A Dying Wish Hits the Penal System Head-On

Ken Bouche is no babe in the woods. He knows that life comes at you from all directions and promises you nothing. Ask for too much, and you run the risk of getting your heart broken. So he and his wife, Denette, kept it simple.

They planned a modestly sweet revenge on the stresses life attaches to us. When they retired -- Ken from a supermarket chain and Denette from a bank -- they were going to kick back and enjoy. Nothing exotic, no ‘round-the-world cruises. No getaway second home, only their modest Brea dwelling. Just take things easy.

And they would have done it all anonymously, except for some late-breaking complications of the overwhelming kind. They have led Ken, at 63, to call the newspaper and ask for some help in making things right, as he sees right to be.

The biggest dart to the balloon came last summer when Denette, then 61, was diagnosed with cancer in both lungs. Ken says two cancers struck, one particularly aggressive. But, not giving up on medical science on any given day, he and Denette plugged along.

Then, earlier this summer, Denette learned that cancer had spread to her brain. No surgery possible. Her days now are spent in the family living room, in bed, with 24-hour nursing service.

“It’s expensive, but she wants to be at home, and I want her here,” Bouche says. “I’ve been married to her for 43 years.”

And now we come to the other problem, the reason Ken has reached out.

It’s not the major miracle he wants, the one that would somehow let Denette thwart all the cancer.

He’s asking for a smaller one -- that their son Damon, 38, and currently serving a second prison sentence for drug possession, can see his mother one last time. Ken and Denette wrote letters a few months ago to prison officials in Northern California where Damon is incarcerated, asking that he be transferred to the prison in Chino, closer to Brea and a facility that has a more extensive drug treatment program.

They didn’t know then just how bad Denette’s situation would grow, so they didn’t ask for a home visit. Now, with Denette seemingly failing, Ken wants me to get the word out to officials about a possible visit.

Life is hard. It doesn’t always go the way you think it should. Ken says those words back to me, and knows they’re true.

Allowing home visits isn’t in the state prison playbook. Under some circumstances, inmates can attend funerals, but that’s it. And the warden at Salinas Valley State Prison, where Damon is, wrote to the Bouches last month that Damon wouldn’t be transferred to Chino.

Ken now must make peace with all that. “We never argued the point that our son deserved what he was sentenced for,” he says. “He has a problem with drugs. He’s a drug addict.”

To Ken, he’s not asking for the world. “He’s in there for drugs, and they don’t have a drug program at that prison. At Chino, they do. It’s 18 miles from our house. It’s beyond me why you’d send someone who needs drug help to a prison that doesn’t have a drug program, and when you know what his mother’s condition is, instead of sending someone to a place close, you send them 300 miles away, which makes it an impossibility to visit.”

The words may come across as whiny on the printed page, but not as they come from Ken’s mouth. “If he was in for murder or rape or robbery or something violent toward society,” he says, “I might be able to understand some of this. But he’s in for abusing himself, is what it boils down to.”

A prison spokesman confirms that Chino has a more intensive drug treatment program than that at Salinas Valley, but says any prisoner in the state system can get at least some help with drug problems.

And while empathizing with the Bouche family situation, the spokesman says prison policy doesn’t allow for home visits, both for reasons of practicality and cost -- even as Ken says he’d pay the transportation costs. A phone conversation between mother and son would of course be permitted, the spokesman said.

He and Denette hadn’t asked for all that much, and now it’s all unraveling for Ken, especially as he watches Denette lie, immobile, on the living room bed. She’ll be 63 in three weeks, but he realizes she’s now too weak to visit her son in Chino, even if the transfer had gone through.

He laments what drugs have done to his son and how they helped create this moment of misery for all of them. “We don’t bring kids into the world for this,” he says. “When we grow older, you kind of dream you and your son will do things together. For a couple years, we were able to. I thought I had him back, but he turned back to drugs.”

I ask Ken if he’s asking for mercy. “To some degree, that’s exactly what I’m asking for,” he says. “She needs to see her son. She puts it this way: ‘It’s for him.’ In a way, she’s not lying. It is for him. He can’t handle things when they’re stressful. If he doesn’t get to see his mother before she passes, it might be the thing that breaks the bridge.

“He’ll have an excuse in the back of his mind, about why he’s being resentful of society and all that crap. It doesn’t justify it, but to his way of thinking, it would.”

While we talk at the kitchen table, the two nurses join us. “I feel it would relieve her a lot if she could lay eyes on her son,” says one of them, Jessie Taylor. “That’s what upsets me the most,” Ken says. “She can’t get peace.”

Besides the warden, Ken wrote the governor’s office and a couple of other places. I think he knows things aren’t going to work out.

It’s the system, a system Ken feels he served well during 10 years in the Army and a stint in Vietnam. He doesn’t mention his Silver Star or Bronze Star or two Purple Hearts until a relative urges him to tell me.

“I’ve never used this as a crutch, but I am now,” he says. “I’m a Vietnam vet. I feel I served my country in a very hard time, and I didn’t turn on society. But I feel like the country has stabbed me in the back, for what it’s doing now. All we’re asking for is a fair shake and a little compassion, and I don’t feel we’re getting it.”

I tell him I can’t help. He thanks me for taking interest and we shake hands goodbye. The nurse says she could wake Denette to talk to me, but I say no and leave.

Life is hard. Comes at you from all directions. Promises you nothing.

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.