They line up outside Bethel Lutheran, a big, prosperous church just down the street from the capitol building in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. It’s a few minutes before six in the evening. There’s a woman with her young son in tow, a nurse, a man who owns an apartment rental agency in town, a group of grad students from the university, a psychologist, a trio of older women who belong to the church, a store owner, two colleagues who work in social services, a retired cop. It’s a long line, more than fifty people tonight. As they enter, each is handed a folder with a name written on it. It is not their name. It is the name of a fictitious person whose identity they will assume this evening. These fictitious people are just-released prisoners: men, women; Black, white, brown; short-timers who’ve been in and out of county jail, lifers who spent three decades behind bars. Some have children in foster care; a few are sex offenders. Several have parents who will welcome them home. Many more have no one waiting for them. The biographies may be contrived for the purpose of tonight’s exercise, but they represent the realities of those being released from prison. This evening’s event, a simulation originally created twenty years ago by JustDane, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit, and since presented in church basements and university classrooms and corporate conference rooms throughout the Midwest, will challenge the participants to complete the set of reentry tasks that routinely face those just released. It’s a “walk a mile in my shoes” exercise that is both harrowing and instructive, an hour-long immersion designed to both foster empathy and spur community action.
This evening’s participants make their way down to the church basement. They eat a buffet dinner, chat with each other, watch a documentary about a released prisoner, listen to a short speech, and then sift through the papers and documents in their folders. They find birth certificates and Social Security cards, travel vouchers, gate money (a sum given upon release) that varies from $40 to $2,000 depending on circumstance. Some find driver’s licenses in their packets. A few lucky ones have notices of jobs waiting for them; a few unlucky ones discover that they will be on restrictive electronic monitoring (ankle bracelets). Some packets contain court decrees that obligate the person to pay child support or letters instructing them to make victim restitution payments. In all of the folders are documents detailing the conditions of the individual’s parole, from required check-ins to drug tests to mandatory treatments. And all contain a list of tasks to be completed. The participant-parolees will have one hour to complete these tasks. That hour represents one month—the first month—following release. The simulation is divided into four timed fifteen-minute (one-week) segments. A large, audibly ticking clock in the middle of the room counts down the minutes.
Around the perimeter of the large room are rectangular conference tables, each with a sign representing a different service, from a community health clinic to the Division of Motor Vehicles, from a resale clothing store to a credit union. There’s a rental agency, a parole office, a job center, a church, a paycheck cashing establishment. United Way has a table. Alcoholics Anonymous has another. A diverse group of volunteers staff these tables, from people who work in social services to people who have spent time in prison, from college students to members of the church’s congregation. Unlike the participant-parolees, they have all been trained in what to do. Many are veterans of other simulations. In the hallway outside the large room are tables labeled “County Jail” and “Police Station.”
A whistle blows to begin week one. Clutching their folders, the parolees rush—or try to rush—from table to table. Should they get their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) food benefits first? But, wait, they need to cash that gate check. A few go to the credit union desk but find the minutes ticking away as they are asked to fill out lengthy forms. Others make their way to the paycheck cashing desk, where they will be charged a premium for the service. When asked to present their ID to cash the check, several discover that the driver’s license they were given in the folder has expired. They have to go to the DMV table. But there is a long line there. And as they are waiting to get to the front of the line, the clock runs out.
The whistle blows, ending the first segment. During that first “week” hardly anyone managed to check in with their parole officer, no one looked for a job, no one had time to go to the clinic to fill prescriptions for necessary medication. No one was able to find time to go to an AA meeting or attend mandatory treatment.
The whistle begins segment two. Anyone on electronic monitoring must stay in their seats for the first two of the ten minutes, a disadvantage that mirrors the difficulties of ankle monitors in real life. These monitors track the wearer’s movements by sending GPS coordinates to their parole officer. If the wearer leaves a specific geographic area, an alert goes out, which could trigger a parole violation or the imposition of even more restrictive geographic boundaries. This can complicate navigating an unfamiliar place, taking buses that might stray outside boundaries, following up leads on jobs.
The others rush out, hoping to accomplish more than they did the first week. At the rental agency table, one person is turned away because he has no rental history. Another is turned away because she doesn’t have the necessary funds for the common upfront payments of first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and damage deposit. Both have been waiting in line for precious minutes.
