Dave Durocher knew something was wrong when a helicopter hovered high above the home in Huntington Beach, California where he and his friends were having a meth party. For hours on that balmy Cinco de Mayo in 2005, it hung there.
A major meth dealer, Durocher knew it was there for him. He wasn’t going to go down easy.
“I had decided that if I got arrested again I would probably be in for life. I was not going to let that happen,” he said 10 years later.
As Durocher took off in a rented Chevy Trailblazer, police appeared from everywhere. A chase through city streets climaxed when he crashed through a makeshift barrier just before a police cruiser struck him from behind, shoving his car up on an embankment. Police swarmed with guns drawn.
The prosecutor refused to offer a plea bargain, pressing for a trial and a 22-year sentence. But Durocher never went to prison after that arrest. Over the prosecutor’s objections, the judge gave him two years at Delancey Street, a residential “therapeutic community” that takes in hardened felons and reforms them by making them do real work to earn a living.
Locking up Durocher could have cost the state over $1 million. Each prison inmate in California costs taxpayers $47,000 per year. And the Golden State is far from alone. One in 14 state budget dollars across the country now goes to corrections, and 1 in 8 state employees works for corrections, according to the Pew Public Safety Performance Project.
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But what if a cash-strapped state could transform a man like Durocher from a desperate criminal into a productive taxpayer in a fraction of the time while costing the taxpayer nothing?
It turns out, they could.
Committed to Delancey for two years by the judge, Durocher voluntarily stayed for eight. By the time he left, he was managing the facility. Delancey has no paid staff and is entirely operated on the ground by the more tenured residents.
Durocher said by the time he left, he had interviewed well over 1,000 applicants, accepting about 20 percent. Now a changed man, Durocher works as a heavy equipment operator in Southern California.
Delancey has produced more than 20,000 graduates in more than 40 years, developing a strong rapport with judges and prosecutors in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Mexico, all of whom send Delancey some of their toughest criminals. Even some of the program’s biggest fans say Delancey invites obscurity by resisting the kind of research that drives publicity, funding and replication in a data-centric world.
“Delancey Street has been performing miracles for decades, right in front of our noses, doing exactly what we claim to want to do,” said Shadd Maruna, dean of the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice in New Jersey. “And the academic world has barely noticed it.”
That may be about to change. Spurred by a letter from an inmate pleading for a shot at a fresh start, a group in Utah is launching an independent Delancey adaptation specifically built to systematize the model, measure results and carefully replicate itself across the country.
Just over a year after the letter was written, a replica of Delancey called The Other Side Academy is set to open this fall in Salt Lake City. The group has a building, enthusiastic buy-in from state and local prosecutors, four seasoned Delancey veterans ready to run the program and an ambitious vision for change.
A desperate plea
One day this spring, exactly 10 years after his arrest in Huntington Beach, California, Durocher got a call from a stranger in Utah named Joseph Grenny. The co-founder of VitalSmarts, a consulting firm based in Utah whose clients include most of the Fortune 500, Grenny wanted to know if Durocher would join three of Durocher's fellow Delancey alums to help build something like it in Utah.
Grenny's call was sparked by a letter mailed by a 31-year-old repeat offender drug dealer named Zach Fausett, whose criminal career parallels Durocher’s, right down the to the final desperate police chase: “The similarities between Zach and me are uncanny,” Durocher said.
As he sat in a Utah County jail awaiting sentencing, Fausett read about Delancey Street in the book “Influencer,” a New York Times best-seller co-authored by Grenny. Desperate to change and facing up to 10 years in prison that he knew would dig him into a deeper hole, Fausett asked Grenny why Utah didn’t have its version of Delancey Street.
Fausett told Grenny of a life that was out of control, crying alone in hotel rooms, hating himself, returning to drugs to numb the pain. Now in jail, he had a profound spiritual experience with prayer and had begun reading, stumbling onto the passage about Delancey.
“I know I won’t last eight hours out there on the street, no matter how badly I want to change,” Grenny recalls Fausett writing to him. “I don’t know why I keep doing what I do, but I don’t want to do it. And I need something really strong to help me. I think that could be Delancey.”
Grenny jumped at the challenge. Within weeks, he enlisted support of local prosecutors and arranged for Fausett and three other Utah felons to be sent to the original Delancey in San Francisco as test cases. Then he signed up Tim Stay, 54, a local entrepreneur and philanthropist, as CEO. Stay has built and spun off multiple businesses, and most recently served as CEO of R3 Sensors, an industrial remote monitoring company based in Orem.
