CLARENCE MALBROUGH
Charge: Petty theft with a prior conviction of theft
Value of stolen goods: $80.67 (batteries)

When Clarence Malbrough walked out of the Payless store in El Cerrito on March 
9 with 13 packages of double-A batteries stuffed into his shirt, he was quickly
apprehended by a security guard. Police subsequently cited and released him 
with a court date. The batteries were worth $80.67, and Malbrough freely 
admitted the crime. It was the last of a number of petty thefts that had kept 
him behind bars for much of his 48 years.

"How did you get yourself into this mess?" he was asked.

"Well, I'm a drug addict," he replied simply. "A drug addict for 30 years."
In the weeks before his final arrest, he'd been picked up for walking out of 
stores with Tylenol in one instance, cologne in another. Ironically, his last 
theft, the batteries, came as Malbrough was making a determined effort to "get 
back a life" by getting rid of "this monkey on my back" -- heroin.
"He had paid a lot to society," said one of his three adult daughters, "and he 
was finally getting it together. ... He was on the right track."

For similar petty thefts in the past, Clarence Malbrough had generally received
jail sentences of about 30 days. This time, the mild-mannered, balding 
grandfather of nine, who had been considered harmless enough to be cited and 
released, was hauled back to jail when the Contra Costa district attorney's 
office realized he was subject to a law that had gone into effect just two days
before the theft, a law that could keep him in prison for decades. If convicted
and sentenced as a "third striker," the 48-year-old Malbrough may be in his 
70s before he gets to go to the park again with his daughters and 
grandchildren.

Clarence Malbrough is a family man against all odds. From his earliest years to
his final days of freedom -- through addiction and crime and incarceration -- 
he has maintained strong family ties. He was married to the same woman, also an
addict, for 27 years, and in recent years has had a stable home life with a 
woman friend and her children. He has worked to re-establish family ties with 
his three daughters -- a hospital receptionist, a security guard and a 
homemaker -- and his grandchildren, who range in age from 6 months to 15 years.

He is also a deeply religious, Bible-quoting man; a gifted singer who once made
a gospel tape at San Quentin prison; and an intelligent man who has read widely
despite his prematurely terminated high school education.

Malbrough's father did not live with the family and, says Clarence's sister, 
Vivian, "was never any help to us" during their childhood years. But Clarence 
Malbrough was very close to his mother, Cleophus, a college-educated, disabled 
teacher who raised him and his brother and sister to be Christians and 
law-abiding citizens. They were a happy, close-knit family, and his mother had 
firm standards. The kids always attended church and school activities -- young 
Clarence was a school crossing guard and won trophies for talent contests -- 
and they were not allowed to play with kids whose families weren't known to 
their mother.

Malbrough's childhood dreams were the American dream: "Like all kids, I wanted 
to be somebody -- a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman, policeman. ... We all had 
those dreams of wanting to be successful. A singer. I wanted to be an 
entertainer. I wanted to do a lot of things." At one point, a teacher even 
considered taking the talented youngster to Europe to sing.

But those early dreams dissipated soon after his family moved from the 
supposedly rough but intimate neighborhood of North Richmond to the more 
upscale but anonymous atmosphere of South Richmond. In North Richmond, his life
had revolved around Shields Park and the legendary Charlie Reid, "a man I 
idolized." Reid ran the park and taught sports to young Clarence and so many 
others -- football, baseball, track, nighttime basketball, running, boxing. The
park, in fact, is now called Shields-Reid Park. "That whole city of North 
Richmond was raised by that man," he says. 

It was "a neighborhood where mostly everybody knew everybody," and he never got
into trouble there. 

But when the family moved to South Richmond, "the better part of town," when he
was 15, Clarence fell in with a more rootless crowd. He can't explain how, but 
in a little time, "I just went astray and never got back on track. Maybe it was
the wildness in me, maybe it was my destiny to do that."

Whatever the reason, he began drinking and taking drugs with his new friends 
and was first sent to juvenile hall for taking a deck of cards and a knife from
someone in a park. He was with a friend, and he was drunk. He also raided the 
lockers at a local bocce ball court. 

