It’s mid-July and Dominic Serio is in jail again.

“I’m 27 years old, and everything I have fits in a box,” he says. “I had more than that when I was frigging 12 years old.”

The other 60-odd inmates in the hall, which houses the Lee County Jail’s drug treatment program, can’t hear him. They’re absorbed in their spades tournaments or lounging on their bunks or watching television.

Serio is talking about them. How he cuts up with the least serious ones all day, then prays for forgiveness at night.

He doesn’t want to grow old addicted to crack cocaine. He won’t post bond and leave. He says that after 15 years of living in and out of jail cells, going to rehab facilities and being injected with supposed recovery elixirs, he wants to dig inside, find a way out.

But when Serio hears a sound like cocaine melting, his mouth waters.

“Sometimes, to make it through a day is like pure hell,” he says, in his quiet voice, twangy words spilling together. “So, if it’s that hard to make it through a day, how am I going to make it through 50 years?”

The program

If you’re heading up Ortiz Avenue past the jail compound in Fort Myers, the gleaming white Community Programs Units look like circus tents tucked behind the cinder block cells. They’re home to hundreds of minimum-security inmates. Among them, in CPU 1, are about five dozen men court-ordered or voluntarily assigned to the drug-treatment program.

Launched five years ago with a $180,000 federal grant, the program has been a sort of petri dish for law enforcement. Authorities say drugs and crime have become intertwined and calcified. Some corrections officials and drug experts think a good place to fight back is here, in a sequestered setting, with a literally captive audience.

There’s some evidence it works. Program coordinator Bette Scruggs says up to eight in 10 people in the general inmate population will come back to jail in two years, but only about half the CPU 1 inmates will pick up new drug charges in that time.

Even the most ardent believers admit you’ve got to loosen your definition of success to be happy with that rate. But to Scruggs and others, it’s worth the money and the effort to reach even just the portion who make it work.

“You’ll see whole families in here,” she says of the jail. “It’s a chain that we’ve got to break.”

For two veteran addicts — Serio, who grew up in Bonita Springs and came to jail in May accused of stealing his friend’s Ford Expedition, and 50-year-old Joe Schaible, who was plucked off the streets last winter on yet another theft charge — the particulars of the class were sometimes less important than the environment and the people it provided.

The origins of addiction

Serio draws on scrap paper precise diagrams of his bedrooms growing up: The one in San Carlos Park with the Star Wars comforter and matching curtains. Then the one in the Juvenile Detention Center. It’s almost a stone’s throw from where he sits now in the CPU.

In the early years he stole for no particular reason. He took a bicycle at 12 or so because he was in the neighborhood and didn’t feel like walking anymore. Holidays back then were bleak. His family would visit wherever he happened to be incarcerated.

“I’d be happy they came to see me,” he says, “but it’s like I’d sit there for five or 10 minutes and be like, alright, I’m going back to my room now.”

Later, between spells of sobriety and a marriage, he stole to fund his drug habit. He robbed dealers and nearly died of an overdose; he took money from his father and nearly killed himself with a bottle of Tylenol PM. He walked out of Publix with meat stuffed into a grocery cart, his back to the security cameras. He saw his son a while back and Serio felt like running away.

Once, when he was tied up with phone cords and thought he would be killed over a drug debt, Serio says, he felt relieved. It would be over.

Good intentions

Joe Schaible walked out of jail again at dawn on July 5. His long white hair was tucked behind his ears, his grin stretched between them. He’d packed some pounds on his 6-3 frame since his arrest. He joked he was surprised the jeans he wore in still fit nearly seven months later.

“Good job, man. You’re alright, huh?” asked William Dennis, a recovering alcoholic who’d already been out of the jail’s program for two shaky, but determined, weeks. He’d come to pick up Schaible and drive him around until he found a job, or a home, or both.

Schaible told the most recent chapter of his story at a Bob Evans restaurant over a plate of eggs, over easy, and wheat toast. He’d gone to see an old girlfriend in Bonita. Then things got fuzzy. He wound up in Fort Myers, running from crackhouse to crackhouse, shoplifting, driving prostitutes around. Then he was back in jail, plopped down in the drug program for at least the fourth time.

“I bet you I’ve been to 16 or 18 rehabs, and I’ve successfully completed them all,” Schaible said. “I had all these good intentions; they didn’t last an hour after I got out the door.”

Together they drove the day away, Dennis at the wheel, Schaible on the cell phone, heading up to North Fort Myers so Schaible could see about a job tip, then across town for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Back over the river, to find out Schaible’s driver’s license was suspended in the quagmire of court administration, and finally, toward evening, down to Naples, where Schaible found a home for the night in the shelter St. Matthew’s House.

“I could drive myself nuts just thinking of woulda, coulda, shoulda,” he said at one point in the afternoon, sitting at a Denny’s booth. “Probably a hundred times a day, it just runs through my mind like a film ... I shoulda did this, I shoulda done that.

“(But) I still got a good 30-something years left. And you know what? Thirty years is a lifetime.”

