‘We’re not perfect, we’re just FREED’: Following 3 San Antonians from prison to healing

Ken Dickson, 38, is now becoming the father he desperately wanted to be during his incarceration.

Camille Campos, 42, just achieved one year of sobriety after a moment of clarity last August led her to fight for full recovery.

Maria Avila, 61, was serving her fifth prison sentence when the loss of a child awakened a new sense of maternal connection and purpose. 

Combined, Dickson, Campos and Avila have spent more than 52 years behind bars. But those turning points were what brought the three strangers to a colorful classroom on San Antonio’s East Side this summer to participate in a new program to give formerly incarcerated people the skills, knowledge and resources they need to heal.

Starting June 12, a cohort of 10 participated in a nine-week program for formerly incarcerated individuals with the mission of reducing recidivism. The nonprofit FREED Texas, which stands for Finish Recidivism through Education Employment and Divinity, uses a trauma-informed approach so that the students — who have already paid back their debts to society — have the best possible chance at a clean slate.

Three of the students agreed to share intimate details of their lives: The circumstances that led to their incarceration, the experiences they had in prison and the obstacles they are still facing years after being “freed.” 

Avila, Campos and Dickson, who finished their sentences between a few years and a decade ago, are still grappling with the fallout.

While incarceration is society’s frequent answer to criminal behavior, studies show it often does not solve the underlying causes of crime nor does it rehabilitate people to successfully reenter the community. In fact, as the students explained, incarceration exacerbates the trauma that led to criminal behavior in the first place, which often stems from childhood.

About 700,000 people in Bexar County have criminal records, said Yousef Kassim, a local attorney who offers expunction services through his company, Easy Expunctions.

In 2019, the most recent year data was available, more than 78,000 people were released from Texas prisons, according to the annual National Prisoner Statistics Survey. 

State data shows that of those, nearly 16,000 — 20.3% — will end up back behind bars within three years. In Bexar County, the three-year recidivism rate was nearly 34% in 2020, according to county data.

FREED Texas is looking to change that.

Seated at desks with composition notebooks ready, a small group of FREED scholars celebrate milestones like a one-year sobriety chip or a girlfriend’s pregnancy.

The classroom itself looks like any other, except for the chalkboard — on which a new inspirational quote was written each class day in ornate script. One Wednesday afternoon, it read, “A Dead End Street is a Good Place to Turn Around.” On another day it read “Self Care is Community Care! Gotta keep it real to heal.”

It feels a lot like a group therapy session, but participants are dealing with much more than just the situations that led them to prison. Walker said the program allows students to identify “what traumas live in their body,” in order to address those needs.

They’re also sorting through the compounded trauma of their experiences behind bars and the stigmas associated with reintegrating into society — all while relearning how to manage their personal finances, rebuild their familial relationships and let go of their guilt and shame.

“We walk around with it, in this trauma state of mind, because we don’t know any different,” Walker said. “And so we’re not able to achieve or attain any small or big goals that we wanna change.” 

Students don’t feel the need to gloss over the hard parts of their stories — they know each other’s mistakes and they accept those parts of each other too.

“We’re not perfect, we’re just freed, prisons and jails are not for me,” the students chanted the program’s mantra at their graduation celebration on Aug. 11, leaving the program with new job prospects, savings in the bank and a new perspective on the future.

At the same time, the FREED program, which Avila, Campos and Dickson credit with monumental personal growth, is navigating what its next steps will be. 

Creating the FREED program

Founder and CEO Leonora Walker, who left home at 12 years old and subsequently became entangled in a life of drug addiction, substance abuse, homelessness and incarceration, credits her survival and success to faith in God and the intervention of a few individuals who wanted to see her heal. 

“Everything can’t be just so black and white — and that’s what our system has done: It’s either you’re bad or you’re good,” Walker said. “I want to work more in the gray.”

Walker developed the curriculum with the help of volunteers in 2019 and a $50,000 disbursement from Bexar County in 2020 helped her get the first cohort off the ground.

While programs like the Bexar County Reentry Center, which opened in 2016 about a block away from the jail, offer educational resources, anger management classes, job assistance and mental and physical health services, FREED’s program adds a unique way to pursue healing after prison — that pays.

The scholars, as they are intentionally called, are paid $15 per hour for their participation in nine weeks of classes Monday through Thursday from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. The classes include peer support, family restoration, divinity, civics, employment, financial literacy and health and wellness. After the nine-week program, scholars can access FREED resources for a year.

