By A.C. Thompson

Thomas W. Jones has spent more than half his 41 years in prison, and he looks the part of the hardened ex-con, with blue-black tattoo ink blanketing his body from knuckles to neck, a shorn head, meaty arms, and broken teeth. He's a white guy, and in the joint he ran with the Aryan Brotherhood, a fact betrayed by his ink – he's etched with many swastikas and shamrocks, both totems of the notorious prison gang.

Nowadays, though, Jones insists he's over it. He swears he's gone straight. And he's possessed of a singular desire: to be reunited with his wife, Amanda, who lives in Susanville, a small Lassen County town in California's mountainous and remote northeast corner.

So far, however, that's proved to be impossible.

Jones's wish has been thwarted by a little-noticed chunk of the state penal code, which requires parolees, when released, to reside in the county in which they were arrested. For Jones, that county is Contra Costa – he caught his last case, for weapons possession and theft, in Pittsburg. So until he's off parole, in mid-2006 at the soonest, Jones will be stuck in the Bay Area.

Jones is used to waiting. After all, he's spent many years waiting for the penitentiary gates to slide open. But after two decades of doing time, Jones is suddenly grappling with the fact that he has very little time – he's dying of a lethal lung disease, a rare disorder called bullous emphysema, which creates lumpy growths in the flesh of the lungs.

"I have a wife and a family I love," he says. "Why should I be kept away from them? It's wrong."

• • •

There's a scar on the right side of Jones's back where doctors extracted a hunk of his faulty lung several years ago. To combat the lung disease, he uses a portable nebulizer three times a day and totes around a trio of inhalers.

According to a medical report from the Northeastern Rural Health Clinics, a Susanville medical firm under contract with the state to treat prisoners, Jones's days are literally numbered. The report, from January, says he "has severe lung disease" and will die in the next one to three years.

"I've accepted the fact that it's gonna happen," Jones says. At this point what he really cares about is spending some quality time with Amanda, 30, whom he married early in February, shortly after he was freed on parole. And he's promised to take her 11-year-old son bass fishing, a promise he hasn't been able to fulfill.

Five hours north, in her Susanville home, Amanda's voice cracks a little as she considers her husband's looming appointment with death. "I'd like to have some time with him, but if they keep doing this, I'm never gonna have any time with him before he goes," she says via phone, adding that Jones's brother lives in Susanville and his parents live nearby. "I've been in love with the man for years, and I want him home. I didn't realize it was gonna be this damn hard."

Hoping to bring her man home, Amanda has launched a one-woman crusade, circulating petitions calling on the state parole system to allow him to relocate and talking to the local press about her situation. She says she's accumulated about 400 signatures so far.

For Amanda Jones, her love affair with a veteran recidivist has put her in an awkward place. Susanville is a prison town, with two penitentiaries – High Desert State Prison and the California Correctional Center – pumping more than $200 million annually into the local economy and employing more than 2,300 people. While cons are the economic lifeblood of the region, they are not, obviously, particularly well regarded in many circles.

The blood runs in her family: Amanda's mom has been a correctional officer for 25 years; her uncle is a cop with the Susanville Police Department. "It's a little crazy sometimes," she acknowledges. "It's a little odd."

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The law isn't immutable: Under some circumstances parolees can relocate. But the parole system, a wing of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, has no intention of letting Jones move. This spring he was caught making an unapproved visit to Susanville, and at this point he is banned from even setting foot in the town.

When we asked parole officials about Jones, they declined to comment but pointed us to a letter from Jim L'Etoile, head of the Parole and Community Services Division, to Amanda.

In the letter, sent in April, L'Etoile lays out his reasons for keeping the couple separated. One issue was the fact that they'd only recently been married. L'Etoile also cited the law, saying it was "enacted to ensure that upon an offender's release, families and parolees do not continue to reside in the prison vicinity as this may increase the local crime rate. You reside in the High Desert Prison area where your husband has served virtually all of his time during four separate prison terms." Finally, the parole boss said "serious concerns have been expressed by local law enforcement in the Susanville area relative to his behavior in the community."

In other words, he's too dangerous to live in a town with a bunch of prison guards, but he's perfect for the Bay Area.

Jones himself is quite candid about his past transgressions. "I've got 20 prior felonies," he admits. Over the decades he's been busted for a gaggle of different crimes – intimidating witnesses, extortion, theft, weapons. "I was a coldhearted bastard. I was a son of a bitch out there. I don't deny that." By his own account, he once "shoved a guy in a garbage compactor outside K-Mart because he pissed me off."

But these days, Jones says he's mellowed. He says he's clean, sober, and dedicated to living a quiet, square life.

On the orders of his parole officer, who's stationed in Concord, Jones is currently dwelling with some 60 other ex-cons in a halfway house in downtown Oakland, where he shares a room with eight other parolees. He's set to begin taking classes – pre-algebra, basic writing, social psychology, and philosophy – at Laney College and is especially looking forward to philosophy. "I like reading Kant, Plato, Aristotle, Marx. Marx and Aristotle are probably my two favorite philosophers because they just come straight at you," he says.

He's excited about his first foray into higher academia, though his mind, clearly, is fixated on another place. "For once in my life I have someone I love and who loves me. She's the best thing that's ever happened to me."

E-mail A.C. Thompson at acthompson{at}hushmail{dot}com.