Consequences

Another weekend in jail. It’s noisy with chatter and the occasional howl of laughter. One group of guys has set up plastic stacking chairs around the television for a repeat screening of “Walk the Line,” the Johnny Cash biography.

Serio’s future is under negotiation these days between his lawyer and the State Attorney’s Office. He should be getting prison time, with his list of prior convictions, but the attorney is asking he be sent to Dunklin Memorial Camp in Okeechobee. It’s a Christian treatment facility, where he’d live with other recovering addicts for the better part of a year.

Tanya Slater, who runs the drug treatment program in the jail, says Dunklin could tip the balance for Serio toward sobriety.

Today, Serio is thinking about consequences, something he says he’s never faced. “I could do something pretty stupid, and I might get in trouble, but I don’t have to suffer inside.”

He says he’s come to understand, through repeated exposure to the language and narrative of addiction recovery, that he avoids pain. That he blots it out, shuts himself down, inhales something toxic and sublime so the hurt just fades away.

Now, sitting in class, one of the teachers might say something that peels back a layer, and Serio can’t put his finger on the sensation. But he doesn’t ask for help, because this is still jail, and he can’t or won’t unravel in front of these people.

“If I could just listen to myself about my own life, I wouldn’t have a problem,” Serio says, against the resonant opening chords of the movie’s title song. “I know exactly what I need to do, and why I need to do it — why I can’t do this, why I should do that ... and then I start to, and then something happens, and then I shy away.”

He remembers years ago bawling when he and his wife split up, staying in bed for days. Not since then has anything hurt so much, he says, but maybe it should.

Building boundaries

It’s to be expected, perhaps, with 60-something men living together in one big room: You walk into CPU 1, and a waft of damp, smelly air fills your nostrils. Sweat and dirty laundry. The corrections officers in daytime keep the dome bitterly cold. Enough, you’d think, to freeze out the odor. But it hangs in the air. It is the air.

Class time here runs a couple of hours. The class plows through scenarios of relapse and the biological mechanics of drug use. One morning, after an introductory reading, counselor George Bair launches into the topic of boundaries on the outside.

“Boundaries don’t hurt other people. They keep me in check,” he says, over the sound of shifting chairs scraping on the floor. “My best friends — let’s take the ‘R’ out of that, right? — my best friends are going to be out there waiting. ‘Oh man, I’ve got the best dope you ever smelled.’ ’’

“Boundaries do not hurt other people,” Bair concludes. “They protect my integrity.”

As for paying attention, the inmates vary. Some draw elaborate graffiti on their notebooks or manila envelopes; some make faces at each other across the room. Others follow Bair, or whoever is leading the class, closely with their eyes.

Corrections officials say they like walking into the CPU, where the inmates are disciplined compared to their counterparts in the sweaty, open air cells of the stockade. They make their beds here every morning and pick up after themselves. Slater, whose firm holds the contract to run the drug-treatment program, says other than the digs, the treatment tools they get aren’t much different than a celebrity might find at a multi-million dollar rehab resort.

Know your triggers. Separate yourself from the old people, places and things. Seek out after-care, like a sobriety meeting. Slater says she fills out the regimen with medical, psychological or spiritual guidance.

Slater is a no-nonsense woman who wears on the surface her belief in the most beleaguered people.

“Each one of y’all has the potential to do it,” she tells the inmates, in her Kentucky accent. “It’s, do you want to?’’

“I get so tired of the lying. I wish I could smack it out of you, but I can’t. Some of y’all was born liars.”

Life outside the walls

The traffic was breezing along on Airport-Pulling Road. The gnats were hanging in the air, as if the parking lot of St. Matthew’s House had invaded their home and their revenge was to float there, in an eye-level cloud.

Schaible looked healthy and relaxed in a T-shirt, shorts and sunglasses. His first week out had been dicey.

On Wednesday, he’d almost given in, almost spent his last change on a bus ride to Fort Myers. He’d pulled through, though, and now Dennis had driven down to toast the struggle with a day of fishing.

Schaible’s a roofer by trade. He’s not too shy to tell you he’s great at it. This could have been a plus, if anyone had been willing to take a chance this week on a guy fresh out of jail, but instead he sat at the labor pool day after day and waited for work that never came.

He went to a sobriety meeting and felt alone. “You listen to all these people saying how their lives are so great ever since they quit drugs and alcohol,” he said, “and I’m sitting there feeling totally miserable.”

He pictured himself walking into Wal-Mart, stealing a new set of clothes and a pack of beer, hopping on the bus and sliding back into the game.

One of the staffers at St. Matthew’s caught him in time. She let him use an office phone. She called about a few jobs for him on her own. He calmed down, and just to get him active, she made him apply at a pool company even though he was sure — and correct — they wouldn’t hire him.

End of the week, wouldn’t you know, the labor pool came through. Now, he was set to join a crew renovating houses. Schaible, who says he works to forgive himself, could now start forgiving.

Nearly 30 years ago, Schaible killed a man in a gunfight. Officially, it was in self-defense and he was off the hook. That left him to mete out justice on his own.

“Because of the shooting, the way I was raised being Catholic ... I focus on one point, you know, an eye for an eye. Because I killed him, I’m going to burn in hell forever,” he said. “So, I figured my life was over, and whatever (else) I did was extra.”