Now FREED is sustained by a mix of private, nonprofit and public funding, including from Bexar County and the City of San Antonio.

The FREED staff gets to know each scholar to understand their individual needs, from bus passes, housing, clothing and nourishment to providing supporting documents for their parole or probation officers. The program has a licensed counselor and occupational therapist on staff, so scholars have immediate access to free support.

“They have so many gifts, anointings, potential — whatever you wanna call it, whatever your belief may be. It just needs to be brought out into the forefront,” Walker said. “And it can get cluttered with so much of the negative things that have been happening in their lives or the way that the system perceives us or society perceives us, or even our own family from the damage we’ve done.

Three paths to FREED

Football, comic books, band, theatre and dancing were the activities that filled Ken Dickson’s early childhood.

Moving back and forth between the North Side and the West Side, Dickson learned code-switching: acting studiously at school and around family while learning the ropes of gang culture around cousins and neighbors on the West Side. Growing up in the mid- to late 90s in the Lincoln Heights Courts, a purpose-built project for African Americans, Dickson was exposed to rampant gang activity and said he was taught how to engage in this lifestyle by members of his own family. 

At age 12, Dickson purchased his first car. And by 13 he was making $5,000 a week dealing drugs with other gang members in the Lincoln Heights Courts. After getting caught driving underage, he experienced his first stint of incarceration in juvenile detention for two weeks.

At this point, his father was in prison and his mother, who was shouldering her own childhood trauma, was battling an addiction that stole her attention away from parenting. Living off of food stamps and other government subsidies made it difficult for Dickson to keep up with his friends’ “fast” lifestyle, so he joined their gang. 

“I had no choice. … Now I have to fend for myself, I have to buy my own school supplies, I have to make sure I eat every day,” Dickson said. “I have to make sure some of the bills were paid — and this was at 11, 12 years old.

“So I had to grow up pretty quick.”

He spent several months in the hospital recovering from a gang-related stabbing at 13 years old and watched his father and brother go in and out of prison.

Dickson said he knew one day he would end up in prison, too. “I was literally waiting, because I knew it was coming: I just didn’t know when.”

Ken was 20 years old when he went to prison for drug charges. He was sentenced to 10 years but got out on parole after eight years in 2014.

Listen: Ken Dickson describes the challenges his family faced with finances

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Campos was born and raised in San Antonio. Her mother worked while in school to support Campos and her siblings.

She had blocked out the trauma of experiencing childhood sexual abuse for decades until she was in recovery last year. 

When she was 14, her older sister came home with a mysterious substance in a “big old black trash bag.”

It was freon — typically used in air conditioners — which, when inhaled, provides a brief, intense and dangerous high. To prevent Campos from getting her in trouble, her sister “held me down and made me do it,” she said.

The same thing happened when Campos discovered her sister’s marijuana joint. 

“So then I started smoking, weed, skipping school, started drinking at 16,” she said. “My life just … spiraled out of control.”

In 2015, at 37 years old, Campos started using meth. She was hiding it from the father of her two youngest children for months, but he eventually found out and moved to California with the kids, taking her “whole world” away.

“From then on, I went further into my addiction. I went further into depression. I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t hear the kids playing outside my window outside. It was just horrible,” she said.

She was sentenced in February to four years of probation on a 2021 felony possession charge. It took two days after her arrest to secure a bond for her release.

Two days in the Bexar County jail was enough to traumatize Campos — she said she witnessed jailers beating up inmates, “just booting ‘em, kicking ‘em.”

“It’s horrible in there. … I would just sit there and just be like this, rocking back and forth,” she said, burying her head in her arms. “It’s someplace I don’t ever want to be again in my life. … I just plan to stay on the right path.” 

Listen: Camille Campos shares the turning point in her life

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The youngest of 10 children, Avila grew up in San Antonio. A painful and abusive childhood in which Avila said she was raped by her stepbrother, her mother’s “favorite son,” led to multiple attempts to flee the immense hurt Avila experienced.

“She had promised to take care of it, you know, after I ran to her,” Avila said. “I finally ran to her, and as she bathed me and washed me, she said, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll take care of it.’ And put me to bed. I didn’t see him for maybe about a month or so. And one day when I come back from school, they’re both eating oatmeal out of the same bowl. … I see it like it was yesterday.”

She ran away from home when she was 15, the same year she started injecting intravenous drugs and had her first child. “I felt the things that I was doing, I was doing to harm [my mother]. But in all actuality, I was just harming myself.”

