Foster Care To Prison: One Black Man’s Journey And Fight To Break The Cycle

Victor Malin Jr. was 9 years old the first time he was placed in the back of a police car.

He landed there not by his own hand, but that of his stepfather.

The man whupped him with a Wiffle bat, and when he showed up to school with bruises, authorities were called.

“I had a lot of welts on my body and my arms, defensive ones from trying to grab the bat,” Malin recalls.

He initially lied to school staff, claiming he’d gotten into a fight with another student, but they didn’t believe him.

“I’d never been in the presence of law enforcement like that,” says Malin, now 43. “He came in with the badge, the uniform, and the gun on the hip. … It took awhile, but he got me to tell him about what my dad was doing at the house. It wasn’t anything crazy – he wanted to discipline me and keep me in line – but in those days, CPS was [ramping up] and they were snatching people out the house.”

During a candid conversation with The OBSERVER, Malin revealed personal struggles with his parents’ mental health, his multiple placements in foster care and how his incarceration represented a transition from one system of control to another.

Origin Story

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The smoke has cleared for Victor Malin Jr. He went from foster care to incarceration, but was shown a different path. 

Russell Stiger Jr., OBSERVER

Malin didn’t know he was biracial until the fourth grade.

“I pretty much grew up thinking I was white,” he says.

His parents were, and they didn’t tell him any different. He thought he had a tan from playing out in the sun. Then, another mixed-race classmate at Hagginwood Elementary asked him about his light brown complexion.

“She said, ‘Victor, are you mixed?’ I was like, ‘What is that?’ I didn’t really see color then. She asked, ‘Why is your hair like that? Why is your skin like that?’”

Malin’s mother and stepfather met in an outpatient mental institute. Malin shared the Jewish man’s name, but not his DNA. His mother became pregnant with him through an encounter with a Nigerian friend of her husband, who was away at a mental institution at the time.

As an adult, Malin has delved into his parents’ origin stories to learn more about how their journeys impacted his own. His mother had several childhood traumas, including being hurt by an abusive father.

“He grabbed her by her throat and banged her head on the ground so hard that she blacked out,” Malin says. “That was the first trauma she had that would kind of settle into her life.”

His mother later survived a gang rape.

“There was no talk of traumas and [adverse childhood experiences] at the time and how trauma gets passed down in different ways to the next generation,” Malin says.

Learning The System

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Victor Malin has cleaned up his act and is now cleaning up his community. He grew up in Del Paso Heights and looks after the area through an Adopt the Block beautification effort. 

Russell Stiger Jr., OBSERVER

Malin recently learned that his mother gave him up at age 6, but he has no memories of that time. He was in foster care again from ages 9-12. He remembers arriving at the Children’s Receiving Home and compares it to the reception center for a prison, which he’d later experience.

“Basically, it’s the way station where you get classified. They do your diagnosis … you go back and forth to court. You’re a ward of the state at that point, just like a prisoner. The judge now dictates where you go.”

Based on his parents’ mental states, Malin was recommended for long-term placement. He was assigned to a foster home in North Highlands.

“That was the first time I really got locked in a room,” Malin says. “I was in the room with four other kids, and they locked the doors at night. You couldn’t even use the bathroom if you wanted to. Little kids would pee and poop in their clothes and stuff.”

Malin learned to navigate favoritism and the power dynamics between foster, adopted, and biological children.

“Going from being an only child to having to deal with all that, it was wild,” Malin says.

His parents completed the parenting classes and other requirements to regain custody.

“They always came back for me,” he says. “That’s the silver lining to my story – the love that my mother and my father had for me. They never left me in the system. The kids who have it bad in the system are the ones who have nobody to come back to.

“Mom would go in and out of the hospitals. They would almost do tag teams; if my mom was in the hospital during a nervous breakdown, my stepfather would be there to take care of me. If he went to the hospital on a 5150 nervous breakdown, she would be there to take care of me.”

That’s how life always was, he says. 

“At around 5 or 6, I knew they weren’t like normal parents,” Malin says. “They didn’t work; they didn’t do much. My stepfather was very depressed. He was just basically laying in bed his whole life, for the most part.

“As I got older, I started to learn things and understand more. I started to understand why they were the way they were.”

His mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and dissociative identity disorder and placed on clozapine, a drug that’s prescribed when others have failed.

Malin recalls witnessing his mother’s multiple personalities emerge.

“It’s called mental illness, but it’s just a broken human being, to be honest with you,” he says. “Back in those days, it was more like they didn’t want to spend money on psychiatric help to help you process your traumas. What they would do is they would give you medication to so-called ‘balance you out.’”

Chip On His Shoulder

After returning from his first stint in foster care, Malin admits he had a “chip on my shoulder from the system.” He was also dealing with the typical angst of growing up. Then living in North Sacramento, he and some friends began breaking into cars and stealing from stores. He swiped a wireless microphone from a Catholic church and tried to sell it at school. Another student reported him to the principal.

“They called my mom, and then she had another nervous breakdown over that. They took me out of the home for the second time.”

He was placed in a group home in El Campo, a town in Marin County three miles from San Quentin. The group home, he says, was run by a man he alleges had “questionable protocols” and inappropriate behavior.

“It was one of those houses, where ‘what happens here, stays here,’” Malin says.

One of the more positive memories he has of that foster home is the work ethic and money that came from the chores he and his “foster brothers” did. He learned to work for the things he wanted.

He bought a video game system with his group home allowance money, but later sold it to purchase a half pound of weed to roll and sell to fellow students. His early attempt at drug dealing didn’t end well. He got jumped by some “older heads” from nearby Grant Union High.

“That really traumatized me,” Malin says. “I didn’t have older cousins or older brothers or sisters or anything to tell what happened, so I kind of kept it all to myself. My physical wounds healed relatively soon, but I had psychological wounds as well.”

