The path of successful rehabilitation in the criminal justice system isn’t a straight line.

It’s a self-portrait that can take a lifetime to finish, and even then — if you’re doing it right — the picture may still be incomplete.

Cedric Martin was 18 when he killed the mother of an acquaintance during a meth-fueled fugue. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2001 and spent almost 22 years behind bars, a decade of that time in administrative segregation, solitary confinement, which he entered with the label of “staff assaulter,” the worst of the worst as far as corrections officers are concerned.

In solitary, Martin taught himself to draw using a 4-inch flexible safety pen which, at first, feels like trying to sketch with a nub of warm licorice. It’s now his go-to tool.

In solitary, and through art, Martin’s attitude, and outlook, changed.

He became a model prisoner and mentor and went on to be paroled 10 years early, into a Colorado Springs arts community that already knew him, and his work, well. They welcomed him with open arms and a promise to do everything they could to help in the transition to freedom, as well as the personal mission Martin knows he will never be able to fulfill.

“I have caused so much harm, so much harm, and now where I once caused harm, I want to help heal,” said Martin, who turns 41 in August.

Now eight months on the outside, he’s taking and teaching art classes, working for a local nonprofit arts collective, and said he hopes to someday return to prison as a free man, to work with inmates and share the revelations and practices that made deep change possible for him.

But if you think this is a story about atonement or the quest for redemption through art, look again.

“This is not about making up for that life I took, forgiving myself, being forgiven, none of that,” Martin said.

He doesn’t believe those things are possible, nor is it his place to seek or even want them.

“I don’t see the fact that I can draw pretty counteracting the scales of having taken a human life,” he said.

Nobody does. Those scales cannot be balanced.

But the fact remains that Cedric Martin can draw pretty. Amazingly, preternaturally pretty.

And he taught himself to do it, despite all the challenges and against all odds.

Full ‘meth-monster’ mode

Those odds began stacking up before he was old enough to hold a pen.

A psychologist who interviewed him before testifying at his 2001 sentencing hearing described a “troubled childhood” defined by the murder of his father when he was 3, a mother who turned to prostitution to support a crack habit and a stepfather who kicked him out when he was 16.

The psychologist told of a boy who started using drugs when he was “12 or 13” and who, by the time he could legally drive, was addicted to meth, homeless and squatting in the vacant building where he ultimately met Cynthia K. Raatz’s son, making the connection that would lead to the “worst decision” of his life.

Martin says he was on Day 19 of no sleep, hallucinating and in full “meth-monster” mode when he stabbed and strangled 38-year-old Raatz, a mother of seven.

At that 2001 hearing, he broke from his legal team to join Raatz’ family in asking the judge to impose the maximum sentence of 32 years.

“He feels prison is better than the life he’s been leading,” Martin’s attorneys explained to the court, according to reporting by The Gazette.

When he talks about his early years today, Cedric Martin focuses on the good parts.

How he grew up in a large and “very blended” family of biological, step- and de facto siblings, the outcome of a co-parenting arrangement between his mom and her best friend born of practicality but sustained by affection.

How his stepfather taught him to play chess, and encouraged his interest in math and science.

How his mom overcame addiction, cleaned up her life, and left a resonating message with all her children that said, “Mistakes don’t have to define you.”

“She got out of prison in 1989 and never went back,” said Martin, whose mother opened an architectural salvage business on East Pikes Peak Avenue, where she upcycled and catered to the DIY-crowd long before it was a trend.

“When you came in there, you didn’t just get what you came to get that you could have gotten at Home Depot. You got an education and an appreciation that these things matter, they’re beautiful, we take care of them,” Martin said.

“This is what my mama did. And she’s gone now,” he said in early April, during an interview at the sober living house where he was living.

He then said nothing for a very long while, focusing instead on the meticulous, delicate shadows of a piece he’d been commissioned to draw — a still-life of a coiled garden hose, captured by a local photo enthusiast and fan of his work.

He was thinking about his mom.

Kimberly LaQuahn Martin died in 2019. Martin’s portrait of her, part of a collage done shortly after her death, was the most difficult thing he’s ever drawn, he said.

“After she died … everything else got burnt away, everything that didn’t matter,” he said. “All that’s left is a desire to make the world know that my mama raised me right.”

By that time, Martin had already met the pivotal person whose prison arts program hadn’t realized it was searching for a muse, for a pilot internship that didn’t yet exist.

‘He is an artist’

Martin found his way to art around 2011, roughly halfway through his decade in solitary, because he wanted to prove them wrong.

“The penitentiary is very, very racially segregated, and one of the things that was said was that Black people can’t draw,” Martin said. “At the time, I was highly motivated to prove these people wrong. So I just went back to my cell and grabbed my little flex pen, and commenced trying to draw, simply to be able to show them that that one stereotype was wrong.”

At first it helped fill the long, empty hours, but as his skills improved, both process and product began to take on new meaning.

“I wouldn’t call it innate talent, so much as Cedric has an aptitude that he developed through hard work and dedication in prison,” said Colorado Springs artist and gallery owner Jana Bussanich. “That’s the piece that I recognized immediately. He is an artist, and he found a way to develop that even under very challenging and difficult circumstances. And that, for him, led to other positive changes.”

When Martin was later moved to medium security and started leading art classes for other inmates, he would tell his students that learning to draw wasn’t about earning early parole, but “helping you be a better version of you by taking the you that is there, that you don’t like to look at, and making it OK to look at.”

The perspective shift was outward facing, as well.

Beauty is rare in a prison environment.

It can create a detente between enemies, and build bridges where before there was nothing.

It can stop people in their tracks and derail old thinking long enough to create room for an altogether different kind of exchange.