Addiction and crime followed Avila into motherhood. Her firstborn child, Leslie Balderas, describes her parents as “functional” heroin addicts. 

Avila’s husband worked a good job and provided for the family, and love was never in short supply in their household. But when her husband went to prison, “it went downhill from there,” Leslie said, “‘cause my mom, she didn’t know how to support her own habit by herself. ‘Cause my dad always made sure that … the kids were fed, their bills were paid [and that they] had their ‘medicine.’ That’s what they would call it: medicine.” 

Avila’s children eventually went to live with their grandmother — which she described as an abusive and unsafe household — while she continued living a dangerous lifestyle.

“A mom should never abandon their kid. And to me, that’s what I felt like. She abandoned me,” said Leslie Balderas. “It felt like she was choosing these things that were not loving her back versus the ones that were trying to love her back.” 

Between 1989 and 2009, Avila accrued a long list of charges including unlawful carry of a firearm, burglary, forgery, many shoplifting charges and drug-related charges. In addition to being in and out of jail, Avila went to prison five different times over four decades.  

In one word, Avila described her experience in prison as a “disaster.”

“I was a very angry person, and I made sure that everybody knew it. … It just went from one chaotic moment to another,” she said.

Listen: Maria Avila recounts struggling for basic needs in prison

Another battle Avila was fighting during her most recent prison sentence was the death of her youngest child. At age 29 Celia was living a lifestyle similar to her mother’s and had shared with her family that she had a gut feeling it was going to catch up with her. 

In 2015, Avila was in prison when she heard the devastating news that Celia Lopez, or “Gizmo,” as her family calls her, was murdered. 

With five years left of her sentence, Avila was not able to properly grieve or bury her child — and she resolved to change. “That’s what opened my eyes. I wanted to get outta there so bad.”

When Maria was finally released from prison in 2020, Celia was the first thought on her mind. “I was gonna finally say goodbye to my child. I wasn’t excited, I was terrified. I was looking forward to do things that I said I would do when she was alive and didn’t.”

The weight of that pain awakened a newfound motivation to be the mother and grandmother that she wished she had been in the past. Maria is very intentional about spending time with her grandchildren, including Lopez’s now 13-year-old daughter, Nashya.

“She’s the one that looks like [Celia], acts like her, talks like her hasn’t even been around her since she was 5, 5 years old,” Avila said. “That’s what keeps me motivated. … It gives me a joyful, wonderful feeling to know that I’m needed. The need to be needed is being filled right there. That’s very important for a recovering addict.”

Listen: Maria Avila shares how her experiences have shaped her

Prison after prison

Once Avila, Campos and Dickson were released from their sentences and returned to their communities, the reality that greeted them was like a second sentence. 

Each conviction also triggers an onslaught of additional legal effects, described as “collateral consequences.”

People who have served time in prison often have difficulty voting or holding public office, are barred from certain professions, can’t serve as jurors, find it harder to obtain housing assistance and lose their Second Amendment rights.

Christian Henricksen, chief of litigation and first assistant to the Bexar County district attorney, said he was unaware that a jail sentence for misdemeanor cases made someone ineligible for federal housing assistance until he attended a housing summit in 2019. 

That disproportionately impacts people experiencing homelessness, as they often have been convicted of criminal trespass charges, “which can just be sitting on a bench you were told not to sit on,” Henricksen said.

In 2021, the Bexar County district attorney’s office launched its Second Chance for Success program, which helps people with arrests and misdemeanor convictions obtain expunctions and access support services. Through the FREED class, the students were able to explore the possibility of getting their records expunged through this program.

“The goal is to try and help those individuals that have been charged with nonviolent, low-level offenses — to give them a second chance at life,” District Attorney Joe Gonzales told the San Antonio Report. “Today’s prosecutor needs to consider the collateral consequences so that we can increase the chance that that person’s not going to come back into the criminal justice system.”

Conviction and arrest records can follow people for their entire lives — even across state lines. If someone does manage to get their record sealed or expunged, it can be a lengthy, costly process, experts say.

There is little that agencies outside the criminal justice system and state Legislature can do to mitigate collateral consequences, but in 2016, the City of San Antonio approved a “ban the box” policy that removed questions about criminal history from city job applications. Last month, two council members filed a policy consideration request that would establish an assistance and awareness program around expunction.

But about half of the people who seek expunctions aren’t eligible, said Kassim, the local attorney with Easy Expunctions. Generally, only arrests and charges can be expunged, not convictions, with a few exceptions for minors.