His first periods of imprisonment were in California Youth Authority 
institutions, which were "little kiddie places" back then. In time, he was back
on the streets, with friends who were on heroin. He tried it when he was 19 or 
20 -- "it was a real curiosity thing" -- and he was soon committing a range of 
property crimes to finance his habit. His first big crime was forgery of an 
unemployment check, which got him a civil commitment in a California prison 
supposedly geared to rehabilitation. That did nothing to slake his addiction, 
and dirty drug tests and other violations soon had him returning to prison 
regularly.

In his mid 20s, Malbrough recalls, "I was mostly a follower," and one of the 
people he followed was an older friend who was a robber. "I had never been into
that type of lifestyle," he says, but "it was fascinating to me back then -- 
quick money, fast money." He followed that man into a motel robbery that got 
him a five year-to-life sentence in San Quentin, of which he served 2 1/2 
years. He was a model prisoner -- singing and taking classes in broadcasting, 
speed reading, landscaping and college academic subjects -- and the warden and 
others "went to bat for me."

When he got to prison, he says, "I was still a child. ... I walked inside and 
it was a whole different world. Everyplace you went there was guns, and when 
you eat there's guns, when you sleep there's guns over you, watching you. 
There's people dying all around you. It was hell. Violence was rampant. It's 
totally different from being on the street -- it's a jungle, and only the 
strong survived. There was the prey and the predator. If you was not strong 
enough or knew someone who could give you the ropes on how to conduct yourself 
and how to grow into manhood, you didn't live. You died. I've seen a lot of my 
friends die. People there were so into killing each other."

It was a deeply unsettling experience for a man of whom his youngest daughter 
says: "My father has never committed a violent act in his life." Or, in the 
words of Malbrough's sister Vivian, "I have never known my brother to harm 
anybody or try to hurt anyone. But I just felt he's always harmed himself."
When he got out of prison, Malbrough held a variety of jobs, including several 
as a nurse's aide, and for a while he moderated his heroin use, using off and 
on. But he was a different person.

Prison, he said, "clammed me up. I wasn't able to function on the street when I
got out. You don't know how to relate to people anymore."

This decades-long drug addict grows intense and eloquent as he expands on the 
ravages of prison and drugs. When you get out of prison, he says, "you want to 
do right, and then you meet resistance, and you're not that strong of a person 
anyway. You have frailties, you're insecure -- that's the reason you're in jail
in the first place. ... They didn't provide anything for you to better the 
condition while you was in there. You was taught by the people of your peers 
who are in the same condition, and you're put back in the same environment when
you get out."

Heroin use, he continues, "is another crutch, another escape. You go into a 
shell when things don't want to go your way. You try to hide from the reality 
of your situation. ... It's frightful, and you fear that, and you fear jail, 
you fear what can happen to you. So the only peace that you find if you're into
drugs would be that solitude or that escapism that you find from the peace that
you get from your drugs -- for me, anyway."

Out of prison and back on drugs in 1980, Malbrough asked a friend of a friend 
for some money. Some time later, when the man, who lived in the same building, 
asked for the money back. Malbrough didn't have it. The man called the cops. 
Malbrough says that the DA convinced the victim he was scared, which elevated 
the crime to a strongarm robbery. He also says that he was let into the man's 
apartment and didn't break in, as he was accused of doing. But in either case, 
he took a deal for three years of prison time and was sent back to state 
prison. It was his second "strike."

No one claimed to have been injured in either of Malbrough's "strikes."
Back in prison, Malbrough again sang in a gospel group. He also worked in a 
variety of positions, from nursing assistance to construction and cooking.
A few years later, Malbrough was back in prison for a daytime residential 
burglary. He recalls that the judge didn't see him as a career criminal but 
rather as a "typical drug addict" engaging in property crimes. The judge, he 
says, wanted to send him to a drug program, but that option was not available 
because of his record, so he sentenced him to just two years because of the 
mitigating circumstances.