Meanwhile “police” roam the room, arresting some people for parole violations (not checking in with their parole officer, not attending treatment, not looking for a job). A few participants are arrested “mistakenly.” All have to spend valuable minutes in the hallway police station, unable to accomplish anything. Their folders are taken away so they cannot use the time to plan or strategize. When the whistle blows again and week two is over, few have accessed any of the mental health and social services that might be able to help them. The lines are so long. The “distance” between one office and another eats up the minutes. They have run out of travel vouchers.
When week three begins, a “choice” character roams the room, arbitrarily stopping participants, demanding that each pick a card. The cards represent random good and bad luck, mostly bad: Your belongings were stolen from the halfway house. You injured yourself. Your brother kicked you out of his apartment. A lucky person gets a $100 bill. A few feet away, a “cop” arrests someone waiting in line for a housing voucher for nonpayment of child support. The room is noisy. No one is smiling. Everyone is either waiting on a too-long line or rushing from one desk to another. At the end of week three, almost all of the participants are still wearing their prison-release clothes. There has been no time to go to the resale shop.
It’s a game, but several participant-parolees are now in tears. The organization running the simulation actually has real counselors in the room to help with such not uncommon meltdowns. I’m doing everything, and it’s just not working. This isn’t fair. This is a rigged system. I don’t have time. There are too many rules. The enforcement is too tough. The service providers are so busy they can’t help.
The final whistle blows, signaling the end of the fourth week. During that hour a handful of people were able to complete all the tasks on their lists. Of the many who did not, a sizable percentage just gave up trying.
***
A week after debriefing with Jackie Austin, a veteran prison reform activist and mover-and-shaker at the nonprofit that runs the simulations, I am texting with Leah. Leah was just released from prison after serving two years. I have signed on to be her community mentor, part of a program run by a local nonprofit. What was a simulation game is now playing out in real time in front of me.
Leah is a thirty-nine-year-old white woman from what used to be called “the wrong side of the tracks,” but in this case would be the wrong side of the freeway. Her mother didn’t teach her much, but she did teach her about addiction. As in how to be an addict. Meth was the mother-daughter drug of choice. It landed the daughter in prison after a chaotic, dysfunctional marriage during which her two children were taken from the home and placed in foster care. And it landed the mother in the morgue. The mother didn’t die of an overdose. She died of a lifestyle. She was crossing a busy four-lane highway on a winter night, not in the crosswalk, to go to a liquor store. In an incident that sounds like the plot of a bad movie, she was struck not once but twice, both hit-and-runs. One car, driven by an eighty-six-year-old woman, was soon apprehended; the other by a seventy-six-year-old man who, a week later, committed suicide. Leah had written to me about her mother’s death. It happened six months before the release. She thought she might have a meltdown after she got out, but she also confessed that she was “relieved” about her mother’s death because it would make staying clean easier.
And now she is out. And the messiness and tumult that was her life—and her mother’s—has followed her out the gate. I hear about it in a phone call so intimate and revealing that you’d think we were close friends instead of two strangers who’ve exchanged a few letters. As she tells me about the obstacles she encountered immediately—within hours of her release—I think about the community members in the basement of that Wisconsin church, clutching their assumed identity file folders, rushing from table to table trying to check all the reentry boxes, access the services that are out there, keep themselves on track. Leah thought she’d have a week to get herself settled in the temporary women’s housing provided by a local reentry agency. Instead, minutes after she arrived, her ex-husband dropped off her two children, six and nine, along with a garbage bag full of their dirty clothes, which, she tells me, didn’t fit them anyway. She had no clothes either, other than the ones she wore out the gate. They were several sizes too big. She had lost almost fifty pounds in prison.
Another woman at the housing unit told her the city buses were no longer in service because of the pandemic, which was not true (in fact, the buses were now operating free of charge), so she started walking with the kids to Walmart, a three-mile trek by the side of a busy highway. The kids lasted about ten minutes before she had to turn back. That was only a part of the tale of her first afternoon, which also included an aborted attempt to get SNAP food benefits and misleading advice about applying to the TANF program (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). The world of social services is replete with acronyms. The acronym agencies each have their own application processes and forms, their own requirements and deadlines. Leah, without a computer, was trying to navigate all this on the tiny screen of her new phone. She had the cheapest plan, the only one she could afford, and data downloading was an issue.
