Smoothing his collar, he glanced over his shoulder at the tall wire fence surrounding the parking lot.
Howard Chung walked up the concrete steps to the Los Angeles County Probation Department’s offices and marched inside when the glass doors buzzed open for him.
There was no wait, unlike when he had gone to report to his parole officer after spending 13 months. That was around seven years ago. Then, the officer had mechanically administered a drug test and taken a photo of Chung’s tattoos. They hadn’t talked.
This time was different.
He chatted with the official taking his fingerprints to check his background. He asked her jokingly if fingerprints ever changed.
He knew his fingerprints would always identify him with his criminal record, despite all the changes he had made in his life since his incarceration.
No, they don’t change – but they do fade, the official answered
Now 32 years old, Chung is a fourth-year study of religion student at UCLA. He wants to work in the community to help people like him – former gang members or incarcerated youth and adults.
“I’ve gone to the extreme of machismo,” Chung said. “God will stop you in your tracks to get your attention. I could have been dead, but I got the chance to reassess my life.”
This school year, Chung took over as executive director of a group called Bruins Reforming Incarceration Through Education, or BRITE. The project is housed in the Undergraduate Students Association Council Community Service Commission.
Starting in spring quarter, the members of BRITE want to volunteer as tutors for incarcerated youth serving out the end of their sentences in a probation camp, Camp David Gonzales in Calabasas.
Volunteers need official clearance to enter the probation camps, so Chung and around a dozen volunteers from Project BRITE are making drives down to the Los Angeles County Probation Department. The probation department grants clearances after a criminal background check, which can take four to six weeks.
When Chung was 17 years old, he spent 13 months in juvenile hall and in a men’s jail for robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Several years later, he served another 13 months in a state prison for possession of drugs with intent to sell.
His convictions give him two strikes under the three strike law in California. A third strike, given even for a minor offense like shoplifting, would put him in jail for a long time.
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Chung and his fellow UCLA volunteers partner with the New Roads for New Visions Foundation to tutor high school students in probation camps.
New Roads has run a school in Camp David Gonzales since 2002. The program focuses on education, including GED preparation and creative arts classes. It also aims to prevent repetition of criminal activity.
“For many young people, they have not viewed college as something that’s in their future,” said Laura Abrams, an associate professor of social welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs who has studied juvenile justice.
She added that educational programs like New Roads help open possibilities and prevent relapse for formerly incarcerated youth.
Chung met the director of New Roads, UCLA alumnus Fernando Montes-Rodriguez, through mutual acquaintances. They collaborated in the past to give advice about college to formerly incarcerated youth.
Montes-Rodriguez understands what some of the young people he tutors went through. As a young man, he was incarcerated twice, like Chung.
“I see a lot of me in them, and I want them to see a lot of themselves in me,” he said.
Montes-Rodriguez left the justice system at 21 years old and eventually graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 2001.
He said his students may not choose the path of higher education he and Chung took. Many of them told him they primarily want a good job and a family, he said.
However, Montes-Rodriguez wants all of them to get engaged in their communities to stop the cycle of incarceration.
“I wasn’t very clear about what I wanted in life, but I knew that I did not want to be a part of the justice system,” he tells his students.
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Chung hopes to inspire the youth in the probation camps.
Growing up in Hawaii with immigrant Korean parents, Chung had the beginning of a privileged life. The ‘Iolani School, the crosstown rival to President Barack Obama’s high school, accepted him as a student.
When Chung was 15, a teacher at his school caught him with marijuana. Rather than risk a jail sentence, he decided to attend a behavioral modification program for young men in Western Samoa called Paradise Cove.
Chung spent five months in the program, where they had no running water and no outside contact and ate meals of bread and porridge. The program was later shut down because of accusations of abuse.
When he moved to Los Angeles to be with his mother afterward, he embraced the strong Korean community. The connections he made and the disenchantment he felt at high school led to his involvement with a street gang.
“I was looking for a strong role model and decided that men must be tough,” he said.
He got into fights. One time, he stabbed another man. As a result, the Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team raided his home with a warrant for his arrest. He decided he did not want to run away from his problems – he knew he had done something wrong, he said. He turned himself into the police.
Detained at Central Juvenile Hall at 17 years old, Chung said he knew he might face many years in jail. In his bunk bed on a rainy day, he became reflective.
“For the first time, I sent a prayer to God,” Chung said. “As we exit the building, the sky clears up, and the sun is beaming. I felt this energy from above. It was my first encounter with God.”
He later learned he received an offer for a lighter sentence because of his young age, the lack of witnesses and the fact that he had no previous offenses.
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When he got out of Men’s Central Jail, where he had been transferred after his 18th birthday, he moved to Hawaii. There, he worked as a grocery store clerk and as a karaoke DJ, eventually becoming an apprentice plumber.
After several years off drugs while working blue collar jobs, he became steeped in drug habits. Since high school, Chung had experimented on and off with marijuana, then meth, crack cocaine and ecstasy. He regularly drank alcohol as well.