Now, he said, with his own survival on the line, “I’m starting to believe that there’s hope. I just don’t want to go to jail no more.”

His fate

Serio was led into Judge Mark Steinbeck’s courtroom on Sept. 4, his hair freshly shaved off, in his blue shirt with “INMATE” stamped on the back.

The prosecutor read through the terms of Serio’s plea deal: for grand theft of a motor vehicle, Serio would serve at least nine months at Dunklin. For two years, he’d be on probation and lose his driver’s license.

“He’s had an on-again, off-again problem with cocaine for years,” Serio’s attorney, Neil Potter, told the judge. After relapsing this year, he said, Serio’s bond was voluntarily revoked. “He figured the only place he could quit getting high was in jail.”

Steinbeck accepted the deal.

The next day, back in CPU 1 until the weekend when he can be taken to Okeechobee, Serio says he’s excited and nervous about Dunklin. Things are getting uncomfortable in jail, he says. He’s been here longer than just about everyone. Most of his friends were kicked out of the program for misbehaving and sent back to the stockade.

Now that he’s almost out, all he can think about is stopping at Popeyes on the drive out of town and picking up some spicy chicken strips. He’s anxious, he keeps saying it. He’s scared. It could be a monumental change — or a catastrophic disappointment.

“It’s not that I don’t think that I’m worth it,” he says. “It’s that I don’t know if I can. Sometimes, I feel like I’m destined to be this.”

Two days later, Serio is kicked out of CPU 1 and sent back to the stockade.

Old habits die hard

For Schaible, the fall went initially unnoticed.

He re-created the timeline later, sitting in a patch of dirt by the public library in downtown Fort Myers: He’d been out of jail a few weeks and saved up enough money, through the labor pool, to get himself a room on his own. He chose a motel in Fort Myers.

From there, several days turned into a cascade of stashing dope in the motel room wall, having sex with a pair of women he picked up on his hunt for drugs and ultimately shoplifting about $1,200 worth of baby clothes for barter.

It started on a Friday, or so, and ended sometime before the next Thursday, when he called Slater to ask for help.

So, here he is in the hot afternoon sun, waiting for Slater to come buy him a bus ticket back down to Naples. He’s planning to beg St. Matthew’s House to let him back in, and if they won’t, he’s got a friend who lives in the area who will probably put him up for a while.

Schaible is grimier, with a swagger not there before. He’s wearing a tank top and camouflage shorts. He has a knife at his hip and a comb in his back pocket.

“When we’re running, doing the stores, I’ve got the girl,” he says, “we call that jazz.”

Slater is cutting him no slack when she shows up. She buys the ticket. They sit down on a bench outside the bus terminal and she says of sobriety, “It hurts a little bit, but it gets better. You’ve got to stop this crap, alright?”

Schaible, the hustle gone from his voice: “I shy away from it because I’m scared of it.”

They talk about forgiveness and redemption, and the Bible, Slater insisting he can’t be blamed for the shooting if he felt his life was in danger. But the whole thing was over drugs, Schaible protests, so how can any of it be justified?

Eventually, Slater gets up to go home. It’s been a long day at work, and the bus won’t leave for hours. She leaves him with a bag of snacks she picked up at a convenience store.

“I’ll be alright,” Schaible tells her.

“Alright,” she says.

Back at St. Matthew’s

Schaible didn’t get back into St. Matthew’s House right away. He wound up staying with his friend for a few weeks, until he felt his welcome had run out and all his money was being wasted on beer. By then it was early September. St. Matthew’s House had relented. He decided to try living there again.

“It’s like I can’t get ahead. I’m tired, I guess,” he said one afternoon in a phone call. “I feel relief that I can go back over there, and be ... even though you’re in a homeless shelter, I’m on my own.”

Free at last

Serio stewed in the heat at the stockade for days as outside, yet again, the negotiations for his future played out. Scruggs and the drug program counselors conferred about what had happened. Apparently, Serio had gone somewhere to get cups without permission, on top of a series of other infractions. Did it mean he wasn’t serious about recovery, they wondered, that all this was a front? Or did he sabotage himself out of fear?

In the end, the program heads decided to back him. The Dunklin staff interviewed Serio and let him in. He walked into the jail lobby at 9:30 on a Wednesday morning.

His father, who brought him a white T-shirt and a pair of shorts to wear out, wrapped his arms around his son. Scruggs was there, and Chip Faircloth, the counselor who had gone to bat getting Serio into Dunklin. The jail staff finalized the paperwork for his release. Scruggs was saying they’d had a talk, and Serio’s head was straight.

Maybe it was all the attention, maybe the fact he’d stayed up playing cards in the stockade and slept only an hour. Or maybe it was the sensation of being free, like standing up after a four-month airplane ride, but Serio didn’t say much. He stood there smiling shyly in the morning light, his hands feeling at the sides of his shorts.

“Feels weird having pockets,” he said.

Staff writer Kathleen Cullinan can be reached by e-mail at kacullinan@bonitanews.com