MANCHESTER, NH – I left the Wednesday morning police commissioner’s meeting thinking about what Commissioner Charlie Sherman had brought up: panhandlers. He mentioned something he’d noticed lately – something he described as a panhandling ring. A man drops people with signs off on various corners, and picks them up again, dropping off someone else. A rotation of panhandlers.
“What can be done about that?” Sherman asked.
Sherman’s question came after Assistant Chief Carlo Capano mentioned that more officers would be circulating over the summer months to address the issue of aggressive panhandling downtown.
“We’re looking at working up a public information piece about the services out there that are available to people, instead of feeding habits,” Capano said.
Capt. Maureen Tessier interjected that the city is currently being sued by the ACLU over a panhandling incident, and Capano added that the city solicitor has been dealing with the federal lawsuit. It was filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire and New Hampshire Legal Assistance, challenging the constitutionality of the Manchester police department’s “practice of detaining, dispersing, and charging peaceful panhandlers for ‘allegedly obstructing vehicular traffic on public streets’ under New Hampshire’s disorderly conduct statute,” even when the panhandlers are in a public place and do not step in the roadway.
“There’s only so much we can do,” Capano said to Sherman.
On my way home I passed the corner of Maple and Bridge streets and saw a man holding a cardboard sign. I’ve seen someone at that corner, across from the 7-Eleven, pretty consistently for the past few years. It’s one of the prime spots for sign-holders on my daily commute. I was heading the wrong way to turn onto the one-way Maple Street, so I kept going. But later in the evening I decided to head back out. My thought was to walk Elm Street and talk to some of the people who I’ve seen there, sitting in front of businesses with backpacks and signs and cups for spare change.
As I drove across Maple Street I saw a man on the corner – not sure if it was the same man who’d been there hours earlier– but I decided to drive around the block and back to Maple so I could talk to him.
“Good evening,” he said, looking a little confused as I approached him on foot.
“I actually came to talk to you,” I said.
“Oh, about work?” he said. “That’d be awesome.”
I told him I was there to find out why he was there. He told me his name was Jonathan, and that he only comes to this corner about once a week.
“When I come down here I usually make about seven dollars, maybe ten. I get enough for my food for the evening,” he said.
“I’m homeless right now, because I have a felony it’s hard to get jobs, and I just lost my ID and my Social Security card and everything, so I had to go get a non-driver’s ID. And because I’m homeless, I had to put my previous address on it, so I’m going to have to go and change that eventually,” Jonathan said.
It was a rush of information all at once. I tried to sort through it.
Jonathan told me he’d gone to prison the first time for domestic assault, for fighting with his younger brother. He was 18 then. Now he’s 29, and has spent most of the last decade in and out of prison. The first time he was locked up he attributed it to being young and having some anger issues. After that, drugs became part of his problem.
“I’ve been straight from drugs for eight months now,” Jonathan said, a hint of pride in his voice. “Once you get out, it’s hard to move on with your life without a support plan. I think the city should have a job fair for people coming out of prison, to help them find work,” he said.
I asked what kind of work experience he had.
“I used to do concrete – slab work, and I do construction, drywall and stuff. Everyone expects you to do 20 to 40 sheets of drywall, but it’s hard for someone who’s on their own to get work,” he said.
He hasn’t been to the shelter “lately,” and then he says, “bad feet.” I ask him what that means. He explains that homeless people get bad feet just from walking a lot, or from being in the elements. The people at the shelter aren’t really the kind of people he wants to associate with. Many of them still do drugs, he says.
This last time, when he got out of prison, he went right to rehab. He’s been out on his own for two months now, he says.
“When I used to do drugs I used to do cocaine and heroin. But I really wanted to get off drugs and just be myself for a change,” he says. “Going to rehab after prison was my plan this time.”
He says he recommends the Farnum Center to everyone he knows who is struggling. He did a 28-day rehab program and now follows the “3-step program,” which is way easier than the usual 12-step program people battling addiction attempt, he says.
“Mind, consciousness and thought. You have to get ahold of yourself. I think the 12 steps are too hard for people because the fourth step is about repairing relationships with people you might have hurt in the past, and I think that’s hard because it doesn’t always work out for people,” he says.
He grew up in Loudon, raised by a single mom. He says it was a good life. He describes himself as an “avid outdoorsman” who spent most of his spare time hunting and fishing. He thought he’d grow up to be a Conservation Officer for the NH Fish & Game Department.
“But going to prison at 18 put a dimmer on that. You can’t have guns once you’re a felon,” he said. Things “went wrong” after his first time in prison, he says.
“Once they let you out they don’t really give you much of a plan. There was no rehabilitation in there. I did the ‘Thinking for a Change‘ program, and passed that,” he says, describing an in-prison program that focuses on making better decisions.
