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What he did learn was a great
deal about their past, including one particularly interesting detail: For years,
the couple had maintained a relationship with the state's department of
corrections, helping to transition violent offenders through the early stages
of parole.
        "They
met when they were both studying offender rehabilitation in graduate
school," Ken told me. "Found some sort of mutual interest there.
Academic for Joshua, personal for Alexandra. You can imagine why. Her father
had been in and out of jail before being murdered, and her brothers were moving
quickly down the same path. Anyhow, once they were married, she and Joshua
teamed up to write a few papers, conducted some studies, and got hooked up with
an alternative program that snagged a federal grant. At that time, the state
was real concerned with engaging the offender's family to help with reentry.
The problem that the Cantrells raised was, what about the offender who has no
family, or whose family is a cancer to him—"
        I
sipped my beer and kept my eyes on the table while I listened, not wanting to
react in a way that suggested this was anything but new to me. I still hadn't
decided whether I'd disclose Harrison's identity, but this twist in the
conversation had me wondering if Ken would bring him up of his own accord.
        "A
police detective called me a few months back, after Cantrell's body was
found," he said. "They'd heard I'd investigated in the beginning, and
he wanted to know if I'd come across anyone who could work as a homicide
suspect. I told him, yeah, I've got twenty-eight names."
        The
twenty-eight names belonged to the violent offenders Alexandra and Joshua had
helped transition back into the world. We had another round of drinks while Ken
recited their crimes, which ranged from bank robbery to rape and murder. As of
Ken's last count, nineteen of them were still free, and two were dead.
        "That
means only seven of the offenders who worked with the Cantrells returned to
prison," he said. "You know anything about recidivism numbers—"
        "Enough
to know that's a hell of a lot better than average."
        "Yes,"
he said. "It absolutely is. So whatever they were doing, it seemed to
work."
        "What
were they doing, exactly—"
        "At
first, they were acting as, well, I guess you'd call it a sort of foster
family. They kind of adopted these guys, stayed close to them, counseled them,
things like that. By the end, after they bought that land in Hinckley, it
changed. They would hire these guys to work for them, kept them on for six
months to a year. They paid them well, but the catch was the guys also had to
live there."
        "In
the house—"
        "Yes.
Imagine that, welcoming convicted killers into your home. Also, while
everything out there was modern enough—running water, electricity, all
that—they insisted that all the work be done by hand, and without power tools."
He grinned at me. "Weird stuff, huh—"
        At
first I thought they were crazy for requiring that… Then I came to understand
how important it was. How the sound of an engine would have destroyed what was
there.
        "Weird,"
I agreed and finished my beer.
        "Alexandra
contended that a great contributing factor to recidivism was a loss of touch
with the natural world," Ken said. "That prolonged incarceration
created this traumatic sense of isolation."
        "Okay."
        "I
talked to a woman with the state parole office who worked with the Cantrells,
and she said that Alexandra's vision was for a new sort of prison, one that
didn't isolate the inmates from nature. As you can imagine, making that sort of change was going to be difficult. So she brought the same ideas over to
the reentry side."
        "She
wanted the parolees to, what, bond with nature—"
        "Evidently.
She had all these studies. One demonstrated that just a view of nature from a
hospital window reduced reliance on pain