The story of Montrel Henderson

By Rob Selna

Montrel Henderson's life has followed an all too familiar path for a young black man growing up poor in Oakland. By age 10, he had witnessed his first murder. By age 13 he was selling crack cocaine and getting into fights at school. And by age 20, he was serving time in San Quentin state penitentiary.

Most people with Henderson's past and criminal record will spend their life going in and out of jail, if not staying there for good. This scenario was true for his older brother and one of his uncles.

However, Henderson, now 21, still has a chance to break the cycle of crime and imprisonment that has plagued his family. Through an unusual alternative sentencing opportunity offered by the Alameda County Superior Court, and personal perseverance, Henderson may still turn his life around and lead a free and productive life.

He is living at home in Oakland again, getting up each morning with a sense of hope and purpose, and looking forward to starting a new job as a summer youth counselor in May. But he, better than most, knows the odds of staying clean and productive are not in his favor.

"Its hard, but I am going to try my best, because I never want to go back to that place (prison). I'll do anything I can not to go back there," said Henderson.

Drugs, violence and prison have been a part of Henderson's experience as far back as he can remember. His uncles were selling crack cocaine in East Oakland when the crack epidemic hit its zenith in the late 1980's. As a kid, Henderson saw his uncles come home with huge wads of cash and listened to them talk openly about how they earned it.

"They were young at the time, maybe 19 or 20, so they didn't think twice about telling me what they were doing. They would give me $50 to go to the store to buy them a couple of pints and tell me to keep the change, said Henderson. "I looked up to them because they had money."

However, while Henderson was exposed to the glamour and rewards of what he describes as his uncles,' "fast" lifestyle, he also saw its downside. "I saw my uncle get killed right in front of my face," said Henderson. His uncle was shot dead at point blank by an angry girlfriend during a heated argument.

At a post-funeral gathering for his uncle, Henderson, then 10, witnessed his first multiple killing. Rival drug dealers ambushed the barbecue at Henderson's house on 25th Avenue in East Oakland, because they knew his remaining uncle and other competing drug dealers would be there.

"I had just gone over to the next-door neighbor's house and my friend and I heard the shooting, but we thought it was fireworks and so we started to run over there and we saw people running and screaming trying to get away," said Henderson.

Luckily for Henderson and his friend, the neighbor pulled them inside the house and told them to hide. According to Henderson, when the shooting was over, many people were injured and several were dead.

Shortly after the shooting, his parents, who were both employed at low-paying jobs, moved to Sobrante Park, a notoriously poor and drug-infested section of East Oakland.

It was in Sobrante Park that Henderson began his own criminal career. While Henderson had seen the extreme risks of drug dealing, the temptation to join in the trade was too great. His brother Bill, who is three years older, began selling crack in Sobrante and making a lot of money, he said. It was only a short time before Henderson followed suit.

At first, Henderson stole small amounts of drugs from his brother and sold them covertly, but soon his brother caught on and agreed to show him how to sell it, as Henderson says, "the right way." This meant that his brother supplied him large amounts of drugs and Henderson too began to make a lot of money. "When I was 13, I was going to school with $500 in my pocket," said Henderson.

At about age 13, Henderson's parents, after years of a rocky relationship, decided to get divorced. As a result, Henderson was moving back and forth between his mother's, father's and grandmother's houses. Henderson attended four Junior High schools in three years. And regardless of the school, Henderson was not a model student. "I was walking around school like I was Billy Bad-Ass with big wads of cash; I got in all kinds of fights just to be tough and boost my ego," Henderson said.

Finally, at age 14, while enrolled at Edna Brewer junior high, on 13th Avenue in East Oakland, Henderson was expelled from school for fighting. This meant that Henderson would have to go to Dewey, Oakland's continuation school for kids who had been removed from "normal" school for disciplinary problems. After two years, he got his G.E.D. (general equivalency degree) and left Dewey.

After leaving school, Henderson started selling marijuana instead of crack, because he, "did not like what he saw crack doing to people." He always kept a part-time job at the movie theater or for a temporary agency so his mother would not hassle him about not working.

After two years of dealing and drifting form job to job, Henderson was busted for selling pot. Due to his surprisingly clean juvenile record, Henderson was only given probation. Like many first-time drug traffickers, Henderson's probation was "banked," meaning his file was not passed on to a probation officer, but rather entered into a computer, only to be seen if Henderson were to get in trouble again.

Henderson was assigned no probation officer and received no counseling or advice. According to Beverly Harris, Director of the Alameda County probation office, the office, which employs 220 officers to counsel 13,000 convicts, has too large a caseload to see everyone.

By his own admission, Henderson paid no attention to the probation officer and started selling drugs again. Almost exactly one year later, he was picked up again for the same offense. Only this time, the stakes were much higher.

Being busted while on probation meant that Henderson's freedom was revoked and the best offer he could get from the D.A. was a chance to plead guilty and spend two years in state prison or fight the charge and face the possibility of doing four years.

To make things more complicated, Henderson's girlfriend had his daughter Abrianna about six months prior to his second arrest.

