CHRISTINE ROBINSON Star-Tribune staff writer | Posted: Sunday, March 2, 2008 12:00 am
Inside these white cinderblock walls, life is easy. Here, Carroll Manning eats three meals a day. Nurses bring him his medication. He knows where he will go to sleep each evening, where he will wake up each morning. He works out regularly in the gym.
Life on his side of the square, glass window in the Natrona County Detention Center is comfortable and familiar, a feeling only time gives inmates.
Manning, 30, has time. He spent more than two-thirds of his life either as a ward or a prisoner of the state, and now faces another 12 1/2 to 16 years talking to visitors over phones and through glass windows.
Manning's convictions number in the dozens and range from writing bad checks to stealing a car. Most recently, he pleaded guilty to 77 felony charges related to a series of burglaries.
Like so many other men and women in Wyoming, prison is a revolving door for Manning.
His life illustrates the difficulties of rehabilitation in the state's juvenile and adult justice systems. Criminals enter the system with little to no education, work or life skills and no experience in a stable home. Many also have mental illness or substance abuse problems.
State officials estimate roughly 30 to 40 percent of paroled inmates return to prison.
After his February sentencing, Manning once again joined that group.
Carroll Manning entered the criminal justice system as a child, and never really left.
He was born in 1977, the first of 18-year-old high school drop-out Valerie Cereceres's seven children.
Cereceres's father was absent and her mother was an alcoholic. She spent her childhood raising her five younger brothers and sisters, and left home when she was 17.
Manning's father left when Manning was 3 years old. Cereceres said they spent the next decade eating beans and rice and living on welfare. She has a job and a stable home now. Back then, she said, life was hard.
When her oldest son started misbehaving, a welfare worker told her to do something with him or risk losing all the kids.
"I'm sure I wasn't easy for my mom to deal with," Manning said.
When he was 9, Cereceres placed him in the state's custody. Manning went to foster homes, group homes, crisis centers and the state hospital in Evanston. He was sent to the Wyoming Boys' School in Worland seven times.
His mother also placed three of her older daughters into the state's care. Two daughters returned home to stay, home, while the other one continued to float in and out of the justice system.
Most of Manning's crimes as a youth were theft and vandalism.
He came home after his first stay in the boys' school in his early teens.
After getting into trouble again, a judge sent him back to the juvenile facility, despite his mother's protests.
"When he came home, he had all kinds of stuff in his head," Cereceres said, adding that he tried drugs at the boys' school.
All he took from the boys' school, Manning said recently, was an increased hatred for authority and unsavory lessons from older kids.
Ultimately, his mother said the judge had no other options for controlling Manning's behavior but to send him back to the boys' correctional facility.
Manning was 16 years old during his final stay at the boys' school when he escaped and stole a state vehicle. It was Christmas, and Manning said he was looking for his mother.
The judge, he said, was less lenient that time. Instead of sending Manning back to the boys' school for an eighth stay, the judge decided it was time for prison.
While he was in the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins, he also had short stays at the Wyoming Honor Farm in Riverton, the Wyoming Conservation Camp and the Casper Re-Entry Center. Each brief stint at a minimum-security facility was followed by more time in the penitentiary.
Despite Cereceres' best efforts in raising her son, Manning is now looking at more than a decade behind bars for crimes that in part mirror his mother's.
Cereceres spent two years in prison for writing bad checks, which she said resulted from having a large family and no support from a partner.
She says she learned from prison. Now, Cereceres has a steady job and is raising her youngest children, keeping in mind the hard lessons she learned from her older kids.
Casper police arrested Manning in October 2006 for charges including check fraud and burglary. He pleaded guilty to 77 of the charges in August 2007 and was sentenced in February.
The majority of the felonies were for check fraud. When police raided his house, however, they found a full U-Haul of allegedly stolen property. The items included a new in-the-box portable toilet, a propane tank, jewelry, a blanket with dolphins screened onto it, a painting with swans and ballerinas, two rifles, multiple samurai swords, hunting knives and a battle ax.
Manning's February sentence was the second time Natrona County District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl sent the Casper man to prison. The first time the judge said he was lenient,
This time, he was less so.
"I can't even begin to explain how frustrated I am," the judge said at Manning's sentencing.
"People failed him in the past," Skavdahl said in court. "I can't cure that…Ultimately, he's the one that has to make the choices."
Now, Manning sits in a plastic chair at the Natrona County Detention Center, donning an orange jumpsuit, his wrists cuffed. He says he doesn't have many visitors.
These detention center walls serve as a temporary holding cell. Soon, Manning will go to prison to start his current sentence. The Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins will be his home for the next 12 1/2 to 16 years.
"They take care of everything here," Manning says, fidgeting with a phone cord on the pay-phone-like device used to communicate between the prisoner and visitor.
He gets paranoid, sometimes refusing to leave his prison cell for days. State psychiatrists diagnosed him with bipolar-manic depressive disorder, which requires him be heavily medicated. Outside of prison, he says he can't afford the pills and the process to obtain them is too lengthy and complicated.
What will he do when officers permanently take his cuffs off?
"I'm sure I'll come back," he says. "When you don't know how to live out there, it's day to day."
He pauses to look over his shoulder at a passing orange-clad inmate with a shuffling, shackled gate.
"When I got out the last time, I knew I'd be back."
Each time the prison gates open to let him out, he goes back to his old life. He tried once to get a job. He tested drill pipes for four months, but he says his truck broke down and his dad wouldn't lend him another one. He quit.
"I thought, if no one will help me, then screw it."
He doesn't blame anyone, not directly. He says his mom tried her hardest. He didn't get the help he needed from the system, and doesn't know if it's too late now to get any help.
He lives his life as he knows how, which he says isn't very well.
Manning will be in his mid-to-late 40s when he gets out again. His alleged accomplice in his latest string of check frauds and burglaries, a woman, is serving 3-to- 5 years in Lusk.
They have three kids.
Contact city reporter Christine Robinson at (307) 266-0639 or christine.robinson@trib.com