Kelvin “Shorty” Wallace had been on an ugly run for more years than he cared to count.
“So I’m like, ‘Well, shit, that sounds good.’ He said, ‘I’ll pay for the cab—I’m gonna send the cab right to you.’”
On a May afternoon 20 months later, Shorty’s in the living room of a nondescript brick three-flat on a dead-end street in south-suburban Calumet City—a recovery home for addicts enrolled in a program called “It’s About Change.”
Because of his previous convictions, Shorty would have been looking at a minimum six-year sentence even with a plea deal, if he hadn’t been in veteran’s court. “I caught a break,” he says. If he’d gone to trial and somehow won his case “I would have got back out there and continued using, I know that for sure. And it would have been a matter of time before I was back in court.”
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While some studies show a genetic vulnerability to substance abuse, Shane Darke writes in his 2011 book, The Life of the Heroin User, that the bulk of research implicates environment more than genetics. The debilitating childhoods that poverty often generates make it much more likely that substance abusers will have come from a disadvantaged background. And addicts are far more likely to have had parents who, like Shorty’s parents, were themselves substance abusers.
The costs are especially high for those who are disadvantaged to begin with and who can’t afford private treatment if they do get addicted. Says Shorty: “People from poorer backgrounds, they can be white or black or any color—it just seem like when they get hooked to this shit, it tears them up more than it does somebody who got money.”
A dozen clients live in Shorty’s recovery home, two to a room, along with a pair of house managers, who also are recovering addicts. Most of the clients are on probation or parole. All the beds are made, and the rooms, halls, and kitchen are immaculate.
