He suffered severe damage this summer from two strokes. Will Angola allow his daughter to bring him home after 44 years?

For all of her adult life, Dominque Jones has spoken with her father three or four times a day.

But for five months, there have been no calls. 

Nearly a decade ago, as the two of them formed her nonprofit, Daughters Beyond Incarceration (DBI), her father, Charles Brown, Jr., would call often from his dorm’s wall phone in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. 

“It was nonstop then,” she said. “Because we were in the thick of it.” From one call to the next, they’d pick up where they’d left off. Sometimes she’d be in a meeting and he’d call and say, “All right, what we talking about?”

One time, he called at the very moment she was testifying in front of a federal committee about prison phone rates. His testimony, heard by the committee via her cell phone, was entered into the formal record.

For her entire life, Jones, 43, has relied on his ability to span worlds. As a kid who ran track at school, she could tell him during a call that she needed shoes. The shoes would be delivered to her family’s door within hours. 

As they formed DBI together, he forged connections between the men he was incarcerated with and his family and friends “in the free world.” Somehow, “he knew how to merge them together,” she said, a skill that was necessary as they formed DBI, which works with girls and young women who want a relationship with their parents and with incarcerated parents who want to work through DBI to be good parents. 

“We always put the focus on the girl,” she said. “What does the girl want? What does the girl need? And how do we work to support the girl better?”

“My dad is the brains behind this organization,” Jones said. “It goes back to the assertion that connection with a parent who is in prison is essential to a child’s development and growth.”

The calls end; he suffers one, then two strokes

Not long before the calls ended, the two of them, father and daughter, were in deep discussions, trying to manage one young woman’s housing crisis in New Orleans while keeping her incarcerated parent in the loop. “That may well have been the last time I heard my daddy’s voice,” she said.

On June 28, her dad, who is 65 years old, suffered a heat-induced stroke, she was told. He had been assigned to a dorm in Camp D that lacks air conditioning. 

On July 13, when Jones, her aunts, her uncle, and her grandmother went to see him, he recognized them but he couldn’t speak their names. He didn’t know his birthdate. When he wanted to ask about Jones’ children, he pointed at her stomach. When she left, she felt the need to remind him who he was. 

“I am Charles Brown Jr.,” she wrote on a piece of paper. “My parents are Juanita and Charles Brown. I have three siblings. I have four grandchildren.”

Then on July 29, Jones got a call at 2:30 a.m., telling her that he’d been struck by a second stroke and rushed to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge. She called the warden’s office and Warden Darrel Vannoy approved her to visit her father. But the hospital refused the visit, contending that her father was not “end of life.”

Since he was shipped back to Angola, he’s had no physical therapy or speech therapy, as far as she knows.

In the family visits since his second stroke, there are hopeful moments. When his brother-in-law Raymond asked who won the NBA playoffs, he blurted out, “the Knicks.” 

Over the past few months, his speech has improved very slowly, if at all. “He can’t form a complete sentence,” Jones said. “He can’t read. He can’t write.” Sometimes in recent weeks, he may ask someone to call for him. When he’s handed the phone, the words are slurred and sporadic and don’t make sense. 

His email messages through the Department of Correction’s JPay system are similarly impossible to decipher, like this one from last week: “Hi as far were are cared, she froe frider, Sat.. $ 16,00 mlada. break ups for of, from and fur are are sure.”

Miles away, separated by a prison wall

A parent’s decline is never easy. 

But for people with incarcerated parents, it can be torment, to watch them age from hundreds of miles away, separated by a prison wall “It’s scary. It’s inconsiderate. It’s all the things,” said Jones, who worries about her dad’s safety, because he cannot verbalize what’s happening around him. 

And she cannot determine his condition over the phone. “The only way to tell is to drive there and physically see him myself,” she said. 

“Nothing can substitute for presence, for the access to family that you cannot get behind prison walls,” said Sarah Staudt, policy director of the Prison Policy Initiative, who helped families in similar situations in a past job. “My heart really goes out to her,” she said.

Staudt’s argument for the use of medical parole is that it makes sense for families and is also fiscally smart for states. “When people start to decline behind bars, the state is paying 100% of the cost for their care,” she said.

Earlier this year, Staudt’s colleague, Emily Widra, analyzed medical parole/compassionate release laws in the 47 states that have them and concluded that “few people” benefitted. 

“Medical parole sets an extremely high bar for applicants, with a lengthy and confusing application and hearing process,” Widra wrote. “As a result, most applicants remain locked up.”

From a reading of the law, Brown seems to be eligible for medical release: he falls under the “permanently disabled” category. 

But unlike the federal prison system, the state offers no formal way for Jones to apply for her father. The warden and his staff or medical unit doctors must identify possible candidates, who typically are then approved by parole officials.

