Annessa's Story
After you’re dressed out and put into a bright orange uniform that feels as though it’s made of fiberglass, you’re led from your holding cell up front by a CO (corrections officer) through multiple gates until you come to a long hallway. On either side of the halls, it’s all the same, offices and holding cells, a concrete block for rec (outdoor recreation), not much else, except, the sally port. The sally port is a large solid glass wall with a door in the center.
Above the sally port sits a guard. You will not get through that door unless a CO radios for it to be opened. When it first opened for me, the reality of my situation began to seep in. The stink could only be described as rancid; a vile mixture of a couple hundred women’s sweat, filth, and food. The moment it hit my face, I nearly vomited, but I didn’t have the chance. I was shoved through with other women and searched.
After, I was assigned to my housing unit, my “pod.” Walking into that concrete box, that “pod,” with 40 other women whose names and crimes I didn’t know, was the worst encounter with fear I had yet to discover. I was never religious, but I prayed to God in that moment, and I prayed every day, until I the day I was released. This is what we call jail house religion and there are few that do not find it within the confines of those walls. Annessa Randolph found it too.
Annessa Randolph (Courtesy of Jess Neal)
Annessa Randolph is a program participant of the sober living house in Huntington called, Newness of Life. The name is well suited because if you talk to the founder, Justin Ponton, he will tell you that the newness of life God gave him, is what saved him, and inspired him to do the same for others. Newness of Life has been around since 2016 and in that time has had hundreds of graduates from its program. February 1st they had a graduation party for their female participants and that’s where I met Annessa.
Annessa can best be described as about 5 foot even, maybe 130 pounds, she is tiny and has short mousy brown hair, but there is something about her, something beneath her awkward nervousness and brief glances that invites you in, like the warmth of a hearth in the midst of winter. We sat in February’s bitterly cold wind on the front porch of the brick house on ninth avenue and smoked. Her hand trembled a bit as she lit a Marlboro and began to share her story with me.
At twelve years old, most young girls are just starting to develop. They find their interests, they find their style, they begin to find a place in the world at that time. For Annessa Randolph, she and her brother were finding their place in the foster care system after methamphetamine was found in their systems due to their mothers in house clandestine lab.
Annessa didn’t mind foster care. It was a life she had not experienced before. It was stable and healthy and for the first time, she found herself happy. Annessa’s failing grades went up and she began participating in her school’s swim team on the weekends. All was well in her world until her mother began to demand weekly visitations.
The visitations were granted and were to take place on the weekend. Annessa was hurt, angry, and resentful. She had finally had a bit of happiness and what she felt were her mothers own selfish desires, was interrupting it. Annessa spent a mere month in foster care before being returned to her mother’s home. One of the most vivid memories she has is seeing a purple-colored substance on a piece of glass. She now knows that substance was methamphetamine. For one year, Annessa continued to live in her mother’s home under the same conditions that had her in foster care to begin with. She was angry, and it showed in school, and at home. She fought continuously with her mother. It wasn’t until she moved in with a friend named Whitney that she had once again found reprieve.
Whitney’s father taught Annessa how to box and allowed her to live in his home for one year. When he caught her smoking cigarettes, he gave her the ultimatum to stop or go back home. Annessa’s defiant spirit, developed after a lifetime of having no control or say in her own happiness, refused to quit, and so, she went home, back to her mother. She was only 14.
Poverty, addiction, and sadness surrounded Annessa for two more years and then she met a young man. Annessa dated the boy for six months and exactly six months into the relationship, discovered she was exactly six months pregnant. She did not plan it, nor did she want to marry at 16, but at this point, she could see a big exit sign in the form of a wedding band.
At 16 years of age, her mother signed the papers for her to marry. The birth of Annessa’s son was not an easy one. She had to have a cesarean section. Cut from one hip to the next, staples holding her stomach together, she could not bear the pain alone; the Percocets the doctor prescribed helped to numb the pain from her surgery and from the pain in her heart.
Annessa’s husband had always had an addiction, suffering from the pain of a recent surgery and a life filled with heartache, her husband taught her how to numb it all the way away by snorting the Percocets. From there, the slippery slope rapidly took hold of Annessa. She and her husband purchased Lortabs off the street. At one point, she says they were each doing ten of those a day. Eventually, their bodies built up an immunity and something stronger was needed. The couple turned to Roxy 30s and Oxycontin.
When that was no longer enough, Annessa learned from a cousin of her husband’s how to engage in IV drug use. During the course of her addiction, Annessa was arrested 22 times, many of which were petty charges, until she was charged for breaking and entering, only then was she sentenced to 1-10 years in prison.
Annessa’s mugshot from June 2019. (Courtesy of Jess Neal)
Annessa was in Laken prison for women for one year. Like myself and so many others, she began to pray. Two months prior to seeing the parole board she found Newness of Life through a friend. The parole board approved her release and nine months later, Annessa is graduating.
In total, she has 20 months of sobriety. If you asked her what saved her, she would tell you that Newness of Life taught her the “solution,” they taught her the twelve steps, and more importantly, they taught her to develop a relationship with the God of her understanding, because faith eliminates fear. Now, at 28, she is pregnant, engaged, has an apartment, is attaining her GED, and has a full-time job. She is happy and has found a solution. It is no wonder I was so strongly drawn to her.
Step Two of a program requires that you come to realize that there is a power greater than yourself that can restore you to sanity. When I first came to rehab all those years ago, step one – admitting we were powerless against our addiction, was easy. Step two was a tough one. I had grown up in a household not entirely unlike Annessa’s.
Although there were no drugs, we were poor, there was abuse on a multitude of levels, and there was my alcoholic brother. I remember walking home from school and seeing all the nice houses along the way. I remember seeing the other kids head into their homes with nicely manicured lawns, and I remember coming home to our single wide trailer where I never knew with any certainty, what that evening would hold for me.
More than that, I remember hating those other children and hating God for favoring them over me. I carried that hate. I carried it throughout life and even below the surface of my jailhouse religion. When I was released, I hated God even more for the life I had lived and the life I had put myself into. I thought he had forgotten me. When my sponsor came to me with step two, I balked and laughed hysterically. There was no way there was a God that cared. I was required to go 90 A.A meetings in 90 days. I was not happy, but it was that or go back to prison.
I always chose to sit in the back, arms crossed, critiquing, and feeling above every person in the room. Then the day came when I heard a story much like Annessa’s and much like my own. For the first time, I did not feel alone, and for the first time, I became open to what the recovery community calls, “the solution.” At the end of each meeting, the group joined hands and prayed. For the first time, I actually joined, and I understood what Dr. Silkworth meant in the Big Book when he said, “And though perhaps he came to scoff, he may remain to pray.” (The Big Book, pg. 21.) Annessa was a step ahead of me in her journey because she already knew that, she remained to pray. “And so it is: the beginning of the end of his old life, and the beginning of his emergence into a new one.” (The Big Book, pg. 26.)
