Irene Sotelo has seen many changes in her life and overcome many obstacles. Sotelo has gone from drugs, prison and homelessness to getting her degree from CSULB in criminology and now pursuing her master degree in Long Beach on Tuesday, November. 20, 2018. She has also founded the Rising Scholars program at Cal State Long Beach, a community for those who have been incarcerated or have family members who’ve served time.
By: CHRIS HAIRE, Press-Telegram – Originally Publish on Nov. 21, 2018
Irene Sotelo stood at a rest stop, just off the 5 freeway near Magic Mountain, and dialed her daughter.
She hadn’t used a phone in 18 months.
Nor had she handled any money. Purchasing the calling card felt awkward. So did buying food from Burger King.
The drive from the state women’s prison in Chowchilla, on her way to rehab in Santa Fe Springs, was her first time in a car since being locked up.
It was Oct. 25, 2009, and Sotelo stood at a crucible.
“I’m almost home,” Sotelo, now 53, told her daughter.
Sotelo’s life has had two acts.
The first act was marked by tragedy, drugs and regret.
Her current act has been defined by redemption: She graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in sociology, reconnected with her kids and grandchildren – and helped found Rising Scholars, a student organization for the formerly incarcerated and those with family members who have served time.
Since launching two years ago, the organization has worked to reduce recidivism rates by helping former inmates navigate the educational system; it has also spread to other universities nationwide, and Sotelo regularly tours the country to chat about the criminal justice system.
But Sotelo has a third act in her. She just started Long Beach’s sociology master’s program. And even though she’ll be 56 when she finishes, Sotelo says she plans on working with girls in juvenile hall – helping them understand they aren’t alone.
“My kids are proud of me,” the Whittier resident said this week. “But sometimes they want me to slow down.
“I want to work.”
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Sotelo’s first mistake in prison was having a calendar.
She marked off her first day, then her second. She kept an eye on birthdays and holidays, which would pass without gifts or visitors.
“It makes time go by slower,” Sotelo said.
On the surface, a series of mistakes and setbacks led her to Chowchilla, home of a state women’s prison 250 miles north of Los Angeles.
Throughout much of the 1990s, Sotelo, then living in Bellflower, maintained a mundane life. Her husband worked at an auto body shop while she stayed home, burying her drug-and-gang past to care for her son and daughter.
Then, in 1998, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
“It was really far along,” she said. “They were giving me a double dose of chemotherapy, but I’d already given my life to God.”
She survived, with a caveat: The pain medication prescribed to Sotelo unearthed her addictions. When the prescription ran out, she needed a fix.
“Everything was about the drugs,” she said.
Sotelo spiraled. She got hooked on meth, left her family of 19 years – and ended up on the streets, sometime around 2005.
In April 2008 – already awaiting trial on drug-transportation charges – police raided a Long Beach motel she was staying at and found a litany of fake credit card numbers. A month later, she had a stroke. Sotelo was temporarily paralyzed on the left side of her body.
Not long afterward, she rolled into the old Long Beach courthouse in a wheelchair.
When the judge spoke to her, Sotelo could only nod. She pleaded guilty. Three years in the state pen.
“Going to prison,” Sotelo said, “saved my life.”
Once inside – despite time’s erosion, exacerbated by that calendar – Sotelo had plenty to occupy her.
There was physical therapy, which helped her walk again.
She thought about her children and the pain she caused.
And then there was the substance-abuse program. It helped Sotelo kick her drug habit, yes, but it also taught her about emotional triggers, about overcoming the scars of the past.
“I had a lot of trauma,” Sotelo said.
Sotelo’s mother killed herself.
She was only 11, the oldest of five children – the youngest of whom were twins less than a year old – to a single mom.
“I was angry at my mother,” she said. “She brought me into this world then left me alone. I was mad at her for a long time.”
Sotelo dropped out of school and, for a few months, cared for her siblings. Then her grandparents, living in a gang-infested part of Norwalk, took them in.
Almost immediately, Sotelo began drinking, using drugs – eventually PCP – and hanging with the gangs.
“At that age, a girl needs her mother,” Sotelo recalled. “It was a bad time.”
When she was 15 going on 16, her grandparents moved the family to Ojai, a fresh start for their kin, away from the old neighborhood, away from gangs and drugs and crime.
But, Sotelo said, it was too late for her.
“I stayed,” she said. “I didn’t have a license, but I had a car, so I drove back-and-forth between Norwalk and Ojai.”
Then, around 18 years old, Sotelo met her future husband. Sotelo got straight. She left the gang life, stopped doing drugs and focused on family. She even got her G.E.D., the equivalent of a high-school diploma. Three years later, her son was born.
But marriage, she said, wasn’t a panacea.
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Sotelo never had an “Aha!,” moment in prison.
Rather than an epiphany, Sotelo said, she had an evolution, a creeping build-up of heartbreak upon heartbreak – until she knew she had to start anew.
While living on the streets, Sotelo carried a letter opener up her sleeve. But that didn’t prevent two men from beating and raping her. Her husband, by then the sole caretaker of their children, checked in on her at the hospital – then dropped her off at a park. He wouldn’t let her near the kids.
“I understood,” she said.
