Some people selflessly use the cards they’ve been dealt in life to make the game easier for the person next to them. For Channae Haller, her mission to help the downtrodden came to her while she was sitting in a Utah jail.
“I was trying not to lose my mind, you know, and so that’s why I took out different opportunities and I started being nice to people and less in my head,” she said, starting with her cellmate, a woman who never learned to read and had apparently been so mistreated by her biological mother and then adopted mother that she had a permanent soft spot on her skull from abuse as a child.
“So I started reading to her and helped her find her purpose,“ which started to give Haller purpose, she told the Deseret News. ”I worked out a lot. I did a lot of yoga in there, and wrote a lot."
Haller said she was arrested approximately 14 times over three months due to a bitter custody dispute with her ex-husband. After two months of jail time — for reasons she continues to assert were false and that are still under legal review — she chose to collaborate with the agencies involved in the criminal justice system through her nonprofit, Justice By Objectives, rather than harbor resentment.
“I look at it every moment from my lived experience and know that I wouldn’t have the knowledge to help these other people without them. Without my addictions, I wouldn’t understand that individual who’s complaining about their own problems or about their father, who is an addict. I wouldn’t know how best to help if I didn’t have my lived experiences to relate.”
Breaking down to build others up
Growing up in Southern California, Haller had a solid mom and a punk rock singer for a dad. Though she never heard her mom make one negative remark about her dad, she knew by age 9, when she was visiting him in jail, that their circumstances weren’t easy.
His heroin addiction “opened my eyes really early on to the struggles with addiction,” which was intensified by his bipolar disorder. But her mom worked hard to ensure her and her younger brother were given as normal of a childhood as possible — sports, parties ... and boys.
Her relationship with a boy at 19 marked the start of her downward spiral into years of mistreatment, both self-inflicted and caused by others, she said. Soon after they began dating, they eloped to Las Vegas. Haller said that she was naive and in love, so she didn’t realize the alcohol addiction he had until it was too late.
He fell asleep behind the wheel while driving home from a party intoxicated, then drove off the freeway and crashed into a parked car. “I had a horrible traumatic brain injury and lost my short-term memory. Lost all my teeth, my mouth was wired and had a bunch of ribs broken,” she said, noting that he walked away without a scratch.
“I was prescribed fentanyl, and it made me feel really good compared to the pain of not being able to remember certain things. I would read a book, and I couldn’t even understand what I read, and that’s really what I loved to do. ... And it was just gone.”
In the same year, she tried to go to college, but her short-term memory issues prevented her from retaining any information she read, ultimately causing her to drop out.
“My whole world crashed, and I got heavily, heavily addicted to the pain meds because they numbed my whole body, and it was better than what I was feeling,” Haller said.
Her mom noticed and thus began her long stint in rehab.
For nearly a decade, she went through multiple rehab facilities until one finally clicked for her. She even ended up working for the facility and grew her passion for helping others with similar vices.
“You have to get through the hard parts. And you got to ask yourself, ‘is your life worth it? Do you want to die?’ If you really want to die like this, go, keep doing what you’re doing.’”
“Because that’s the end of the story for you,” she continued, “You’re not gonna have anything fun out of this. It’s gonna continue. It’s gonna get worse. So, just telling them honestly, like the whole perspective. That’s what I finally had to get told.”
Her romantic relationships after rehab also left her at times downtrodden and abused. Still, she kept going, had two children, and decided to take her experiences and establish Justice By Objectives.
A place for everyone
In 2021, Haller observed a lack of support for individuals navigating the complexities of the criminal justice system, something she was all too familiar with. More importantly, she believes, these people weren’t granted a second chance at life despite having served their time.
“One in three people has been impacted by the justice system,” Haller said. “So the stigma around it needs to change. What we really need to do is educate our communities on how to better understand substances, better understand parenting, better understand all these different components of why these people go and maybe make a mistake — but we’re all guilty of it. It’s just some people get away with it. Some people don’t.”
But Haller’s actions speak louder than her words. She has never turned anyone away who has come to her nonprofit in need of help, and only once did she have to quit helping a person due to inappropriate behavior.
“I help everyone,” she said, “And some people require a little bit more attention, and some people don’t. Some people need more education, and some people need more of a purpose.”
Some of the people she’s helped have even become her colleagues.
Vincent Thomas and Adrian Gordon, who both spent time behind bars, have drawn on their experiences to connect with individuals seeking purpose after prison, working at Justice By Objectives.
Gordon, the community engagement coordinator and case manager, served 23½ years on what he says was a wrongful conviction. He told the Deseret News he began mentoring troubled youth while in the system about 15 years ago and wanted to continue those pursuits on the outside.
“It’s all just people building connections. That’s all it is,“ he said, adding that anyone could make a mistake.
“Whether you’re poor, whether you’re rich, whatever, I’ve seen so many people in here with money and without that have come to our organization and have had a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, that had somebody that was in the trenches.”
Thomas, the nonprofit’s program manager, said Haller approached him after he shared his life story at a networking meeting and offered him a job.
“My father was killed in a drug deal, my mother went to prison when I was 8 years old,” he said, “So within a span of like seven to eight, I lost my grandfather, my father, and then my mother was in prison, so everything that was any kind of influence in my life was gone.”
“I was involved in homicides, drug dealings, kicking doors in, you know, just struggling‚" he said, so when Haller approached him about being a certified peer support specialist and case manager, he didn’t feel qualified.
“I was like, skills and what? Like, I’ve never even tried this. And she’s like, ‘Well, I’ll get you the training, come work for me and let’s figure this out.’”
Being able to utilize his life experiences, Thomas likened himself to a bridge for those who need the same help he was offered from Haller.
“I’ve been in the same trenches as them,” he said. “But now I’m saying, ‘hey, there’s another way.’”