“Unfortunately, the people who need it the most are the people we can’t help,” Kassim said. “As a matter of public policy, the way the laws are written today, we’re essentially saying: ‘Fuck you forever.’“

But if someone can make it 10 years without getting arrested again — which is rare — there’s a less than 1% chance that they will ever get arrested again, Kassim said.

“Wouldn’t it be a better public policy to not foreclose hope for people?” he asked.

Listen: Ken Dickson shares what expunction would help him achieve

After getting her record expunged this spring, FREED CEO Leonora Walker was able to get approved for her first “nicer, safer, reliable” apartment.

Avila has been on the long waitlist for housing through Opportunity Home San Antonio for three years. Since September, she’s been sleeping at Haven for Hope and keeping her belongings in her car. She also lost her full-time job where she was working as a home health aid and custodian.

Avila has struggled to find stable housing and employment since she was released from prison.

“It’s horrifying, man,” she said. “It’s worse than prison.”

Landlords are happy to take her application fee, but “they know already that you’re a convicted felon and they’re not gonna allow you to move in,” she said. “It don’t matter how positive I am, the doors are all getting shut.”

Dickson, who has more than a decade of experience in sports coaching, applied for a job as a youth sports director.

While his criminal record was not explicitly cited as the reason why he didn’t get the job, Dickson had a gut feeling that the crimes that led to his prison sentence were keeping him from attaining a job that would help him fully turn away from the activity that led him to prison in the first place.

Eventually, Dickson landed a job with Stand Up SA, the city’s community-based violence prevention program. He engages with the Westside community, including Lincoln Heights Courts where he grew up, to respond to gang violence and help people choose better paths in life.

He also started a free, nonprofit youth football program called the WestEnd RedWolves.

Now that he’s completed FREED’s program, “I can actually focus on trying to obtain sponsorships [and] donations,” Dickson said. “I’m going to try to put all my energy into [the RedWolves] for these next six months.”

One day at a time

After successfully graduating its summer cohort, the FREED program is figuring out its next steps.

Walker originally planned to facilitate a fourth cohort this fall, but she put a pause on that plan to instead focus on restructuring the program based on lessons learned from previous cohorts, strengthening internal structures and fundraising for future classes when they restart.

“I have to do some restructuring,” she said. “I’ve learned so much in these first two cohorts. … I have a list right now of so many people, and I get contacted daily by people that want to be on this program, but I also know that I have to do things right.”

In many ways, the program is still in its infancy and Walker admits that there’s still a lot of work to be done to fundraise and decide what the future of FREED looks like.

Walker feels the tension in the choice to pause classes for now. 

“There’s such a need, and I know it, but there’s always a need,” she said. “We have to figure out the future of this program for the sake of the people involved in it.” 

With one year of sobriety under her belt, Campos is pursuing becoming a community health worker to help other members of the San Antonio community end their own addictions.

Listen: Camille Campos shares the toll addiction took in her life

“A lot of these people out here, they don’t have family or people to give them that [push]. So me being able to get out there and let them know, ‘Hey, you are someone, and you are special. Don’t feel like your life isn’t worth living for. …We all just get lost somewhere along the way, but we can find our way back.”

Campos is also fostering a healthier relationship with her three oldest children, who she says are “her biggest supporters.”

“Now we’re really close, they’re very proud of me,” Campos smiles.

Watch: Dickson, Campos and Avila express gratitude to loved ones

Dickson’s work with youth football is helping others choose paths that don’t include gang activity. At the same time, he is putting his family first.

“This time I want to make sure I fully choose my kids before anything, like before relationship, before going back to prison, before like, doing anything that I wanted to do, I wanted to make sure that was number one,” he said. “I think I succeeded on that because I’m still here. … I’m very, very, very thankful that I made that I made that decision to fully be in dad mode.”

Avila is holding fast to her faith for purpose as she navigates the difficulties that she’s faced outside of prison after five different incarcerations.

”I’m tired of not being seen — looked at but not being seen,” she told her classmates in a session over the summer.

“We need more programs for individuals that have been long-term incarcerated in order to reunite back into society. … Those people have been in there a duration of their life, and they don’t know how to function,” Avila said.

Even with the challenges of homelessness and starting over, Avila said the FREED program has given her hope for the future. “Am I going to give up? No.”

This story has been updated to correct details of Camille Campos’ arrest and sentencing.