This was a woman who went into reentry with advantages. She had been behind bars for only two years. Although the COVID-19 world she entered was alien to her, the way the world generally worked was not. Unlike Belinda, the woman paroled after two decades who I had hoped to be able to help more than five years earlier, Leah knew how to text and Google. She knew that cards and swipes had long ago replaced cash and checks. And thanks to the local nonprofit, Leah had, at least temporarily, a roof over her head, a room in a house especially established for women with young children. She could feed herself and her kids. She would have to donate her SNAP benefits, whenever she could arrange to start receiving them, to the house’s food budget, but for now the nonprofit would cover the cost. Amid the tension and confusion and uncertainty of this day, the nerves, the fear, the excitement, Leah was in a better place than many who set off on the reentry path.
***
Reentry is—and this cannot be repeated too often—both a perilous and an exhilarating journey. The release date, the promise of freedom, and the anticipation of a new life, all fuel the exhilaration. Most people leave prison with high hopes. The level of optimism is actually quite astonishing given the inmates’ lack of resources and connections and what they know, because they’ve seen it firsthand, about recidivism. All those prison friends who left and then returned. Yet, in the Urban Institute’s Returning Home study, three-quarters of those asked said they thought reentering was going to be “very easy” or “pretty easy.” And what researchers considered a “staggering” 42.3 percent “strongly agreed” (and another 37 percent “agreed”) that a former prisoner could make it if he or she wanted to. The American Dream, the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches myth, is alive and well behind iron bars.
But reentry is neither “very easy” nor “pretty easy.” Once released, most people encounter obstacles big and small, foreseen and unforeseen, obstacles that can fast-track them back to prison. That’s what the simulation is all about. But there is another side to this. In facing these same obstacles, in dealing with and overcoming them, a person can learn persistence, resilience, and self-confidence. To understand this complicated reentry journey is to understand what it takes to remake a ruined life, to live what University of Michigan historian Charles Bright called “the corrected life.” Most of those who succeed do so without the resources the rest of us take for granted, the economic and social “capital” that we have acquired over time. And many do so when who they are—poor, uneducated, often unskilled, sometimes in poor health, and disproportionately a member of an already marginalized minority group —is the biggest obstacle of all. Or when their own traumatic backstories of abuse, addiction, homelessness, or gang affiliation conspire against successful reentry.
What success looks like from the outside is stable housing, a living-wage job, and healthy relationships. What it looks like from the inside may be just the ability to fall into a restful sleep, to get up every morning and not reach for the pipe or the needle, to navigate the aisles of a grocery store without suffering a panic attack. Whatever success is, it begins with the simplest of things, right out the gate: transportation from prison to the community; clothing that fits and does not look like you just got out of jail; a little money so that your first act of freedom will not be asking your family for a handout or spare-changing on the street.
Most states have some policy about handing released prisoners gate money, from Alabama’s $10 to Colorado’s $100 to California’s $200. The average is $40 to $50, according to a report from The Marshall Project. California’s seemingly generous amount has not increased since the 1970s. In many cases, prisoners are receiving their own money back, funds taken from prison wages and put into a separate account or money family had deposited in their commissary accounts. If no transportation is provided and there is no family support, the first cost will be paying for a way to get off the prison grounds. Family support has its own costs. One inmate, inside for ten years, spent his entire gate check in his first hour out when he took his wife for dinner at Applebee’s. She had picked him up at the gate. She had stuck with him all these years. She had sent money to his account. It was a gesture he needed to make. And then he was broke.
Some states have programs to help with reentry; others have nothing. In some cities and counties nonprofit agencies offer resources like temporary housing, food banks, job boards. Getting out of prison only to land on the streets, homeless and hungry, is the quickest way to go right back in. But just as there are food deserts with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, there are reentry resources deserts, especially in smaller towns and rural areas, with few or no support services.
And simply providing services—although this is anything but simple—is sometimes not the answer or not the definitive one. In 2008, the Second Chance Act awarded federal grants to government agencies and nonprofits to provide employment assistance, substance abuse treatment, temporary housing, family programs, and mentoring services. It seemed like a recipe for success, a way to take the wind out of the sails of recidivism. Ten years later, in a report to the National Institute of Justice based on interviews with almost a thousand ex-prisoners at eight different sites that had gotten the grants, researchers found that those receiving the enhanced services were more likely to have a reentry plan and a case manager they trusted. They reported more stable employment and higher earnings. But surprisingly—or perhaps not—they were no less likely to be rearrested than those who did not receive these services. Reentry is not about checking the boxes. It is far more complex.