Malin stayed home from school for months after the attack, until a truant officer showed up. Instead of exploring the reasons for his absences, he says the officer resorted to threats, telling his family, “If you guys don’t get him to go to school, we’re going to have to fine you or take you to jail. They didn’t ask me what was wrong. He wasn’t ‘trauma-informed,’ as they call it now.”

A hardened Malin returned to campus. “I remember I made a mental change or note in my head like, ‘I’m not going to be a victim anymore. If it takes me to be a victimizer to get along in this little miniature society, then I’m going to be the victimizer.’”

He began hanging out with those who were feared and, in his eyes, respected.

“That’s when I kind of lost my innocence,” he says.

He was gang banging, drinking, packing pistols, and stealing cars, which finally landed him in the juvenile justice system.

“It was a pivotal thing,” he says. “Because you’re crossing over from the foster care system.”

Foster youth are disproportionately at risk of incarceration, a phenomenon often referred to as the foster care-to-prison pipeline.

A 2024 briefing by the Prison Policy Initiative highlights data on how Black children are subject to more enforcement action from child welfare agencies than other children and are more likely to end up in foster care.

“Just as Black and brown people are overrepresented in jails and prisons, their families are overrepresented at every stage of a child protective services case,” the report states. “These systems not only target the same communities, but the same individuals. Incarcerated people are more likely to have been in foster care previously than others, and youth in foster care are more likely to become incarcerated as adults. Involvement in one system makes families vulnerable to becoming involved with the other.”

Caught Up

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Girls at juvenile hall write letters of encouragement that are shared with community members on the outside. 

Russell Stiger Jr., OBSERVER

Malin was one of the first in his immediate circle to go to juvenile hall. He got caught joyriding in a stolen car. He’d return to the facility on Keifer Boulevard often from age 12 to 17 for other stolen vehicles, weed sales and assaults. He would encounter several “angels” over the years, including an attorney who kept him from going to a violent state juvenile facility and the African American retired corrections officer, Arthur Patrick, who ran a Stockton group home.

“I was blessed by the grace of God, in my mind, to be able to go to his home,” Malin says. “It was different. His example was what changed my life.”

Patrick had Mercedes-Benzes and Rolex watches, but got them through legal means. He and his family encouraged Malin to get his GED and helped him apply for college and financial aid. He enrolled at San Joaquin Delta College, earned a place on the dean’s list his first semester, and then transferred to Langston University, an HBCU in Oklahoma.

Unfortunately, he took some bad habits with him. He was drinking heavily and used a purse snatching involving his mother back in Del Paso Heights as an excuse to return home. It didn’t take Malin long to reacclimate himself to the ways of the streets and the trouble that comes with that.

A North area shooting at age 18 landed him in adult trouble. The standoff with police before his conviction could have left him dead, if not for another of those angels.

“They put me in the back of a police car,” Malin recalls. “The officer who had the gun in my face, he said, ‘I don’t know what I was thinking when you came out the window with that gun in your hand. All my training as an officer, all my heart and everything told me to shoot you, but for some reason, I just couldn’t pull the trigger.’” 

The officer’s next remark changed everything for Malin.

“He said, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do with your life, but you’re going to do something.’ In retrospect, I look at that and I know God put a trigger lock on that thing.”

That his story could have ended that night isn’t lost on an older and wiser Malin.

“They had all the justification to shoot my ass dead,” he says. “The window ledge was about four feet high in my room. All he could have hit was my head or my chest, and I know I saw a barrel aimed at my head.”

Locking It Down

Four months after turning 18, Malin found himself in the county jail, on 23-hour lockdown, seven days a week. 

“This was one of the worst places I think I’ve ever been in my life,” he says. “Just being locked in a room.”

Malin was first charged with assault with a deadly weapon and then attempted murder when he refused a plea deal. He ended up serving 41/2 years in state prison. It was at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy that he began to plan for a future outside of the system.

“The adults and juveniles that I speak to now, I say you have to have a reentry plan,” Malin says. “And don’t wait for this. Do it yourself.”

When he got out of prison at age 23, Malin walked out with acceptance and financial aid letters for Sacramento State, and a five-year reentry plan he’d written down. “I always tell the kids I came straight from California state prison yard to a California State University campus.”

The “kids” are young people he now mentors, some at the same juvenile facility where he was housed. Malin turned his past into purpose and has run a nonprofit, Reaching Back to Our Youth, since 2009.

“I decided I was going to go with my passion, and I put myself out there to the world as Victor Malin, a redeemed person.”

He never saw himself as a lost cause.

“Arthur Patrick put in my mind that I had a different path,” he says.

Malin connects with youth by telling his story, and then he and other team members do one-to-one mentoring. He has developed a 14-lesson life skills curriculum and is approved by the state to give a certificate in violence reduction.

The mentoring continues after young people come home. This past Earth Day, several participated in a neighborhood clean-up effort hosted by Reaching Back to Our Youth as part of its Adopt a Block project. The project places plastic bins in front of area homes, and youth and their neighbors work together to keep garbage from accumulating.

“It’s about people coming home from the inside and connecting to the community and being a part of rebirthing their communities, doing their part to build up as opposed to tearing it down,” Malin says.

What started as a volunteer effort for Malin has led to partnerships with the Sacramento County Probation Department, the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency and local homeless shelters. He has also served as executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition.

Malin wants to offer the kind of support he wishes he’d gotten early on.

“I made the decision back in 2009 that I was going to be a part of the solution,” he says. “My hope is just to replicate that in as many young people as possible and as soon as possible, so youth don’t have to hit the penitentiary. I’ll catch them in a juvenile hall where I should have been caught.”