“It didn’t really help,” he says.
At one point he was doing better, and was just two-months short of getting off felony probation.
“Then I got into some trouble, arguing with a cop, and they pressed charges and imposed my suspended time,” he says.
So he’s back on felony probation until sometime in 2018.
He said he eventually went to an anger management course in Concord, $20 dollars per session.
“I’m now far away from my anger in my life, which is good. The guy told me my problems is I’m old-fashioned. He said my beliefs are that the guy runs the house and works, and the woman does her thing, but these days you can’t shut a door and say we’re going to talk it out, and if they don’t want to stay, you get in trouble for it,” he says. “That’s what happened to me with my wife. That’s why I had to go to anger management.”
I try to fill in some of the blanks in that part of his story by reading between the lines. I ask him when he had time to get married while in and out of prison. He said he was married in 2012, and it only lasted for 2½ years, one of the times he was out of prison.
“That was when I was trying to do everything right,” he says.
At this point, standing on the corner with a sign is pretty much his only option, he says. He doesn’t have a car to get to a job outside of the city. And he just lost the phone he paid $100 for at Metro PC – plus $58 for the month. It was a dumb mistake. He lost the phone, along with his ID and Social Security card and phone chargers – and his spare socks.
“I had everything in my bag, it was a drawstring bag – I don’t like to carry a backpack, because people think you’re homeless. They judge you. Anyway, I set it down at TN Market – I was buying a soda and some other things – and I just forgot it. I went right back, about 20 minutes later, and everything was gone except my deodorant,” Jonathan says.
So he has a friend who lets him use his phone number, for job leads.
“I just had someone call me today about a job, someone had given me their card last week. As soon as I said I didn’t have a car, they said they’d get back to me, but they never called back,” he says.
I’m watching his face as he talks, looking for signs of drug use or a whiff of alcohol on his breath. He appears to be sober. He’s polite. His hands are clean, although they look cracked and maybe a little swollen from the elements. He has a persistent cough, although he says he only smokes cigarettes occasionally, if someone offers.
I will never know how much of his story is true. Even though I have no reason to doubt him, there are too many pieces missing from a life story condensed into a 20-minute conversation on a street corner. But the parts I know are true are the ones I’ve heard before, that prison time does not equal rehabilitation. Often, it leads to recidivism. And that’s because felons aren’t welcomed back into the fold so easily. His idea of a job fair for people who’ve done time doesn’t really sound so far-fetched. I remember Capano’s words, “There’s only so much we can do.”
Yes, maybe there’s only so much the police can do. Maybe there’s something more the city can do, or the state of New Hampshire, or the prison system.
Or someone.
So, what would help you most, I ask him.
“A job in the city, some place walkable, and a chance to rebuild my life,” he says.
We chat a little longer, and he mentions he’s disconnected from his family. His mom is disabled and lives in Berlin. She isn’t in a position to help him. His brother is also disabled, and about to have his third child. “I still love him dearly, though.”
As for panhandling, Jonathan says people are generally nice to him. He uses the money he gets for meals, either at the Spanish restaurant down the road, or a convenience store. He also likes to stop at the 1269 Cafe for lunch, a faith-based outreach for the homeless, and even sees Charlie Sherman at New Horizons soup kitchen sometimes, when he stops for a hot meal.
“When I’m here on the corner, nobody’s been mean. The landlord who owns this house here yelled at me once. But then I talked to him, and he told me he was upset about all the trash on the side of the road. He said he didn’t know if it was my fault, but I cleaned it up for him,” Jonathan says. “We ended up having a good conversation. He doesn’t yell at me anymore.”
Jonathan says maybe other panhandlers use the money they get for drugs, but he’s not one of them.
“I actually have people who ask me for drugs. I try to stay away from those people,” he says. “People actually talk to me for words of wisdom. I don’t go to church or anything. I don’t follow a particular religion, which I think is a good thing. I don’t push people toward religion.”
He said not having a car or driver’s license is tough. To get his license reinstated, he’ll need $100 – something about having to waive his license to get the non-driver’s ID so he could work, because he didn’t have the $250 required by the state, based on another court proceeding.
It was hard for me to follow.
“I think I’m a smart person, and I think that a lot of these other people out here, if they’re at least as smart as me and they’re not figuring it out, with the knowledge and skills we have, we should be getting somewhere. It feels like we’re getting nowhere,” he says.
Like there’s no redemption, and no way back to life.
So I ask him one more question. What his dream life looks like, once he can find work and get back on track.
“I’d like to have a family, and a truck. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to waive my felonies, but I’d like to see my kids grow up the way I did, outdoors, hunting and fishing, and not be around craziness – and not have them have to come out here,” he says.