One reason (among many) that the Second Chance Act grants failed to make the hoped-for difference is that meaningful help with reentry needs to begin far in advance of release. That’s what the research indicates. But prisons in some states have no such programs. Others have programs that are not well advertised or promoted within the institution or have particular restrictions on eligibility. In some institutions, like the one Arnoldo emerged from, the programs are oversimplified, superficial—and optional. “I had no idea how unprepared I was for freedom,” wrote ACLU strategist and ex-con Lewis Conway. “I thought it was going to be as simple as the woman that taught the prerelease class said it would be.”
The Vera Institute of Justice reports that today most prisons run limited programs on anger management and drug addiction, often a vital piece of the reentry puzzle, but that only a minority of prisons run college programs. This is in the face of Department of Justice findings that every dollar spent on education in prison translates into four dollars saved on incarceration. Education can lead to better job opportunities, more stable employment, and higher wages, not to mention helping to write a new narrative for the “corrected life.” The Vera Institute also reports that only 9 percent of inmates earn either a trade school certificate or a college degree while in prison.
Employment, as steady as possible, as soon as possible, paves the way to successful reentry. But getting a job can depend on having an address and, of course, a phone number. How likely is this if a person is released to the streets with no money and no support? Getting anything other than a pick-me-up-on-the-corner day laborer job depends, these days, on internet access and the skills to search and apply online. Again, an obstacle. Those online applications often ask for résumés that include job histories. My children learned how to write résumés in middle school. The forty-something-year-old men I work with as a volunteer at a reentry resource center—the one that matched me with Leah—didn’t have a clue. This was on top of their inexperience—and confusion—around connectivity and the online world.
Housing is an obvious—and formidable—obstacle upon reentry. Some prisoners have family that can take them in, which can be a mixed blessing. Some are fortunate enough to be released to cities or counties that have agencies offering temporary, transitional, and halfway housing. Others, as a condition of parole, are sent to in-treatment drug programs, where room and board is provided. Those who have some funds, some prospects, and some of the technical and social skills necessary for the task, can look for housing they can afford. “Afford” does not just mean the monthly rent. It most often means being able to pay first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and a damage deposit upon signing a rental agreement. Even for the most affordable, low-income apartment imaginable in most cities and towns that means upwards of $1,000. Those with no funds, no family, and no support live on the streets or in homeless shelters. With no funds, no housing, and no employment, they are unable to meet the demands of parole: paying for (and participating in) mandated treatment and programming, paying victims’ restitution costs, charges for weekly drug tests. The deck is stacked against them. As ACLU’s Conway put it, “I thought serving my time in prison was my punishment; I didn’t know I was facing a life sentence after leaving prison…for many people that’s what reentry is—a life sentence.”
This “life sentence” can be a result of the stigma we attach to those who’ve been incarcerated and, just as important, their internalization and acceptance of that stigma. That perception and self-perception is, write the sociologists who studied prisoner reentry and detailed it in On the Outside, “arguably harsher punishment than the sentence itself.”
The life sentence plays out in more definable, quantifiable ways, too, the result of what have been called “collateral consequences,” the invisible punishments that follow previously incarcerated people after their release and, sometimes, for the rest of their lives. There are, according to the American Bar Association, some 45,000 federal and state statutes and regulations that affect a convicted person’s ability to get—and stay—on their feet and to live a fully engaged life. These include everything from not always being able to qualify for SNAP benefits to not being eligible for federally funded public housing, from not qualifying for financial aid for college to not being eligible to hold public office.
The largest category of such restrictions pertains to employment. State governments require licenses for hundreds of occupations, from real estate agents to manicurists. The Bureau of Labor estimates that about one-quarter of all full-time jobs in the United States require professional licenses or government approval to practice. The opportunities for jobs or careers in law, banking, medicine, education, counseling, physical therapy, security, home healthcare, child care, and other fields can be affected. In the words of law professor and criminal justice reformer Michael Pinard: “The United States has a uniquely extensive and debilitating web of collateral consequences that continue to punish…long after the completion of sentences.”
The list of consequences continues. Legislation passed in the late 1990s intended to prevent foster kids from languishing too long in the system before being eligible for adoption has resulted in accelerating the termination of parental rights for women whose children were put into foster care when their mothers went to prison. Ex-con status also results in what is called “felony disenfranchisement.” Although casting a ballot may not be on the top of the list for those reentering society, losing the constitutional right to vote is a kind of civil death that confers second-class citizenship. Each state enacts its own felon voting laws. In nine states former prisoners may lose their right to vote permanently. In nineteen states their rights are restored after serving parole and probation. The average time on probation is five years, but some serious offenders are on lifetime parole. This exile—from participating in democracy, from parenthood, from jobs, from the everydayness of life—keeps those who are reentered from fully reentering. They are in but not of the larger society. “We keep them at a distance,” says University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee criminologist Thomas LeBel, “and avoid them entirely when we can.” He likens them to lepers.
