Susan Burton Built the Welcome Home She Never Had

In 1981 Susan Burton's five-year-old son was struck and killed by a car in Los Angeles. The driver was an off-duty LAPD officer. She has said she was unable to find support for her grief.

Without that help, she turned to alcohol and drugs to cope.

What followed was nearly two decades of addiction, arrests, prison, and parole. Burton was incarcerated six separate times between 1981 and 1997.

She has spoken openly about those years. In her telling, women released from prison were sent back to the community with very little: a small amount of cash, often no identification, and nowhere stable to live. Without treatment for her grief and addiction, she kept returning to the same patterns and the same consequences.

In 1997, after her last release, Burton entered a treatment program in Santa Monica, a far more affluent part of Los Angeles than the neighborhood she came from. There she got sober and stayed sober.

The experience showed her something. Real recovery support existed in Los Angeles. It simply was not reaching the women she had known in prison.

She has explained that she understood both the need and the lack of services, and what a safe place could mean for women trying to stay sober and learn how to live after prison.

In 1998 she opened her own house in Watts to women leaving prison. She has described going to the bus station where newly released women arrived, meeting them there, and offering them a bed in her home. She knew from experience what that first day out could be like.

That house became A New Way of Life Reentry Project. Burton did not build it alone. Community members including Michael Towler and Pamela Marshall joined her work and became core leaders of the organization.

Those first women lived together, supported one another, and worked on staying sober. Burton has said that in that house they all got better. The practical model was a bed, a community of women who understood, and help with the many steps of starting over: housing, legal problems, work, and reunification with children.

A New Way of Life grew from one home in South Los Angeles to a network of reentry houses, along with free legal services, workforce and education programs, and advocacy for women affected by incarceration. The organization reports that it has housed more than 1,800 formerly incarcerated women, helped more than 400 reunite with their children, and provided legal help to more than 3,400 people with conviction records.

Her work drew wider recognition, including a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award in 2014. She has also become a national advocate for policies that remove barriers facing people with conviction records, arguing that women leaving prison should be helped home rather than punished again.

In 2017 Burton published a memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, written with Cari Lynn. In August 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom granted her a full pardon. Michael Towler now serves as CEO, and Burton remains the organization's founder.