As Malbrough and his wife went back and forth to prison because of the various 
crimes they committed to pay for their serious heroin habits -- and subsequent 
parole violations for dirty drug tests -- their three daughters were raised 
together by a "beautiful, Christian" foster family with whom they placed them. 
Malbrough emphasizes that the children were never taken from them by 
authorities and that they were raised by a good family with good values. When 
he and his wife were out of prison, the children would often come stay with 
them -- "the door was always open for us ... we were never shut out."

Often, over the years, Malbrough tried to kick his heroin habit by going into 
programs. But, said his sister, most of the them were short detox programs and 
couldn't help him. And, adds a friend, the longer-term programs he explored, 
which might have done him some good, all had long waiting lists and didn't 
accept MediCal.

Nor could he get a steady job. Many times, he said, he put in applications for 
positions for which he was well qualified but was not accepted because of his 
felony record. When he did once get a good job with an oil company, his parole 
officer showed up to verify that he was working; then, he said, with his felony
record thus exposed, he was fired. After a while, he gave up on finding 
employment.

Malbrough's life changed dramatically in 1989, after eight months in county 
jail for some petty thefts. He left his wife and fell in love with a woman who 
became an important, positive influence on him. His new woman friend, Saundra 
Dickens, was a straight, working woman who didn't know at first that he was 
using heroin. When she found out, she gave him an ultimatum. For the first time
in his life, Malbrough gave up heroin cold-turkey, without having to go to jail
or prison. Dickens stayed with him through the sickness of withdrawal and 
showed him he could do it by himself with good, loving care and food. 

Malbrough, who had spent most of his years "caught up in that street life," as 
Dickens put it, settled easily with her into a stable routine -- perhaps the 
first he had known since childhood. There were always lots of children and 
grandchildren around the house, and her children enjoyed the company of the man
they called Dad. Malbrough and Dickens spent their evenings at home, playing 
Scrabble, canasta and backgammon and listening to music. They'd also have long 
discussions of current affairs.

Through the more than four years they lived together, Dickens put her foot down
whenever he slipped back to drugs, and as a result his drugless periods 
stretched longer and longer. At one point, he was drug-free for 16 months 
before backsliding. He spent much of 1992 and all of 1993 going through a 
variety of detox programs and looking for an opportunity to get into a 
methadone maintenance program. To get into one of the detox programs he even 
advanced $240 of his meager disability funds. 

The process would have been easier, said Dickens, if they could have afforded 
to live in a better neighborhood, where drugs were less readily available. "He 
truly wanted to quit," she said, but Malbrough still had a psychological 
dependency; whenever anything went wrong with his life -- like when they lost 
their home because of financial difficulties -- he'd return to the crutch of 
heroin.

Shortly before his final arrest, once again on heroin and facing a string of 
petty theft charges, Malbrough realized he had reached the end of the line with
his self-destructive way of life. Dickens, he says, "wanted her old guy back --
not this new guy on drugs, whom I don't like myself." They had separated, with 
the understanding that they would get together again if he got straightened out
and found a new place for them to live. 

Malbrough was determined to "get back a life. ... I cried, and I prayed, and I 
got on this program." The program was a methadone treatment program run by 
Berkeley Addiction Treatment Services. It was not easy to get accepted; the 
program had a long waiting list. Every day, Malbrough went to the agency to see
if his name had popped up. It took several months to get into the program. He 
entered the BATS 21-day detox program in February and began the maintenance 
program March 1.

After he entered the BATS methadone program but before he began the regimen of 
individual counseling and group therapy sessions, Malbrough committed his last 
petty theft -- stealing the batteries from Payless. He wanted some money for 
cigarettes. He was, he says now, still "in the frame of mind of a heroin 
addict." 

Walter Byrd, executive director of BATS, says he recognized in Malbrough 
someone ready to change his ways. Malbrough, he said, was "tired of the same 
old grind," and he was persistent in seeking a slot in his program. But it does
not surprise Byrd that Malbrough committed another petty theft after entering 
the program. It takes more than sobriety to change the behavior of a hardcore 
heroin user like Malbrough, he said, and "you can't do it alone -- you need 
help." 

"You don't know how to do things the way other people do," he said. The BATS 
program is designed to teach job, coping and social skills, and that process 
"certainly takes more than a few days." The treatment is "about learning to 
make good choices for yourself," Byrd said, and until then, recovering addicts 
will often revert to "whatever they learned to do to survive on the streets."

