Flip the Script, a culturally specific program in Portland, puts formerly incarcerated Oregonians in front of state lawmakers
W hen Patrick Alexander was released from prison, eager to course-correct his life, he had one question for his parole officer: “What can you help me with?”
“Nothing,” the officer replied.
“And before I left the office,” recalled Alexander, “he said, ‘You owe me 25 bucks.’ I said, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘Supervision fee.’”
Do they expect someone fresh out of prison to have $25?
“They don’t,” chimed in Calvin Harris, another former prisoner. “It’s designed for permanent punishment.”
Harris and Alexander are alumni of Central City Concern’s Flip the Script program, which supports formerly incarcerated African Americans as they exit Oregon prisons and sends them to Salem to advocate for reforms to the criminal justice system.
While Multnomah County permanently eliminated supervision fees last year, there are many barriers people exiting prison continue to face.
If you’re Black in Oregon, you’re 3.7 times more likely than your white neighbors to be incarcerated. Outside prison walls, fewer than 3% of Oregonians are Black . Inside, that number increases to nearly 9%, according to Oregon Department of Corrections demographics data . When prisoners are released, they face obstacles that can make success outside of prison seem impossible — and with few places to turn to for help.
De-institutionalizing the space Just past Portland’s iconic White Stag sign, at the base of the Burnside Bridge, is a three-story brick building. It’s called the Shoreline Apartments, a housing community run by Central City Concern. That’s where Flip the Script started four years ago, on the second and third floors. But the location wasn’t ideal.
Central City Concern is a nonprofit that serves people experiencing homelessness and poverty with medical clinics, transitional housing and jobs programs. It also runs a parole transition program, which was referring people exiting incarceration to Flip the Script. Many of them were Black, and when they’d arrive at the Shoreline Apartments, they were immediately confronted with cultural barriers.
“They had to still go through what appeared to be a white institution type of setting,” said Medina Kurney, Flip the Script’s associate director of reentry services. The institutional atmosphere made it hard for people to get to the second- and third-floor offices where the program was located.
They realized Flip the Script needed its own space where participants could find a safe environment, staffed with people who look like them.
Kurney and her colleagues are now settling into a new location at Southwest Fourth Avenue and Oak Street, a ground-level corner storefront with floor-to-ceiling windows and a transparent front door.
“You can see we’re still kind of unpacking,” Kurney said, gesturing to African masks and sculptures covering the tables by the entryway, and the still-bare walls painted in an earthy orange, radiant in the cascade of morning light. It feels more like a cafe than a bureaucracy. In fact, the space used to be a Starbucks.
Kurney said they have plans for Afrocentric murals and window etchings as well. The masks and other art, she noted, were donated by Dave Dahl, founder of Dave’s Killer Bread. Dahl was a prisoner himself, and before he sold his company, it employed many formerly incarcerated people. The culturally specific artwork immediately communicates to people of African descent that they belong.
The decision to make a more welcoming environment was intentional, Kurney explained. In the waiting area, Flip the Script participants and alumni were laughing freely.
“Do you hear the chatter?” she asked. “They’re not going to be shushed. They’re not going to be told to take it outside.” She said it’s important that, having had their personalities silenced for so long, participants feel free to be themselves.
“They’re being treated like decent people,” said Billy Anfield, Flip the Script’s advocacy coordinator, whose desk sits opposite Kurney’s. “And that’s the big difference from how you’re treated when you’re inside.”
“When people are given respect, they give it,” Kurney added.
Beyond reentry is advocacy Flip the Script helps usher participants back into life outside of prison. But it doesn’t stop there. The key component, Anfield said, is sending participants to Salem to speak to state legislators.
“A lot of programs don’t have an advocacy component,” he said. But Flip the Script wanted a way to elevate participants’ voices.
