March 13, 2024 – The department agreed to pay the Amity Foundation roughly $121 million over five years to oversee and review reentry homes in Los Angeles County, Taxpayers paid about $5,200 a month per parolee for Walden House to offer a mix of housing, food, substance use disorder treatment, therapy and various other activities. And when Fredreaka Jack ended up in the emergency room again and again, doctors sometimes attributed her physical complaints to mental illness and “drug-seeking behavior.”
Each day someone at Patton State Hospital near Highland handed Fredreaka Jack her medication: three pills to manage her schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, one or two for her blood sugar, one for hypertension and one for hypothyroidism.
That all changed on April 14, 2022. Jack had been sentenced to 32 months in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree burglary. After successfully petitioning to be paroled into the community, she just had to complete about three months at a state-funded reentry facility in El Monte known as Walden House and she’d be free.
Jack told her mother she loved the facility and the hints of freedom it offered — trips to the store, access to her phone and the small job she had helping out. She hoped to be reunited with her family in Louisiana soon.
Instead, Jack would be dead within months. She was 37.
In granting her the freedom she sought, the court released Jack into a public parole system so full of holes that Jack’s…
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