“If you experience negativity from me every time you walk by, then you’re going to funnel that back to me. But if you walk by and I show you a pretty picture … now you’re not looking at me as just a ball of hate and fury and violence sitting inside this cage. You’re looking at me as somebody who’s in a situation producing something that it feels good to look at,” Martin said. “I got to the point where I was talking to people I never would have ever spoken to at all without art.”

He held up the flex pen, the only art tool with which he was trusted in solitary. It began as a symbol of limitations, and became the opposite.

“I can’t hurt anybody with this … but this is my ‘weapon of mass destruction,’ that destroyed all the false realities,” said Martin. “It is the thing that eventually allowed me to fight back against my environment.”

It allowed him to process his pain, and heal enough to be able to communicate so he could seek healing for himself and others.

It gave him the courage, in 2016, to walk into the room at Fremont Correctional where he met the woman who would change his life.

Help with a parole plan

Karen Hamer founded Tin Roof Productions as a nonprofit Springs theater company in 2008, doing mostly productions of classic works with young people and self-penned musicals adapted from the works of Jane Austen.

When Fremont Correctional Facility emailed to say it was putting together a theater program, and was she interested, she wrote back “immediately.”

Hamer doesn’t remember the day she first met Cedric Martin, other than the mental snapshot of a towering man, with his hair in “little pigtails,” who showed up to take her class.

She can, however, recall what she wrote years later, in a letter to Martin’s aunt.

“I said what I remember about Cedric is how gentle he was. He had this warm gentle energy that was interested and engaged and that was curious about what we were doing,” Hamer said. “I just remember him being sort of alert and obviously intelligent, and just fun to work with.”

Martin initially was among about a dozen inmates Hamer kept in touch with after she left Colorado and moved with her family to Texas, where she’s completing a doctoral degree in criminology.

She would send letters, sometimes books and art materials, knowing they might not make it to him due to the limitations on what he could receive in prison.

Sometimes, Martin would send small sketches of his work, in manila envelopes.

“Over time, a lot of my focus went to him just really because of who he is. Everybody is unique, but he has a set of gifts that I recognized, that others I think certainly now recognize,” Hamer said.

In February 2022, Martin asked her if she could help him put together a parole plan. He had a hearing coming up.

“At that time, he had nowhere to parole to, no job, no nothing. I said yes, I can help, not really knowing what one does to help,” Hamer said.

She Googled, and contacted everyone she knew who might be able to assist, finally reaching someone with the right connections to secure long-term housing for Martin, should he be granted parole.

The idea to create and fund a pilot internship program, to support Martin during his reintegration to society, came to her later, when she was in the shower.

“I got out and said to my husband, ‘Tin Roof Productions can do this, so Cedric can come out and do the thing he knows how to do, which is art,’” Hamer said.

He ‘internalized rehabilitation’

Colorado has among the worst recidivism rates in the country, with more than 50% of people released from prison back behind bars within three years.

Retired corrections officer and case manager Bernard Cantin said he believes Martin, with the help of Tin Roof Productions, can beat those odds.

“Cedric is fortunate beyond all fortunate,” said Cantin, one of Martin’s case managers who worked with Tin Roof Productions on his parole plan. “He had a mandatory release date of 2032. To be released 10 years earlier is phenomenal.”

But it’s not just good fortune; Martin is a “very unique case.”

Cantin only worked with Martin for a handful of months, but the 6-foot-2, 300-pound incarcerated artist, who did his phenomenal work with rudimentary tools, alone, in an 8- by 15-foot cell, made a lasting impression.

“He’s truly one of those guys who internalized rehabilitation … and he’s grown and made himself better. Unfortunately, a lot of these guys don’t do that,” Cantin said.

“And, really, what Cedric has done Cedric has done on his own, in isolation.”

Success on the outside, however, is a different kind of struggle. 

It requires help. 

The biggest factor affecting parole (and recidivism) for the formerly incarcerated is stability — stable housing, transportation and work, Cantin said.

“Tin Roof has provided Cedric an opportunity where all of those factors have been met,” Cantin said.

Martin works part time at Concrete Couch, the nonprofit community arts collective, and the galleries of Springs artists and Tin Roof volunteers Jana Bussanich and Chris Alvarez. His wheels were donated by Manitou Springs’ E-Bike Sales and Rental.

Eight months after his release, Tin Roof Productions’ pilot internship program is doing exactly what it set out to do, for the person it set out to do it for.

“This program found the perfect person. Actually, Cedric found it,” Cantin said.

Martin, he said, hasn’t had any infractions since his release.

He’s met all the criteria that parole has put before him.

While he’s changed housing several times, which can be an issue, he’s again in a stable situation, house-sitting, in a space that’s big enough for him to truly stretch his artistic wings, try larger works and different media.

“I don’t see him being on parole much longer than two years. That’s how well he is doing,” Cantin said.

A debut at Yellow Couch Gallery

Martin was paroled in November 2022, just in time for the opening of his first art show at Bussanich’s Yellow Couch Gallery, under the Colorado Avenue bridge.

“It worked out to be pretty amazing timing, and we didn’t know until about 10 days before that he would be getting out,” said Bussanich.

Standing in freedom after two decades, seeing the pieces he’d created while in prison, among works by the artists who had mentored him then and promised to stand by him now, brought emotions too powerful and abstract for words, Martin said.

He said he plans to spend the rest of his life saying “thank you.”

He also said he hopes his story can encourage others who are in a position to help the formerly incarcerated to take a second look.

And to remember: What they’re seeing are portraits-in-progress, and potential masterpieces in-the-rough.

“A lot of people come out of the penitentiary worse than they went in,” Martin said. “But sometimes the people that are coming back from the penitentiary do have things to offer, they are worthy of opportunities, and there are places in society for us.”

If society is willing to make room.