“We’re not just enrolling people, putting them back in the community, and that’s it,” Anfield explained. Through his advocacy coordination, former prisoners work to change the laws that landed them in prison in the first place, and to chip away at obstacles to reentry. “They have talked to police; they have been involved with subcommittees and criminal justice reform ever since this program existed,” Anfield said.
After 22 years with Central City Concern, Anfield had retired. But then he heard about Flip the Script and that it was culturally specific.
“To have an opportunity to serve my people really caught my attention,” Anfield said. So he came out of retirement, and he has been with the program since the beginning.
Harris called Anfield “the glue” that holds Flip the Script together. Some participants said they only gave the program a chance because of Anfield’s authenticity. “I probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that man right there,” Harris said.
“I did this in the ’80s. I went to prison. I’m an ex-con. I’m an ex-druggie,” Anfield said. “We walk this walk together.”
Anfield said the program is everything he’d hoped: “We’re proving that we can help and support those that want to change their lives.” But he said the program needs to broaden the base of operations because demand is top-heavy. He compared it to a funnel that’s only able to drip out a few people at a time back into society.
Obstacles ex-prisoners face Drawn to Anfield’s charisma and strength, participants began to show up. Anfield said that during the program’s first year, Alexander and other Flip the Script enrollees “elevated their voices” to identify their biggest obstacles to reentry. They said their main stumbling blocks were housing, employment, mental health, and parole and probation.
“Those are the four categories that we’ve been focusing on the last four years, and wherever we can interject our voices, we’ve done that,” Anfield said. But each of those topics has its own subset of problems, and Anfield sees a need for “changing and reforming all of them to better suit Black people.”
One problem with parole and probation, for example, is age and racial discrepancies. “The parole department should be run by people the same age as the parolee, the same race as the parolee,” said Willie Fiers, another Flip the Script alumnus. “It shouldn’t be a 60-, 70-year-old white man — excuse my terminology, but that’s what it is — for a 25-year-old Black man.” Fiers called the parole system “an invisible program” contributing to keeping formerly incarcerated people down.
“Parole and probation doesn’t satisfy a reality,” Anfield said, adding that when people get out, they want a home-cooked meal and the embrace of their family, not to go to a probation office. “You expect them to stop by a building before they go home?” Anfield said he takes a different approach. “I don’t come at them with a program. I come at them with reality.”
And then, before it was permanently removed in Multnomah County, there was the monthly supervision fee. “I’m not even out of the gate yet, and they’re already hitting me with bills. They’re putting me in debt,” said Richard Holmes, who joined Flip the Script a few months ago for help.
He said he didn’t even have a place to stay, let alone $25 in his pocket, upon release. “It makes you almost where you don’t want to walk out of the gate,” Holmes recounted. “It intimidates you to where you’re afraid to leave.”
But Flip the Script has supported Holmes and has even managed to get the attention of state legislators. Lawmakers have suspended parole fees, partly due to COVID-19, and might permanently ban them.
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Lisa Bonner Brown, Flip the Script’s housing specialist, said finding a place to live is just as problematic. Many residential property owners in Oregon won’t house people with previous convictions. Bonner Brown said the only way to navigate this is on a case-by-case basis, having personal conversations in the hopes that someone will make an exception.
“It took me two years for me to actually get permanent housing once I was released,” said Alexander. He credits the personal attention Bonner Brown and Kurney have extended to him. “When they talk to me, they talk to Patrick, as an equal. As an individual.” He said their attitude of “how can we help you?” was exactly what he was looking for, and not finding elsewhere, when he got out of prison.
“We’re just revving up the motors,” Anfield said. “Our goal is to turn those numbers around so there’s less of us in jail and more of us in the community.”
But Anfield, Kurney and their colleagues are taking in people whose spirits, in many cases, are already crushed and walking them through an uphill, against-the-wind battle.
‘We’re telling you we need help’ “I made a choice when I got to prison, like, ‘This is my last time coming here,’” said Holmes. “But the closer I got to the gate, I was like, ‘This might not be my last time.’”
