Blessings, beadwork bring hope after a life of trouble

One of the most important moments in Jerel Driver’s life came 3½ years ago, two days before he was to start serving a prison term for criminal endangerment.

He was living in Glendive, where he committed most of his crimes. He said all his trouble involved the same two things: alcohol and violence.

“I grew up fighting,” he said. “That’s the way it was. You were taught to fight, to protect yourself.”

The prison term he was facing in Glendive in 2011 was nothing new for Driver, who is 61. How much time has he spent in prison?

“I would say it comes to half my life—30 years,” he said. “It’s nothing to be proud of. But if that’s all I have to spend, I’m one of the lucky ones.”

That life-changing event came when he was visited by his niece, who was working for the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. In March 2011, when she heard her uncle was going back to prison, she flew all the way out to Glendive to see him.

“She told me I’d better make this the last time, and figure out how to change my life,” he said, recalling that he had tears in his eyes when he listened to her talk. “It hit home. I mean, she didn’t have to do that.”

His niece’s message was reinforced by an alcohol counselor he had at Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge. The counselor “hammered on me,” he said, urging him to take responsibility for his life, to learn how to deal with his anger before lashing out at those around him.

Driver said he vowed to stay sober, and to stay out of trouble during his prison sentence. It helped that he got back into beadwork, which he had learned as a boy from his mother. He grew up on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and did his own beadwork for his traditional dance costumes.

At Deer Lodge, he said, the beadwork “was just something that kept me away from the games that were played in prison. I had to make a choice, whether I wanted to continue being a criminal, so to speak, or change it.”

He was released from prison in August and has been living since then at Independence Hall, a transitional-living residence in the Heights that serves homeless veterans. It is operated by Volunteers of America and funded by the Veterans Administration.

When Driver came to Independence Hall, he gathered in all the beadwork he’d done during his two-plus years in prison, having sent it to relatives for safe-keeping. It’s all gone now, sold to supplement his income, but Tammy Long, the service coordinator at Independence Hall, took photos of his handiwork.

They show dozens of intricately beaded works—chokers, ponytail holders, dream catchers, earrings, pendants and more. Driver is proud of his work, but he said he was nothing special at the prison.

“There’s a lot of good people there, lots of good artists and beadworkers,” he said.

There are opportunities for prisoners to sell and profit from their artwork, including a Corrections Department hobby store in Deer Lodge staffed by low-security inmates, but Driver would like to set up a system that would allow inmates to send their work to someone on the outside who could arrange to sell their work at a variety of shops. That might earn them more money, he said, and give them a chance, like the one he had, to concentrate on straightening out their lives.

That’s an idea he plans to continue pursuing, but in the meantime he wants to keep working on his own life. He said he has been sober since March 2011, when he was sent to Deer Lodge, and he’s been working since moving into Independence Hall.

He started as a dishwasher at the Sonic Drive-In in the Heights and worked his way up to prep cook. That’s good, he said, but winter is a slow time and he needs more work. He was accustomed to working hard.

He is an Assiniboine-Sioux, born on the Fort Peck reservation to parents who were both alcoholics. He said he spent part of his childhood in Anaconda, where he lived with an aunt and uncle, then later in Butte for a spell, with his mother and several siblings. They also moved back to the reservation for a few years—Driver said his mother wanted to show her children “that there’s two different worlds”—and then back to Butte.

In 1971, he was living with his aunt and uncle again because his mother was drinking heavily. He felt lost, and not knowing what else to do with himself, he decided to enlist in the Army. His mother had to sign his enlistment papers, he said, so he greased the skids by getting her drunk. He felt bad about that, but it worked.

“The only way to get her to sign this paper was to give her beer,” he said.

Driver brightened up as he talked about his time in the military. The Vietnam War was still raging, but he was trained as a combat engineer and sent to Germany. One brother was already in Vietnam and another was in the Army in Japan.

Driver did some demolition work but mostly was employed as a mobile assault bridge operator, which involved quickly throwing up temporary bridges, supported by pontoons. Once, he said, they blocked the mighty Rhine River for 12 hours. River traffic, including barges and cruise ships, had to wait until the Army was through with its exercise.

After his discharge in 1974, he moved to Billings, where he lived with his brother and worked for a brickmaker. His first prison term came after he was convicted of burglary (he said he was innocent, but was compelled to plead guilty), received a suspended sentence and then violated parole by getting in a fight.

Over the years there were more stints in prison and more jobs. He said he worked in Williston during the oil boom in the early 1980s—“everything from derrick hand down to learning how to drill”—then as an ironworker, and later in a lab, where he ran tests on drilling core samples.

It’s tempting now to think of working over in the Bakken oil patch, Driver said, but also dangerous.

“There’s a lot of money there, but a lot of trouble, too,” he said. “I don’t need any more of that.”

He got into Independence Hall after talking to a veterans representative. Vets can stay there up to two years, with room for 20 at a time. Rent is 30 percent of whatever income they’re making, and each resident supplies his own food, shares chores and works in the community garden in the spring and summer.

Long, the service coordinator, said Driver has been a welcome addition to Independence Hall.

“He’s very positive,” she said. “He’s very motivated. He’s a great role model.”

In February, Driver is scheduled to start paralegal training through a Veterans Affairs Upward Bound program. He thinks it’s a profession he could be good at and would enjoy.

He said he is at peace with himself. “I’ve pretty much made amends, in a roundabout way, with anyone I ever harmed,” he said.

He stays in touch with the niece who changed his life, he said, and talks to another niece, who lives in Billings, almost every day.

“I’m blessed that even to this day I have these two nieces that are there for me,” he said.

Driver acknowledged that a lot of criminals claim to be reformed, that a lot of alcoholics claim to be sober. But he said he’s not losing any sleep over what others might think.

“I’m a different person,” he said. “I know I’ve changed. If I know I’m doing good and doing right, that’s all that matters.”

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