Together, Stay and Grenny laid groundwork for The Other Side Academy scheduled to launch this fall in downtown Salt Lake City where they have a property on a tree-lined street that can accommodate 40 residents.
Why not here?
Utah County prosecutor Christine Scott, who handled Fausett’s case, was initially dead-set against sending him to Delancey. Scott said she fought the idea, but it kept coming back, and one day she had an “impression” she should let him go.
"I don't know who your higher power is," Scott told Fausett in court, "but I want you to know that I was totally opposed to this.”
Scott had to get permission from probation and parole officials in San Francisco to send a Utah felon under supervision to their city. This is never easy, she said. No one wants to handle someone else's criminals.
"But when I told them Zach was going to Delancey," Scott said. “They immediately agreed.”
Delancey people never cause any trouble, they told her.
Maruna was not surprised by that response.
“In criminology we have these theories about how the world should work and then we have the real world where hardly anything ever works like it’s supposed to," Maruna said. "But at Delancey Street, we have this real place that has existed forever and is even more radical, more outlandish than our theories, and it works just as its theory says it should.”
Delancey Street is one member of a family known as “therapeutic communities” inspired by Synanon, a revolutionary addiction treatment program founded in 1958. Synanon had a major effect on recovery theory before sliding off the rails, implicated in cultish violence and brainwashing.
But the TC approach itself survived. The community is the method for TCs. Living and working together, residents hold everyone else accountable, and all members work full time as they reform their identities. Change occurs in years rather than the 30-, 60- or 90-day increments commonly attempted in rehab stints. As residents grow, they gain privileges and responsibilities, including mentoring new residents.
A 2003 study sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that TCs are effective in improving mental health and employment while reducing drug abuse. But the study also noted that length of time spent in a TC program is the key to success — the longer the better.
The therapeutic community method is now central to a number of high-profile recovery systems, including the Phoenix House, a drug treatment facility with over 60 facilities in eight states, and Daytop Village with over 15 facilities in New York City.
No excuses
And then there is Delancey Street, which was founded in San Francisco in 1971 by John Maher, an ex-felon, and Mimi Silbert, a psychologist. Delancey is unique in its dogged focus on curing criminality. Roughly 20 percent of Delancey residents are addicts desperate to change. They apply from off the streets. But most come through the criminal justice system, and the typical resident has 12 felonies, four prison terms and a lifetime of addiction.
“It’s not a drug program,” said Alan Fahringer, 59, a Delancey graduate and part of the team being assembled in Utah to found The Other Side Academy. “We don't even talk about drugs. It's an actionable offense to talk about drugs.”
Discussing their past is also a rules violation, until just before they leave, Fahringer said.
“We don’t want them to share war stories or glorifying their sordid pasts,” Fahringer said. “They need to focus on the different, better life that lies ahead of them.”
Delancey is operated on the ground entirely by tenured residents, who themselves once went through the program. There are no alarms and no fences at a Delancey home, but going AWOL will get a resident kicked out of the program and back in prison. There, they usually end up serving their whole sentence with no plea bargain. That's the deal they make — and the threat that makes them stay.
Many times during his first two years, Durocher says, he would have split if the 22 years were not hanging over him: “Going in you don't realize how difficult it is. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done," he said.
At Delancey, they wake up at 7 a.m.; work eight hours; attend daily group meetings; no drugs; no violence; no talking about the past; and respect others.
Nothing goes unnoticed, and everyone will call you on anything. All Delancey street residents are expected to earn their high school equivalency degrees, and each is trained in different marketable skills.
Three nights a week, Delancey residents sit down with 20 other residents, holding a mirror up to each other. If you ditched your duty, broke a rule or showed bad attitude, you’ll hear about it here.
Blunt talk works because everyone comes from the same starting point. Everyone is a “wounded healer,” in Carl Jung’s famous phrase.
"The staff are just like you," Fahringer said. "They're just a few steps ahead of you, and they help pull you along."
No compromises
As Grenny and Stay familiarized themselves with the field, they stumbled on one very successful Delancey adaptation in Durham, North Carolina, which now has 530 residents. Known as TROSA, it was founded in 1994 by a Delancey alum named Kevin McDonald, at the suggestion of local businessmen who were frustrated that the Delancey in Greensboro, North Carolina stalled at 30 residents. At first glance, it might seem that TROSA would be the needed opening for mainstream expansion of the Delancey model, but so far TROSA’s leaders have been tied up managing a huge facility with 60 paid staff, and have not had the bandwidth to consider duplicating it.
Grenny and Stay also found a cluster of therapeutic community projects in New York, and they interviewed Fernando Perfas, who worked in training and development for 10 years at Daytop Village and four years with Phoenix House. Avoid government funding, Perfas told them.