Unknown to Henderson, and most second-time offenders, if a felon's probation is revoked, he faces relaxed rules of evidence, is not entitled to a jury trial, and standard of proof for the prosecution goes from, "beyond a reasonable doubt," to "the preponderance of the evidence." If he did not plead guilty, all Henderson would get was a hearing with the D.A., public defender, judge and cops who busted him.

According to Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry Goodman, the defendant loses in about 90 percent of these hearings.

The court makes it easier for the prosecution in these cases because the court's caseload is too big to handle trials of second-time offenders. "we do it [giving the prosecution an advantage] to keep the calendar moving. Otherwise we would not get anything done," said Goodman.

"It's insane. Probation has banked people, but nobody's monitoring them. All it does is give us a hook, so if they commit another crime we can whack them," said Alameda County Assistant D.A. for sentencing, Eileen McAndrew.

According to the Alameda County D.A's office, every year, 1,969 probation revocations occur in Alameda County, 443 of which are for drug trafficking. Many of the individuals in these cases are young men who end up going to state prison for two to four years.

In short, in one fell swoop Henderson went from being an ordinary teenage pot dealer in Oakland to, at best, a prison inmate staring at two years behind bars. The "fast" life had now caught up to Henderson.

Not wanting to go to state prison and be separated from his new-born daughter, Henderson wrote judge Goodman to plead with him for a lenient sentence. "I told him how I hadn't had any money and how I had gotten caught up in the system and didn't want to be kept away from my daughter for two years," Henderson said.

This letter, which had no official power, ultimately proved to help Henderson. Goodman sentenced him to two years, but put him on 90-day observation in San Quentin state penitentiary. Maximum-security San Quentin is widely considered the worst prison in the state system. If he received a good report, Goodman might consider sending Henderson to a more humane, lower-security prison.

"Sometimes I send them on the observation to scare the s--t out of them and sometimes I really want to find out whether they are penitentiary material," says Goodman.

Henderson definitely fell into the former category. "When we got to the gate at San Quentin, it flung open like a horror movie and I said I oh s--t, this is hell," Henderson said. The horrors included muscular inmates who oohed and aahed at the slight Henderson as the bus rolled into prison and the roaches and rats in the kitchen where Henderson worked as an inmate on observation.

Luckily, during his observation Henderson was kept in isolation from the hard-core convicts and only let out to work. After 90 days, Henderson received one of the best evaluations Goodman had ever seen.

In the past year, Goodman was introduced to a new alternative sentencing program in the Alameda County courts called the Underground Railroad. Typically, alternative sentencing programs take drug addicts who commit crimes to feed their habit and instead of sending them to prison, provide drug rehabilitation and counseling.

However, the Underground Railroad was different. Run by an ex-con who Goodman had sentenced to federal prison in the late '80s, the program's goal was to take non-violent offenders and provide what the probation department could not offer: counseling and tangible alternatives to the "fast" life.

In the year that it had been in existence, the program had only a 20 percent recidivism rate, whereas traditional probation suffered an 80 percent rate.

As a result of his favorable evaluation from San Quentin and his minimal juvenile record, Goodman decided to extricate Henderson from the prison system and place him in the Underground Railroad. "I felt like he was 20 and still salvageable, if someone could kick him in the ass hard enough and get him to stop hanging around with his homies. If you put a guy in prison at 20, he's lost," said Goodman.

Through the Underground Railroad, Henderson received help in finding a job and getting enrolled in school. He has worked as a telemarketer for Time Life Books and is starting as a summer youth work counselor with the City of Oakland in May.

However, Henderson is not home free yet. In conjunction with the Railroad, he is on probation for three more years. If he commits a felony in that period, he will surely go to state prison for four years.

While he has not broken the law since he started the program, his record has not been perfect. He left Time Life Books after his supervisor claimed that, "he was intimidating him," and Henderson had stopped attending school because it conflicted with his full-time work schedule.

He is looking forward to starting the new job with the city, but right now he is not working. His stepfather, who wished to remain anonymous, said, "you never know with Montrel. I pray for Montrel all the time."

Staff at the Underground Railroad believe that he will be O.K. "Montrel is more intellectually advanced than a lot of guys in this program. He has an awareness of life and an ability to deal with things that come up in society," said Frank Ennix, a job developer at the Underground Railroad.

Henderson's younger brother Armel, who is 13, thinks that the combination of going to prison and the guidance of the Railroad have changed Henderson's perspective. "When he looks for a job now, he puts forth all his effort. He used to not want to get up in the morning, but now he's up early and he's persistent. He's told me to stay away from the bad things he got involved with."

Hopefully, Henderson can continue to practice what he preaches.

"I saw my uncle get killed right in front of my face"

"When I was 13, I was going to school with $500 in my pocket"

Every year, 1,969 probation revocations occur in Alameda County, 443 of which are for drug trafficking

"I felt like he was 20 and still salvageable, if someone could kick him in the ass hard enough and get him to stop hanging around with his homies"

"When he looks for a job now, he puts forth all his effort. He used to not want to get up in the morning, but now he's up early and he's persistent"

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