health Worker Gregory Mitchell, once his fellow inmate at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad. He is one of many success stories of CMC’s 5-year-old Transitions Clinic Network program, which exists to help inmates successfully navigate the complex process of reintegrating into society once they have completed their prison terms.

“CMC has provided a pathway to success,” Gregory says. “(Inmates) get out, we send them to the doctor, the doctor sets them up with mental health, mental health sets them up with a social worker, the social worker sets them up with a primary care provider, and they’re all communicating with the individual.

“If you don’t have your health, and your mind isn’t healthy, most likely you’re going to have problems. As we get these individuals who are reentering society, CMC has the opportunity to have an impact on society by leading them on a path to success.” 

Salvador is basking in his success, never more so than when his parole officer paid his first visit to the apartment.

“He said, ‘Wow, Salvador, this is nice. I’m proud of you,’ ” Salvador recalls. “I’ve been doing everything they’ve asked me to do since I’ve been on parole.”

During Salvador’s weekly visits to West Lane, Gregory shares some of the tools he has relied on during his own successful reintegration following incarceration: meditation, exercise and journaling.

“We try to write down three things a day that we’re grateful for during Salvador’s sessions,” Gregory says.

Salvador knows he has plenty of reasons to feel grateful.

“I feel blessed," he says. "I look around and say, ‘Thank God. Look at where I’m at.’ Before, I used to live in a cell. Everything is coming from God. I’m not perfect, you know, but I’m trying to do my best. Now, I live in freedom, in a community, and it’s wonderful.”