The programs he worked with, Perfas said, found that government funds brought more and more regulations, and with them a flood of professionals. Soon, former addicts were required to get certified to work at the facility, squeezing out the wounded healers that made it work. The new professionals lacked the life experience that lends authority, and they also didn’t really get the theory.
“Once they get hired they have very little interest in learning the model,” Perfas said.
Government entanglement made it difficult to protect the community. Some residents turn out to be toxic, he notes, but organizations that take funding soon find it financially and bureaucratically difficult to clean those residents out.
Other compromises were tied to other funding demands. Perfas notes that Daytop Village and other TC operations saw a market demand for short-term residential treatments and met that demand out of organizational survival need, at the expense of the integrity of the TC and of adequate treatment for the hardened clients.
It is to avoid such compromises that Mimi Silbert, Delancey’s original co-founder, has, for over 40 years now, held a very tight grip on Delancey operations.
The good news is this control has helped Delancey avoid the vision erosion that has dogged some other programs. The downside is Delancey’s growth has been weak, and the model has not spread.
“Delancey does so many things so well,” said Stay. “But it doesn’t seem like it’s been important for them to scale the model.”
“I think Mimi Silbert is a big reason for the great success of Delancey,” Stay said. “But she is also a reason that they haven't replicated more successfully. Everything of any importance, and much of little importance, has to go through her, and she becomes a bottleneck.”
Indeed, press calls to Delancey Street go directly to Silbert’s office. No one else speaks for the organization. A secretary there said Silbert is busy in the morning putting out fires on the East Coast, and in the afternoon she focuses on the West Coast. She is hard to reach. For some reason, Delancey does not use email, and repeated calls produce no call back.
Durocher and Fahringer hesitate to criticize Delancey Street or its leadership, which they credit with saving their lives. But they also recognize that for the Delancey model to reach its potential it must somehow break out without compromising its vision.
“To me Delancey Street represents a perfect system run by imperfect people just like me,” Fahringer said. “It’s been able to sustain itself for almost 50 years. It’s remarkable, and I’m proud to be associated with it in any way I can.”
Thinking big
Stay's job as CEO at The Other Side Academy in Utah is not to engineer a single replication, rather to do it big and do it over and over. They plan to create three facilities along Utah's Wasatch Front, and Stay is already looking ahead to expansion in Phoenix and Denver.
Last week, they signed a contract to buy their first building in downtown Salt Lake City large enough to house 40 residents with possibilities to expand. They plan to begin interviewing residents in the fall and begin operating at the end of the year. Their first business enterprise, Durocher said, will be a moving business.
The Other Side Academy will also grow large facilities. Stay's ideal size is roughly 100 to 150 residents — large enough to build a strong culture that can survive transitions but small enough to for intimacy and accountability.
The Other Side will also differ from Delancey by building outcome studies into the program. As Stay and Grenny see it, they live in a data-driven world, and any nonprofit that cannot show results will never learn how to improve, nor get the funding or high-level attention needed to advance its model.
“We were surprised that was not part of the Delancey culture,” Stay said. “They say they don't want to spend any energy on that.”
Breadth and depth
In January, Stay and Grenny took a group of Utah civic leaders out for a boot camp in San Francisco. The group included prosecutors from Utah County, the mayor of Provo and the chief of staff of the Utah Attorney General. Scott visited with Fausett on that trip, reporting he was finding change very hard but was in good spirits and doing well.
It was at that Delancey boot camp that Stay and Grenny quickly saw they could never get what they needed from a training course.
“We knew that we needed more depth and breadth,” Stay said.
They networked and found a team of four Delancey graduates with a combined 28 years of experience in the program and a vital range of skill sets from community outreach to vocational training to accounting.
Durocher once ran the Los Angeles facility, while Fahringer handled community outreach with the judicial system. The other team members are Martin Anderson, 42, who was raised in a hardscrabble environment of drugs and crime from the age of six and faced 16 years in prison when Delancey saved him, and Lola Zagey, 46, who got hooked on heroin at 16 and wallowed for 20 years in pain before Delancey saved her.
“We’ve got the coverage, depth, the understanding of the system,” Stay said. “In fact, we have more Delancey experience than has ever been assembled in a replication.”
And, like many reformed felons who ache for chances to help others, the members of the new team can’t think of anything they would rather do.
"We were pinching ourselves,” Fahringer said. “We’re going to have an opportunity to help build a replica of the place that saved our lives. Saying yes was a no-brainer.”
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Email: eschulzke@desnews.com