Malbrough did not attempt to run or hide from his last crime. "From the very 
first," he says, "I always said that I did the crime -- there's no doubt about 
this. I cooperated in every way. It was a petty theft."

Malbrough is familiar enough with the customary penalties for petty theft. In 
the weeks following his Payless theft, judges in Alameda County sentenced him 
for nearly identical offenses. He was given a three-day sentence for the 
cologne theft and 30 days for the Tylenol theft -- with a few more weeks of 
time dropped so he could continue in his methadone and counseling program.
But before Malbrough was released from those sentences, an arrest warrant was 
issued by neighboring Contra Costa County for the batteries theft for which had
previously been cited and released. Although the charge was nearly identical to
the one for which he was doing 30 days, this time the sentence could be 25 
years or more. He was brought to Contra Costa's West County Detention Facility,
one of the first Californians to face the "three-strikes" charge. 

Subsequently, Malbrough was offered a deal by the Contra Costa prosecutors -- 
six years for the petty theft, by "striking" a prior -- but he rejected it. "I 
don't want six years for picking up some batteries -- that usually carries 30 
days. It's not fair. They're not giving me that much time for petty theft. The 
only reason they'd give you that much time is because they're using your past 
record, and your past record shouldn't be held against you, because you already
paid for that."

Malbrough feels that the law shouldn't apply retroactively, with harsh new 
penalties set on the basis of crimes committed years before the "three strikes"
law went into effect. "If they're gonna give people three strikes," he said, 
"they should start at one. Start it at the beginning, because [otherwise] 
everybody's already struck out -- the people that it's gonna hurt. ... It's not
getting at the people they want to get to.

Facing this newly legislated penalty is "a scary situation," he says, "it's 
hell. All your life goes before your eyes. And you see all your mistakes and 
wish that you could right them. You wish you could tell those people, `Hey, I'm
not like that no more. Can't you see how much I've changed over the years. ... 
If you look at a person's record and see that he's making a good attempt and 
effort to right wrongs and to stop the things he was doing ... and is not a 
threat to society, then that person should be given another chance."

Malbrough has found a kind of happiness despite the uncertainty of his present 
circumstances. Looking back, he says, "I think I was in a bubble and I couldn't
find my way out of it. I just went round and round and round and round and 
round, and I finally found a way to get out of that bubble, and that's through 
my lord Jesus Christ. Now I'm happy."

Clarence Malbrough still has dreams of what he would do if given another 
chance. He'd like to resume the drug program that was terminated by his 
incarceration. He'd like to continue his daily visits with his daughters and 
grandchildren. "We'd been doing a lot of catching up," said one daughter. And 
the children, who delighted in the wrestling, the park and zoo visits and the 
picnics with their recently returned grandfather, were devastated when he was 
unable to keep his promise to take them all to Marine World Africa USA.
But before he gets to try his wings again, Malbrough must pay for his last 
crime, and how much he ought to pay is an issue that troubles all involved. He 
says, as his sister put it, that "he is willing to pay for his crime -- but not
give up his life for a petty theft."

Understandably, the Payless manager from whose store Malbrough stole the 13 
packages of batteries does not see the crime as a simple petty theft. His store
loses $1000 a day in disappearing inventory -- mostly through shoplifting -- 
and he finds it "extremely difficult to be sympathetic." Crimes like 
Malbrough's put his own job in jeopardy.

But the manager, John Scalet, agonizes over what is the appropriate sentence 
for such a crime. He thinks the amount of the theft and the previous criminal 
history must be taken into account. "Every case is different," he says, "but if
it's repeated -- if he's habitually a criminal -- then that's where `three 
strikes' has to come into play."

However, he says, you also have to ask, "Is he gonna get better in jail or out 
of jail. Someone has to answer that question. I don't know. ... Fortunately I'm
not in the situation where I have to make those decisions."
In any case, he says, "it's hard for me to justify 25 years. ... Is 25 years 
too long? Probably. Could the person have been taught the same lesson in five? 
Probably."


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