Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Ernest "Bleu" Fisher in his home in San Francisco's Mission District

“I had asthma as a kid, so I turned blue a lot,” he told me.

Bleu, 48, has been in and out of prison for more than 20 years on drug charges and one burglary. He was released again 18 months ago and has two felony strikes against him. Since he got out, he has been diagnosed with HIV and diabetes. When he’s not at doctor’s appointments or drug meetings, he earns money to pay the rent on a small room in a Mission District hotel by working as an in-home caregiver for other HIV patients. On the weekends, he sells trinkets and collectables at the Alemany flea market. He also writes poetry and, recently, a newsletter for a group of fellow parolees.

I met Bleu last week while reporting on the closing of two alternative court programs designed to keep San Francisco parolees and probationers out of state prison. Bleu has spent the last 10 months participating in one of the programs and credits the judge and staff there with keeping him connected to drug treatment, counseling and HIV medication.

“Without structure, a lot of guys fall off,” Bleu said. “Knowing I have to go see the judge every week keeps me safe.”

Bleu represents the demographic lawmakers hoped to reach when they approved Gov. Jerry Brown’s “criminal justice realignment” earlier this year. The law took effect Oct. 1, transferring responsibility for parolees and low-level offenders from the state system to county jurisdictions. For months, experts and news outlets have been calling the shift the biggest single criminal justice reform in California history.

It’s a gargantuan task amid a relentless state budget crisis, which led last summer to the wholesale slashing of hundreds of millions of dollars from the statewide court budget.

Dozens of criminal justice experts I’ve spoken with this year agree that San Francisco, and the Bay Area in general, have long been ahead of the curve when it comes to innovative alternatives to incarceration that save money and produce better outcomes for offenders and the general public alike. Several of our county probation chiefs and local sheriffs are recognized nationally as leading reformers working to end the intergenerational cycle of crime and incarceration.

The Bay Area has, in effect, become a laboratory that could well impact criminal justice practices throughout the country.

But for realignment to work, even here, many in the field say that counties have to create and maintain more programs that reduce recidivism by treating the underlying causes of criminal behavior.

Spending time with Bleu, it’s easy to get a sense of where many of our addicts and offenders come from. Bleu suffered frequent beatings at the hands of his father.

“By the time I was 12 my dad put me in the hospital eight times,” he said. “I thought he was going to kill me, that’s why I left home.”

Bleu ran away from his family in Oregon that year. He was hitchhiking, he said, when a driver picked him up, injected him with speed and began pimping him out for drugs. When they eventually arrived in San Francisco, Bleu managed to escape, but still spent much of his youth hustling on Polk Street, addicted to meth. He worked as a prostitute for about a year, "and then I learned how to sell drugs," he said. "That was easier."

He took creative writing classes during some of his prison stretches. Whenever he was out, he worked a variety of jobs in restaurants, hotels and antique shops. Still, he couldn’t shake his meth addiction, and wound up back in prison.

Today, Bleu describes himself as a “work in progress,” struggling to undo a lifetime of drug abuse, insecurity and disdain for authority. He takes medication to curb his meth habit and meets weekly with a therapist and two case managers, trying to understand the issues that have fueled his addiction. He says he still struggles with depression.

“It’s like gravity gets 50 times as strong,” he said. “It’s a struggle, but it’s worth the fight.