Pre-Release Success

Good morning Sunday Morning Coffee readers. I hope you’re up and at ‘em and feeling good. I’m a little late getting going this morning because I actually stayed up past 9pm last night and slept past 7am. I spent my evening with Stevie Nicks and Billy Joel with a few hundred other good folks in Baltimore. I was amazed that at 74 and 75 years of age respectively, they rocked the house like always. It was amazing. It was the culmination of a busy week spent in San Diego with people passionate about changing the world of corrections. APDS is the B Corporation that provides an education platform on e-devices to incarcerated students, and they graciously invited me to be part of their annual employee retreat.

There are so many gems that I could pass along about this week, but today I want to focus on a recurring theme that really kicked off for me during a panel discussion moderated by the fabulous Lawrence Bartley, the publisher of The Marshall Project Inside, the Marshall Project’s publication intended specifically for incarcerated audiences. The guest panelists were three justice impacted folks, and one topic of conversation was opportunities provided pre-release that they felt were helpful to them post-release.

Here’s what’s interesting about this conversation:

One of the panelists was one of my former students from the DC DOC who’s been home for a whopping five weeks or so. He completed course work and passed his certification exams to be an AWS Cloud Practioner in our pilot partnership with APDS and AWS while he was at the DC jail. He got a job offer pre-release from APDS, which of course he accepted. He had a meaningful job with a sustainable living wage waiting on him. Remember my post about The Trouble With Halfway Houses? Well, he’s yet to start that job because of trouble with the halfway house, although they did finally approve his employment the day before he was supposed to travel to San Diego for his inaugural retreat. This is all fodder for another time, though. The point is, that as he talked about his pre-release opportunities, he had none during his time spent in the FBOP, but at the DC jail during my and my team’s tenure, his opportunities were many and varied. When it came to telling the crowd what he’d been able to achieve on his APDS tablet, he finally gave up and just said, “Really, anything I wanted to learn was available to me.”

The other panelists talked about their struggles in pre-release preparation. One was allowed to work construction, office, and clerical jobs for 25 cents to a dollar an hour, but if you had a job, you weren’t allowed to enroll in education. So the prison forced her to choose. She thought the job experience would be the most valuable, but that turned out to be less than true. The other panelist talked about how getting a college education would be helpful during confinement. They talked mostly about opportunities lost. And the young man working now for APDS just finally said, “Man. I’m sorry you guys didn’t have the same opportunities I had. That tablet and the education staff who were helping us were everything. Everybody should have those opportunities.”

Indeed. It seems like a no-brainer that when we, as a society, talk about reducing recidivism and post-release success that we should be talking about what needs to happen for that to be true. Nothing comes from nothing. We can’t expect folks to miraculously make better choices when we give them no tools to know what that looks like, sounds like, and feels like.

Virtual education platforms increase the number of people that can be served in prisons and jails. Certified educators who are compassionate and diligent are invaluable. Offering in-person as well as synchronous and asynchronous programming is essential. If we aren’t going to teach people how they can do better, then give them the opportunity to practice, we can’t expect it as an outcome.

Post-release success is dependent on pre-release success.

And for goodness sakes, let’s make some noise about the inefficient ways in which we send folks home.

That’s a topic for a few hundred future blog posts. Stay tuned. :)

All in all, it was a very good week for me. I hope yours was the same. If so, then tip your coffee cup to honor your fabulous self for navigating such a stellar journey, and if it was less than stellar, tip your coffee cup to honor your fabulous self for navigating THAT and look at you, still standing.

If you want to toss around ideas about how to increase opportunities for incarcerated students, give me a shout here.

Cheers, Navigation Warriors.