Cognitively incapacitated

As Jones sees it, her dad is cognitively incapacitated in a way that now seems permanent.

For the past few months, he has been housed on the medical ward, a red flag, said Brown’s old friend, Jerome “Skee” Smith, who knows Brown from serving 38 years at Angola. “If you’re on the ward, something is wrong,” said Smith, who was released three years ago and tried to track down Brown as soon as he got the news. He discovered that the strokes caused some grave medical damage.

But to casual observers, Brown doesn’t appear incapacitated, because he still has decent use of his arms and legs. Also, prior to the stroke, he was physically active and working out, lifting weights on the “iron pile.” He can appear healthy, to someone who merely observes him.

That could make medical parole a long shot, people say, because correctional officials seem to favor conditions that deteriorate the physical body more than the mind.

It’s a common issue with medical parole across the United States, said Dr. Nicole Mushero, an expert in geriatric medicine at Boston Medical Center. “If a person can still wash and dress themselves,” Mushero said, “they are not seen as ‘incapacitated’ even though they may be cognitively impaired from strokes or dementia.” 

Mushero has written about the increasing need for compassionate and medical parole in the face of the dramatic aging of the U.S. prison population: by 2030, it’s estimated that 1 in 3 incarcerated people nationwide will be 55 or over. 

Because recidivism rates plummet to nearly zero once people reach 65, posing less of a public safety threat, she believes that the public safety experts within corrections should consider creating an external medical review board staffed by medical professionals, who could conduct medical parole hearings.

Brown, wired to help others

Charles Brown was built to be a mentor, said his longtime friend Jerome “Skee” Smith, who was 17 when he arrived at Angola and met Brown on the basketball court. It was 1987, “a time when the prison was real rugged,” he said.

He credits Brown with his ability to ultimately be released. In the early 1990s, a man pulled a knife on Smith in his own cell and stabbed him in the arm and then the leg. In a fury, Smith took the knife from the man and started beating him. 

“I was fighting for my life, hitting him hard,” he said. “And Charlie grabbed me through the bars and said, ‘Stop! If you kill him, you ain’t never going home.’” 

Smith and an entire generation of incarcerated men also went through legal training with Brown, he said. “Charlie knew the whole criminal code of procedures,” Smith said. “He’d tell you to read it and then you had to give it back to him. He wanted to be assured that you knew what you were talking about.” 

The law was one of his two key focuses. That and Dominque, Smith said. “That’s all he talked about was his daughter,” he said. 

Though Smith hasn’t seen Brown for three years, he keeps a memory of him in his mind, of Brown moving toward him at Angola on an average day. 

“He gonna be walking on his toes, coming up that walk,” Smith said. “And you acknowledge him. Then, because he’s Charlie, he always gonna have something constructive, something positive, something good to say.”

That’s the way he moved before the strokes hit him, Smith said. “He always led by example and he always gave you something positive before he gave you something negative.”

Left to go to the store, 44 years ago

In January 1982, when Jones’s mom was first pregnant with her, she had some cravings: for a pickled pig lip, Lay’s potato chips, and a Hawaiian Punch. Her dad left, headed to a store near their apartment in the St. Bernard public housing development, Bernell’s Grocery at the corner of Gibson and Sere Streets. 

He never returned. Instead, he was arrested for an armed robbery of a Metairie couple, that began as a hold-up a few blocks from the store, on Lafreniere Street near the St. Bernard Recreation Center. It ended with the rape of the woman in Metairie. He and a co-defendant, Darryl Boutte, who has since died, were convicted in Jefferson Parish and given life sentences. 

He had a longtime drug habit, Jones said, so the robbery doesn’t seem impossible to her and her family, though they have always been doubtful about the rape charge landing on him. 

Jones was born in November of that year. She has always lived in a world where her dad was locked up.

And for her entire life, he has been a steady voice. “The phone calls were consistent,” she said. “We talked about everything.” 

Because of her bond with her dad, she always stayed in close touch with his mother, Juanita Brown, and his sisters, Demetria and Karen. “My daddy’s side of the family, they always show up,” said Jones, who believes she inherited even her character from her dad.

He was always known to be an all-around fix-it man, his sisters said. “I call him Mr. Jack of All Trades. That’s my brother,” said his sister Karen.

Jones remembers her dad helping her, over the phone, with multiplication tables and other homework. She ran track and had hopes of being an Olympic sprinter. He’d track the result of her races in the newspaper and celebrate the results with her by phone. 

And he’d tell her she was special, every time he spoke to her. “That was embedded in my head,” she said. “I knew early on that I was somebody who was a strong, beautiful black woman because that’s what my daddy poured into me.” 

It’s now time for her to care for him, she said. She would like to bring her dad home, where she can ensure his safety and get him much-needed therapy and help with rehabilitation, she said. “He’s way past the age of committing any crime,” she said. “I want him released.”