Progress can entail lonely road; Time seems slower digging out of a hole.

Byline: Clive McFarlane

COLUMN: CLIVE MCFARLANE

Robert Chartrand Jr. sat by himself in general population at the Worcester House of Correction last year, watching friends and other inmates avoid him like the plague.

He was trying to clean himself up, and for that he had become an "alien" on his cell block.

He still didn't know why he had volunteered to be among the first group of 36 inmates to participate in the jail's Substance Treatment Opportunity Program, or STOP, as it is called. He can only believe it was because of some "higher power."

The program was billed as an 18-week comprehensive program to help inmates deal with their alcohol and drug habits; identify behaviors, feelings and attitudes that consistently get them into trouble; and develop tools that will help them stop their counterproductive behaviors.

But after 35 years of flitting in and out of foster homes, residential facilities, hospitals and jails, he had felt no real need to change a life that comforts him like a baby blanket.

He didn't even flinch when an inmate he knew at the jail, John Yovino, 38, of Fitchburg, died from a heroin overdose in February 2005. It meant nothing to him that he was probably the last person to see Mr. Yovino alive, having "used with him" just prior to the overdose.

He recalled Mr. Yovino shaking his hand and saying, "You are one of my only true friends," following their use of the drug.

But even then, he didn't feel any urge to change his ways. He was a year into a 4-1/2-year sentence for multiple robberies.

In one night, the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2003, he had hit five Leominster businesses - The Village Basket at 195 Mill St. ; Merle Norman Cosmetics studio, across the Mall at Whitney Field; T. Nails & Tanning Salon, at 27 Sack Blvd.; the Boston Bed Company at 111 Sack Blvd.; and Aldente Pizzaria at 23 Sack Blvd.

The papers said that little spree netted him about $2,250. The Southbridge police arrested him that Saturday, after being tipped off by his girlfriend, and he was later the subject of 14 indictments involving robberies in six communities in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

If there was an impetus behind his desire to change his life, aside from the higher power he believed it was; it might have come from his mug shot from the Southbridge arrest.

"I looked into my eyes, and I was done. I was beaten. I knew I would be on a suicide mission if there was no one there for me when I was let out this time."

The STOP program proved more than he had bargained for. He was one of 26 inmates to successfully complete the debut program. Unlike the others, who were reassigned to minimum security and thus were eligible for opportunities to participate in work release and similar programs, his extensive record kept him confined in the medium-security section of the jail.

But the STOP instructors had forced him to look at himself as he had never done before, forced him to "think about his thinking" and about his actions - so much so, that he came back to his cellblock yearning desperately for a do-over with his life.

He got a job in the laundry, and six months later, after getting parole, the instructors in the STOP program helped him enroll in the jail's "Almost Home" program, which provides ex-prisoners who volunteer to kick their addictive habits drugs and/or alcohol treatment and job and educational training.

He has since graduated from the Almost Home program, and is living at Dismas House, which provides transitional housing to ex-inmates.

He is spending his time now training an assistance dog and working full time. He is doing "commitments," visiting jails and other institutions, telling his story, steeling himself to make more community-friendly choices.

He was recently accepted into the General Studies Program at Quinsigamond Community College. He has four children, the oldest of whom will soon make him a grandfather. Having a completed a parenting class, he is trying to be the father he never was. He understands that will take time.

"I have to constantly remind myself where my boundaries are," he said. "I don't have the right to jump into their lives and become Daddy. I have to earn that right now."

So while deciding where he wants to be in life tugs at him impatiently, he sticks doggedly to the business of doing his life over one day at a time, one step at a time.

There is no guarantee that he will. The hole that he dug for himself was a deep one.

"I couldn't find the bottom and I just kept digging," he recalled.

But he thinks he is going to make it now - now that he has a network of people, including STOP officials, who are helping him to find the "acceptance I have always been looking for all my life."

But if he makes it, somewhere down the line he might realize that the biggest move he made in turning his life around was the one he didn't make.

When he was alone that time in his cellblock with 2-1/2 years left on his sentence, living like an alien among his fellow inmates, and "listening to all my friends planning their next visit, when the current one was not yet over," he had chosen not to join them.

And that one moment of courage could be what made all the difference.

Clive McFarlane can be contacted by e-mail at [e-mail].