“It’s set up for recidivism,” said Harris. “Why would they want to let you out if they’re making money on you?”
Fiers agreed, calling it a revolving door.
“We’re sitting in jail, and we’re telling you we need help,” Holmes said, lacing together nail-polished fingers and leaning over his Chuck Taylor high tops. Holmes’ propensity to speak from the corner of his mouth and glance over his shoulder, like prison’s following him, contrasted with the more animated composure of his alumni counterparts, who have already completed the program.
“When I was in prison, I took every class that I could,” said Holmes. “I worked from the first week until I got out.”
In his last six months of incarceration, Holmes asked for letters of recommendation reflecting his behavior as a model prisoner and program participant to help him find employment upon release. Most people he went to were dismissive. “I asked at least 12 officers, four sergeants and six counselors for letters, and I got a total of three,” Holmes said.
“And that kind of hurt me,” he added. “These people really don’t care.”
To make matters worse, for the final two years of his sentence, Holmes had been trying to access programs that guide prisoners through reentry. But Holmes said he couldn’t access them until he had only 90 days left in his sentence.
“They kept telling me I had to wait for my 90 days,” he said. Then when that time arrived, he could no longer access the programs because of a technicality around a change to prisoner status. “I said all right, thank you for setting me up for failure when I’m telling you I’m trying to succeed in life.”
Then, Holmes said, they threw him back into a community full of drugs and the things he was trying to get away from.
“My parole officer told me, ‘Go out and create a life for yourself. And if you’re doing something wrong, I’ll tell you,’” Holmes recalled. He said before he met Anfield, he felt beaten down, like he already had one foot back in prison.
“The system wants you to feel you’re not a person,” said Fiers. “There’s your stumbling block.”
Fiers said that before prison, he worked as a structural repair specialist in the aerospace industry, with multiple security clearances, and had traveled all over the country. Then he was incarcerated. Now, he said, he’s recognized only as a “felon.”
While in prison, Fiers said, he did jobs that prisoners had never handled before. “I ran the canteen at Ontario prison,” he said. “I reconstructed it. I did their taxes. I did everything for their organization and ran the crew.” He said he accomplished similar things in three different prisons, as he personally changed, learned and achieved. “But nowhere when I got out of prison does it say, ‘That man has organizational skills.’”
If you work in prison, you deserve a good reference, Fiers said, just like in the outside world. “Don’t give me a piece of paper that says ‘felon’ on it. Give me a piece of paper that says ‘construction worker, carpenter.’”
After release, Fiers found a job at Denny’s. “That was a dramatic mental challenge,” he said. “Go to Denny’s. I’m a space person, but I’m washing dishes.”
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He said staying motivated in a depressive environment was one of prison’s most harrowing challenges, and one that extends into the post-incarceration world where people assume he has no skills or knowledge.
“Once you go into the system, you spend so much time hearing and feeling how you are inferior. And you’re not inferior,” Fiers said. But hearing that message again and again, “it overwhelms your mentality.”
Like Holmes, Fiers’ story demonstrates that success in prison doesn’t seem to matter to most people outside.
“Now I’ve got to do, what, sweep the sidewalk, sleep on the street? That’s the mentality they gave me,” Fiers said. “The system, the city, the people, the peer pressure, everything now says I’m nothing. But I’m not nothing. I still want to be something. When I look in the mirror, I want to smile at myself.”
He said that it has felt like dragging an anchor but that Anfield has supported his self-esteem. “Billy says, ‘Willie, you’re not in prison. So don’t act like you’re in prison!’ I said, well, I’m at Denny’s.”
But Fiers said he keeps fighting to move forward. And Holmes said his perspective is changing, just from being around Flip the Script alumni.
“The more I work with these people, my confidence gets higher,” Holmes said.
The Flip the Script participants said their confidence escalated when Anfield took them to Salem and insisted they speak in front of legislators. “Out of the blue,” said Fiers, “the inner person comes out.”