Around Christmas 2005, her daughter took her to a family dinner. Afterward, her daughter dropped Sotelo at a friend’s camper, where she was staying. As she crawled in, Sotelo saw her daughter cry.
“I knew I hurt her,” Sotelo said.
There were nights in the riverbed, near the 605 freeway in Bellflower, where she saw the shadows from rats scurry by – occasionally they’d fall on her tent – and nights where, freezing from the cold, she’d walk by houses and peer into the windows, seeing families warm in front of the television.
“I’d think,” she said, “‘What am I doing out here?’”
In prison, the substance-abuse program helped her deal with the trauma, both of living on the streets and of her mother dying. She realized she needed to get straight, to be a mother again, to become educated.
But the final heartbreak came the day she left Chowchilla. After wolfing down a burger and calling her daughter from Santa Clarita, she arrived at the Phoenix House rehab center in Santa Fe Springs, which has since closed. Her kids were there to greet her.
Her son had a surprise.
“He told me I was going to be a grandmother,” Sotelo said. “But if I didn’t get it together, I wouldn’t see my grandchild.”
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Sotelo walked into her criminal procedure class, on the Cal State Long Beach campus, and took her seat.
It was the first day of the spring 2017 semester.
It’d been more than seven years since she left Chowchilla. Since then, she transitioned from rehab to a sober-living home, enrolled in Cerritos College, earned an associate’s degree in criminology – graduating, in four years, with highest honors – and transferred to Long Beach. She’d also reconnected with her family.
Her criminal procedure teacher, appropriately named Jennifer Cops, introduced herself. She seemed familiar, Sotelo thought.
Then Cops told the class about her background: She graduated with a law degree from the University of San Diego, worked at a law firm and eventually joined the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
“That’s when it hit me,” Sotelo said.
After class, she walked up to Cops and asked if she’d ever worked in Long Beach. Yes, Cops said. Then:
“You put me away,” Sotelo replied.
Cops asked if Sotelo was sure. Yes, Sotelo said, divulging her background.
“I was shocked,” Cops said last week. “I was confused.”
Eventually, Cops remembered a woman in a wheelchair, pleading to several crimes.
Cops was worried. Would Sotelo hate her? Hold the conviction against her? Think Cops would be unfair to her in class.
“No,” Sotelo told her. “Thank you. You saved my life.”
Cops said Sotelo was the kind of student teachers love – engaged, questioning, open to telling her story. And eager to learn.
“She’d come to office hours every week and we’d chat about class,” Cops said, “and then she’d tell me about her past.”
Each layer Sotelo drew back impressed Cops: The way Sotelo overcame her mother’s suicide, how she persisted in her education, that the system actually helped her.
“It’s called the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,” Cops said, stressing the last word. “But our recidivism rate is crazy.”
She’s right: About 46 percent of those who serve time in California get convicted for a felony or misdemeanor within three years of release, according to the latest state statistics.
“She gave me a sliver of hope,” Cops said.
And their relationship did not end after the semester. Sotelo kept in touch – texting her, going to office hours. Cops attended Sotelo’s graduation party and the pair have met each other’s families.
“She’s one of my best friends,” Sotelo said.
And Sotelo still stops by for office hours.
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Last year, around Thanksgiving and with finals not far off, Sotelo had a heart attack.
She spent a month in the hospital.
“I told her to take it easy,” said James Binnall, the faculty adviser for Rising Scholars. “But she wouldn’t listen.”
Binnall met Sotelo in spring 2016, her first semester at Cal State Long Beach, in his class on the courts system.
Binnall, a former felon, told the class about the drunken driving collision, in which he was behind the wheel, that killed his best friend and his time behind bars.
Like with Cops a year later, Sotelo approached Binnall and told him her story.
“She didn’t understand how I did all those things,” said Binnall, who after prison went to law school, and earned multiple other degrees. “Seeing me gave her some kind of hope.”
Not long after meeting, Binnall approached Sotelo and two other former convicts – Adrian Vazquez and Joe Louis Hernandez – about starting an informal group for students who’ve been incarcerated.
They suggested a formal student organization.
“It’s happened so fast,” Binnall said. “Their energy is boundless.”
Rising Scholar’s first event, in August of that year, drew about 200 people – with university President Jane Close Conoley in the front row. Subsequent events have had actor Daniel Trejo and Hollywood producer Scott Budnick (of “The Hangover) as guest speakers. Next on the groups list of gets is Snoop Dogg.
“I’m so proud of her,” Binnall said.
Binnall, Sotelo said, is protective of her. That’s why, when she was laid up in the hospital, he called her every night and had food brought to her.
He told her to forget finals, take the incomplete grade if she had to, just get well.
“No professor has the gumption to fail a student in the hospital,” he recalled telling Sotelo.
But she didn’t listen. Sotelo studied in the hospital and, after getting out, showed up on campus near Christmas to take two finals, though she was still recovering.
While there, she ran into Binnall.
He was angry. “I told her to go home,” he said.
But she didn’t.
“I don’t have much time,” Sotelo said. “I’m 53.”
So Sotelo, making up for lost time, took the finals – which she aced – walked back to her car and drove off.
At last, Sotelo was heading home.
Source: Press-Telegram