He needed a change, so he moved back to Los Angeles. He turned from just using drugs to selling them on the street.
“There was no moral compass,” Chung said. “I was like a cowboy. I wanted to use the profits to help my friends out, but it was misguided.”
One night when he was at a nightclub drinking with some friends, the group got into an altercation with some security guards. When the cops got to the scene, they searched Chung’s car and found plastic bags and scales – and about six ounces of meth, which Chung estimated to be worth about $8,000 on the street.
Though he wanted to stay in an inpatient drug rehabilitation program, he was sentenced to California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, Corcoran – the second strike on his record.
“On the streets, you graduate by doing time, you become a more sophisticated criminal,” Chung said. “I decided that’s what I would do.”
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In prison, Chung cut himself off from drugs. The violence of prison culture troubled him, so he began to alienate himself from the other prison inmates.
He started reading the Bible regularly with his bunk mate, who had received training at a Bible college and served as the “jailhouse preacher.” Inspired by a new sense of faith, Chung made a long list of scriptures he found particularly relevant to him, and has kept those yellowed pages to this day.
When he got out of prison, Chung’s main priority was to join a local church. He found a supportive community at Young Nak Celebration Church, where he taught as a Sunday school teacher. He grew out his hair, didn’t watch television and stopped cursing for a year.
He drifted in and out of community college and various temporary jobs. Unable to pay back all his debts, he filed for bankruptcy.
“I had never thought of going to (UCLA),” Chung said. “Becoming a student again was a process.”
He started attending classes at Santa Monica College, knowing a college degree would improve his job prospects. The Alpha Gamma Sigma chapter at Santa Monica College, which is part of a statewide honor society, voted him as president.
Supported by scholarships, some of which targeted first-generation and low-income students, Chung decided to attend UCLA because of its strong religion studies department.
“I wouldn’t want to repeat what I’ve gone through,” Chung said. “I might not ever be fully healed.”
He says his paper profiles, including his criminal and credit records, don’t reveal his full identity.
Now, his school record – a 3.9 GPA – doesn’t show all the hard work he has had to do and endless nights he spent studying.
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After taking over project BRITE from the graduating leadership last year, Chung concentrated his efforts on recruiting a new generation of volunteers in fall.
Amanda Tapia, a second-year political science student and the camp director for BRITE, joined the project when she learned Chung was reviving it this school year. She is also a member of the USAC Community Service Commission.
She comes from a similar neighborhood to the students in Camp Gonzales, and hopes their similarities will allow them to relate. She grew up in South Gate, a city with a largely low-income and Hispanic population and a gang presence. Several of her own family members and friends have had experiences with incarceration.
She credits her father, who learned the value of education after a “life of mischief,” for inspiring her to follow her college dreams.
“(For) our recipients, (adversity) is their norm and they have nothing else to contrast that with,” Tapia said. “I can show them – no, there’s actually something different and better. It was through education that I learned there was something better.”
Tapia works with Chloe Su, a first-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student and the BRITE internal programs coordinator. While attending UCLA on a scholarship from Singapore’s Ministry of Education, she wanted to become a tutor in a service project.
She joined the BRITE team in part because she knew how much encouragement from a few people can help someone who has been incarcerated. Her parents supported her uncle after his incarceration in China when others did not, she said.
Su helped tutor at-risk youth briefly last quarter and found that her traditional teaching methods of going over homework weren’t enough to keep her students’ attention. She and the students only connected when they shared personal stories.
“It’s good to relax and just talk to them if they do not want to study,” Su said. “Because of their background, they have been questioned and labeled as not talented. We just say that they can do it.”
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Chung probably won’t make it into Camp Gonzales because of his record.
The seriousness of one of his felonies – a robbery – makes it very difficult for him to receive an exemption sometimes granted to people with criminal records who want to access probation camps.
However, Chung wanted to try, at least to show other volunteer members of BRITE what to do. His goal this year was simply to resurrect BRITE and inspire a new generation of volunteers.
If the probation department denies him clearance, he would not be too disappointed. He has plenty of other ideas on how to help his community.
He has found the man he once assaulted and asked for forgiveness. Now the two men are working together to shoot a documentary based on their experiences with gangs and spirituality.
He also applied to be an Astin Civic Engagement Scholar next year at UCLA. If chosen, he would pursue research into how churches can provide support for formerly incarcerated youth and adults.
Simply living the “good life,” as he calls it, is already taking up more and more of his time.
He recently moved into a new, larger home with his spouse, Ai Kondo, a fourth-year international development studies student. Kondo’s two kids call Chung “dad.”
“I was scared (my surrogate kids) would become rebellious in their teenage years, like me,” he said. “But I told myself ‘they don’t have to be like you.’ I should be in their lives so that doesn’t happen.”
Kondo and Chung are expecting a baby boy in April. Chung wants to name his son “Abraham,” the name of a figure in the Book of Genesis, to honor how his relationship with God has changed his life.