Slideshow Loading
previous next
  • pkitagaki@sacbee.com

    Nikki Pittman's son Thomas can't stay out of trouble. First imprisoned in 1999, he has broken parole 10 times. Nikki Pittman dreads when she must drive to a prison to bring him to her Red Bluff house. Above, she shows where he hid drugs during one of his brief stays.

  • pkitagaki@sacbee.com

    Thomas James Pittman's personal belongings the last time he was released from prison are held by his mother: a key, a wristwatch and a spoon for heating drugs.

  • Thomas James Pittman

  • pkitagaki@sacbee.com

    "He must have rehab," Nikki Pittman says about her son Thomas James Pittman. "He can't sit in a cell and do nothing. It's the same person they let out, every time."

Our Region - AP State News - Bee State News
Comments (0) |

Red Bluff mom wearied by son's prison ins and outs

Published: Sunday, Sep. 14, 2008 | Page 1B

RED BLUFF – On the days when her son Thomas gets out of prison, Nikki Pittman follows the same routine.

"I lock my husband's office," Pittman said, seated in a chair inside the spotless residence on her 18-acre walnut ranch. "I lock my other son's bedroom. I lock my bedroom. I take my laptop and lock it. I put all checkbooks in a safe for fear that he can break open an office door."

Then she drives to the prison, picks Thomas up at the gate, brings him home – and waits for corrections officials to revoke his parole and return him to custody.

It's a cycle that has repeated itself 10 times in seven years, according to parole and probation records – a testament, Nikki Pittman says, to California's parole system that sends seven of every 10 offenders back to prison within three years of their release.

She'd like to see the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation place her boy in an in-prison drug program with the aftercare follow-up on parole. But that won't happen as long as he goes back only on short-stay parole violations instead of new prison terms.

It's a system that Nikki Pittman says is driving her nuts.

"I love my son very much," Nikki Pittman said. "But the only time I'm relaxed and at peace is when he's locked up in prison. I look forward to the parole date because I love him and I can only visit him behind glass when he's in prison. But I know I'm going to be scared to death when he gets out."

As of Sept. 3, there were 171,790 inmates in California prisons, fire camps and the like. An untold number of families share Nikki Pittman's fear of and love for society's outcasts who hold entree into their homes and hearts.

According to one expert on prison families, it's the parents of the convicts – as much as the kids or spouses – who shoulder the burden of prison time bestowed upon their incarcerated loved ones.

"When somebody in your family goes to prison, it implies some kind of failure on your part," said Gretchen Newby, statewide executive director of Friends Outside, a state-financed organization that helps relatives of inmates. "With parents, it's a shame and stigma that is with them forever. What could they have done differently? What did they do wrong?

"Often, their support services have disappeared," Newby said. "We tend to back away from them and they tend to pull away from us into social and emotional isolation. They have this enormous cloud hanging over them, and they can't deal with it and they can't share with others."

Efforts this week to contact Thomas James Pittman, through prison officials and the parolees' legal defense program, were fruitless. He is locked up at High Desert State Prison in Susanville and is awaiting a parole revocation hearing.

The supervising parole agent of the Red Bluff office knows Thomas and Nikki Pittman well enough to express major sympathy for her.

"She's regular Americana," David Nichols said. "She's a legitimate, hard-working individual who has this one son who is running amok, and it's frustrated her over and over. She's at the end of her rope with it."

A 71-year-old widow whose husband died in February, Nikki Pittman knew from the beginning Thomas would be a load. She adopted him when he was 4 from her trouble-bound oldest daughter, herself adopted and fighting a drug addiction problem, according to their mother. Both have been diagnosed as bipolar, Pittman said. (Pittman said she has three other grown adopted children who lead normal, productive lives.)

One day when Thomas was 14, Nikki Pittman looked out her back window and saw him beating her husband across the back with a two-by-four.

Police arrested him and he was later convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.

His probation records show other juvenile convictions for car theft (twice), giving false identification to a police officer and battery.

As an adult, Thomas Pittman picked up his first prison term in 1999 for stealing a neighbor's car, trying to cash a stolen check belonging to his father and possessing a checkbook stolen from his parents.


Call Andy Furillo, (916) 321-1141.

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming to sacbee.com. We welcome your participation in our commenting boards and forums, but we ask that you follow a few simple rules to keep the boards open and the discourse civil.

We reserve the right to delete comments that contain inappropriate links, obscenities or vulgarities, spam, hate speech, personal attacks, plagiarism or copyright violations. You can help notify us of potential abuses by flagging comments that you find offensive. Action will be taken against users who repeatedly or flagrantly violate the rules. Keep it clean and you should have no problems.

tool name

close
 
Sacramento Bee Job listing powered by Careerbuilder.com

Quick Job Search

View All Top Jobs
Buy
Used Cars
Dealer and private-party ads
Make:

Model:

Price Range:
to
Search within:
miles of ZIP

Advanced Search | 1982 & Older