Jared Klickstein figured the best way to kick his heroin addiction would be to go to jail. It was only after arriving there and meeting a Neo-Nazi that he remembered he was Jewish. "It's almost like I forgot and then I saw a guy with a swastika tattoo."
Jared Klickstein wanted to go to jail.
After years of experiencing homelessness on Skid Row in Los Angeles and in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco while suffering from addiction, he says he thought time in a cage would help him kick his physical dependence on heroin. "So over the span of 10 years, I got arrested many times, had many contacts with the police, but this was in California," Klickstein tells Inside Edition Digital. "And I never really got held for more than three or four days."
In 2015, he says he was on felony probation when he got into an altercation that he was certain would put him behind bars. "I got mugged by another homeless person in a Panda Express and I defended myself against this mugging," he says. "When the police came, they observed the camera footage of this altercation, and they actually arrested me for assault with a deadly weapon. Eventually they did drop the charges because in reality, it was just two crackheads fighting over chicken at Panda Express."
But Klickstein says he had enough and didn't want to return to the streets to start this cycle over again. He says he asked his public defender to request a 6-month sentence in lieu of probation, which he saw as a better option to freedom. "I was sleeping outside, fearing for my life every night," he says. "I was fighting daily already for my life. So going to jail was basically the same thing, except you got a bed. So to me, it was an upgrade."
After going through what he says was a brutal detox period, Klickstein was finally sent to jail to serve his time. He says he was somewhat surprised to get a greeting upon entry. "I walked into the dorm and the first guy that came up to me was a guy named John," he recalled. Klickstein described John as a jailhouse cliche, being very large and bald with tattoos, some of which were swastikas. It was then, Klickstein says, he remembered something: he's Jewish.
"I didn't really think about it while I was homeless or anything," he says. "It's almost like I forgot and then I saw a guy with a swastika tattoo and then I remembered, and my last name is Klickstein, which is pretty Jewish. So I thought that could be a problem."
Klickstein says John identified himself as a Neo-Nazi, but since there were so few of them in jail, they rolled with the "woods," or white guys, and answered to their "shot caller." Klickstein says he identified himself as German and kept his Jewish identity a secret in the beginning of his stay. He says as time went on, he started to see that, despite heavy racial segregation behind bars, the inmates didn't really seem too committed to their assigned racist beliefs.
"The main driving force behind the whole setup was race politics and race gangs, but what surprised me was at the end of the day, people were kind of goofy and kind of viewed those rules as stupid, and people got along a lot better than I thought they would. There was a larger sense of respect that I foresaw," Klickstein says.
He says he decided to reveal his full identity when he realized it could be beneficial for him. He says he noticed another inmate received a kosher meal, which had value on the prison market. It was better-tasting food than what was served in the dining hall and some inmates would pay him for it with money or other valuables. Klickstein says he was ready to reveal his secret.
"So I did come clean, and the Nazis thought it was sort of funny and they didn't express any hate, which was almost disappointing," he says. "It was extremely odd."
Even more surprising, he says, was how fascinated his fellow inmates were with him. "So they had a Jewish friend for the first time in their life," he says.
"I think it broke down a lot of their preconceived notions about Jewish people," he says. "Because the first thing they said was, 'What are you doing here? Can't you make a phone call? Doesn't your uncle own the jail? Isn't your whole family judges and lawyers?'"
Klickstein says he took no offense, and used it as an opportunity to educate them. "I informed them that I was just like them. I was just a criminal and I came from a blue collar background. I think a lot of their beliefs changed," he says. "They thought, 'oh my God, how could the Jews run the world while, at the same time, I'm standing next to a Jew in jail who's worse off than me? He's like a homeless crackhead Jew. So it actually gave me a lot of respect in jail. The fact that I was such a downtrodden Jew. My life changed for the good once I came out as Jewish in jail."
It's one of many awkward situations Klickstein details in his new book, "Crooked Smile: What It Took to Escape a Decade of Homelessness, Addiction, and Crime."
While he discusses serious subjects like addiction and homelessness, he says he also wanted to make it funny. "I mean, being a homeless crackhead is sad, but it is funny. I mean, there is a lot of funny things that happen. You do a lot of very stupid things, and when people do stupid things, oftentimes hilarity does ensue," he says.
He hopes his humor about his past will get people to read it and find comfort if they're dealing with addiction in their lives. Klickstein also says he wants people to see that the system for treating addiction needs to change.
"I live in California. It doesn't help that I was able to commit crime with impunity for 10 years," he says. "That's not helpful to a homeless drug addict to just let them commit crimes, but at the same time, sending them to prison for the rest of their life isn't helpful, either. So I think we really need to build infrastructure for long-term treatment centers that are not profit driven."
