Coming Home to…
Well hello winter! Don’t know about where you are, but winter popped in overnight here in the Mid Atlantic just to say, “Hey girl. On my way.” Loving this coffee even more this morning, bundled on my back porch, knowing I probably won’t be writing outside early morning for a few months. I hope you’re somewhere warm! Welcome to Sunday Morning Coffee. Let’s talk about reentry on this crisply promising morning…
In my last year as an employee of a DOC, I built a post-release program that was amazingly successful: 0% recidivism and 100% employment for the first year. It was a team effort, and boy, was it hard work! Hard because it felt like the system was poised against us. In a city that is resource-rich for returning citizens, at least on paper, I was astounded at how difficult it was/is for justice-impacted people to come home and be successful. I mean, I knew the basics of how hard it is (I just spent two trips myself to the DMV just to get a driver’s license and vehicle registration, and I had all the information I needed!), but I never realized HOW hard until we were trying to help folks navigate it. You can’t get a driver’s license if you don’t have a birth certificate and you can’t get your birth certificate without a picture ID and you need to have a lease agreement but you don’t have money for the down payment necessary to sign a lease agreement and never mind anyway because since you have a criminal record, you can’t qualify, and your PO is hammering at you to get a job, but during your last interview he called and said you had 30 minutes to get to the office to take a UA…and so it goes (I should also mention that all of these activities require basic technology skills and access to technology, neither of which most people who’ve been incarcerated for long periods have). Do I have some stories! When we talked about these things, even in our community that touts itself as returning-citizen-friendly, people would often shake their heads and say, “Well, it isn’t that bad for everybody.”
So I built a reentry activity that simulates the experience in our city and started offering it to the community. In the middle of it, after what simulated four weeks of reentry, we often saw grown folk trying not to cry or throw things. To quote one participant, “This is really hard!”
It is hard, folks. Unbelievably so. And many times, the very people and institutions who should be helping are the hindrance.
There’s so much work to be done to make reentry smoother for people coming home. Imagine being incarcerated for decades and coming home with no money, no family, no skills, no network, no home…95% of folks who are justice-involved in our country come home. What are they coming home to? Is it any surprise that many of them return to the system? Also, for any lay-readers out there, people are returned to prison not just for newly committed crimes, but also for parole revocation that doesn’t involve committing a crime at all. But we can talk about that on another day.
We should be preparing people, robustly preparing people, for reentry while they’re incarcerated, meeting them at the gate when they earn their freedom, and getting them where they need to be in order to be successful once they cross the threshold. If you’re reading my blog as a “lock ‘em up” supporter (I have no idea what would lead you to my blog, but I’m so glad you’re here), then look at reentry efforts as a way to stop further victimization. There just isn’t a way to look at successful reentry efforts in a negative light.
We had to turn people away from our post-release employment program because we didn’t have the resources to fully implement it for the number of people who applied. We did, however, help everyone who asked for it to navigate the basics and to find housing and to connect to resources. That’s a bare minimum that didn’t cost us anything.
One way I can help immediately is to offer our reentry simulation activity to your organization. We can tailor it to your community resources, if you want, although the experience of coming home isn’t much different from place to place. Here’s how it works: participants navigate the activity for an hour…every 15 minutes simulates a week of reentry. We briefly touch base between each simulated week for a quick pulse check. At the end of the simulation, we work in small groups in a debriefing exercise, then we work to provide possible solutions to the issues we discovered/experienced. Your participants leave with a greater understanding of what it’s like to ‘come home’ and armed with ways to make reentry easier and more successful. You can read more about our simulation here, and contact us if you’re interested here.
I hope you either purposefully live in a place with no winter or are welcoming winter with an open heart (and lots o’ layers), because, it looks like it’s here. Enjoy that steaming cup of whatever!