Reform and self-worth Alexander was the second person to join Flip the Script. Now, with years of civilian life behind him, he carries himself with a steady, outspoken bravado and calls himself an “unofficial employee” who stays involved and mentors new enrollees. He delights in recounting the time he cornered Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who at the time was the director of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, at the state Capitol, demanding to be heard about the way the Department of Corrections could better spend its money.
After that conversation, Schmidt came to one of Flip the Script’s Third Saturday advocacy meetings, Anfield said. Anfield told Schmidt that he thought public defenders and their propensity for plea bargains too often send African Americans unjustly to prison. (Editor's note: This sentence has been clarified from the original version to show that these words and views are Anfield's, not Schmidt's.)
“He appeared to be a very sincere guy,” Harris said of Schmidt.
“We’ve met with city government, county government, local government, state legislators,” Anfield said. “It’s just a continuation of meeting with people who have the power to change laws and policies around the criminal justice system.”
Flip the Script trains people like Holmes and Alexander to speak in front of legislators, to say who you are and what your experience is in two minutes or less. Participants said realizing you can speak on an equal level with people in power has been transformative for their own sense of self worth.
Anfield’s trips to Salem serve a dual purpose: They influence criminal justice policy through the voices of Black people with lived experience in the carceral system, and they help those who are speaking reclaim their personal confidence. The healing is both outside and inside.
“It feels good,” said Holmes, adding that it’s also a little scary to speak up at the Capitol. “Giving me that responsibility, it’s like I’m not going to let these people down,” he said with a nod toward his alumni counterparts. “I’m not gonna mess this opportunity up and be a bad apple coming from a bunch of golden apples.”
And it’s changing his perspective, just like prison did. “I don’t see the world so much as them and me,” Holmes said, adding that he’s beginning to feel like he could work with anybody.
Alexander said he wanted to be quiet on his first trip to Salem, but Anfield pushed him to let his voice be heard. As a result, he’s now more comfortable speaking to people who haven’t been in trouble, even to police. He’s spoken at the Portland Police Bureau’s Training Advisory Council.
“At first, I felt like, do they realize who I am?” Alexander said. But after sitting back and listening to officers speak, he realized their knowledge relied on textbook information like statistics and laws. He went from feeling out of place to realizing that his direct experience was actually uniquely informed compared to their book knowledge. “So I started telling them like no, that ain’t it. I said that’s a lie.”
Alexander’s transformation of confidence is now a beacon for new participants, like Holmes. And Alexander hopes new participants will soon surpass his own achievements with Flip the Script.
“Everything that they put into me I’ve got to pour out and take it to another level,” said Alexander. If the program is to be a model for other programs, “we’ve got to put everything that we have into it.”
Bonner Brown took a moment to praise the growth she’s witnessed in Holmes, Alexander, Harris and Fiers. “They’re butterflies now,” she said.
Hire the people you want to help Alexander said the biggest component to Flip the Script’s success is the people they hire because it’s important for participants to see people who not only look like you, but who have lived similar experiences as former prisoners. “It needs to be expanded more,” he said of the program.
By contrast, he said, the state of Oregon and Multnomah County say that they want to help out the Black community, “but they don’t want to offer us jobs.” Alexander noted that hiring formerly incarcerated people also gives hope and inspiration to those still in prison.
“You have to hire the people that you say you want to help,” said Alexander. “No matter what their criminal background is, parole or probation, find a way to put them to work where they can earn a living and help out their community, too.”
“We’re workers. We’re family people. We are trying to survive,” said Fiers, “reconstructing ourselves in a world that wants us to fail. And this organization (Flip the Script) is telling us, and showing us, that we can succeed.”
“It’s also nice just to come by a place where I can just stop in anytime I want to,” Alexander added. “It’s nice to have that once you get out of prison.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story did not acknowledge that Multnomah County permanently removed the $25 probation and parole fee in 2020. Street Roots regrets the error.
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