Nick Crapser, the ex-con now working in reentry services, puts it simply: “Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever done and just print in on a T-shirt you have to wear every day of your life.”
***
The final—and the most difficult—part of reentry is the cognitive transformation, the hard work of developing, reinforcing, and maintaining this new role of a “free” person, a role some ex-prisoners have not played for decades. It is about creating and embracing a new identity. This is what Belinda was in the process of doing when she sat across from me at that steak house, texting madly in the grip of a hasty, high school–style romance.
Maybe two years after that dinner, I was giving a talk to a university audience about mass incarceration. In the lecture hall was the usual assemblage of students with a sprinkling of faculty. Six rows up, to the left, sat a woman, fortyish, but with that embattled look of someone for whom a number of those forty years had been tough going. Her hair was that particular orangey-straw color that dark hair becomes when it is mercilessly peroxided. She was wearing an oversized sweatshirt. I noticed her not only because she didn’t look like the other women in the room, but also because she alternately stared at me, hard, and then bent her head to furiously scribble notes. During the Q&A session, she stood up to introduce herself, saying that she had served twelve years in prison and had been out for two. She was now a university student, living an entirely different life. She said she had recently been at a support group for formerly incarcerated women. They sat in a circle and introduced themselves by stating their name, years out of prison, and inmate ID number—the number that is a key part of your prison identity, that gets you your mail, your pass to go to work, access to your commissary account. It is you. When it was her turn, she rattled off her name, years, number. Then caught herself. She had given her university ID number not her inmate number. “That’s when I knew,” she said, pausing, looking down. “That’s when I knew I wasn’t who I was anymore.” She paused again. “I was who I was gonna be.” The room erupted in applause. It was more applause than I had gotten at the end of my talk. And rightly so.
This new identity must be constructed, piece by piece, over time. The process involves shedding those behaviors and attitudes that worked in prison, that kept a person safe and sane, perhaps powerful and, within that setting, privileged, but that are inappropriate, counterproductive, self-defeating, and sometimes downright harmful in the community. Imagine the self-awareness that takes. The insight. The initiative. The courage. Sociologist Peggy Giordano outlined the steps toward cognitive change in groundbreaking research published back in 2002. Based on a long-term follow-up of female and male “delinquents” and their paths to what criminologists call “desistance” (cessation of offending or other antisocial behavior), she and fellow researchers identified four steps to cognitive transformation: openness to change; exposure to and receptivity to “hooks for change” (defined as environmental stimuli that are perceived as incompatible with continued criminal behavior); contemplation of alternative, noncriminal identities; redefining of criminal behavior as negative and undesirable. In other words: a complete paradigm shift, a rethinking of not only behaviors but of underlying self-image.
For some this can and does begin in prison. It happened for Sterling. It happened for Arnoldo. Maybe it’s a class or workshop they were able to take, a therapeutic group they joined, a book they read. Beginning this internal change, stepping on this path before release, can be one of the keys to successful reentry. But for too many, incarceration means the opposite: the daily reinforcement of the criminal self. There are few hooks for change inside. In a closed enclave populated by hundreds or thousands of fellow criminals, there are few alternative, noncriminal identities in evidence. There may be an openness to change, a yearning for change, an optimism about the possibility of change, but many leave prison without the tools to make that happen.
What they leave with, instead, is what mental health professionals have begun calling “post-incarceration syndrome.” Of course it has an acronym—PICS—although it is not yet officially recognized by inclusion in the bible of the field, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). PICS is a discrete subtype of PTSD that results from long-term imprisonment. It is a recognizable cluster of symptoms that behavioral therapists who work with released prisoners (and researchers who study this population) say includes depression, anxiety, panic disorder, agoraphobia, alienation, and sensory disorientation. In an in-depth study of men and women released from state institutions after an average of nineteen years, the former prisoners reported nightmares, insomnia, fear of crowds, paranoia, emotional numbness, and confusion and helplessness when faced with decisions. They talked about persistent roadblocks to forming relationships because of an inability to trust and difficulties in judging the intentions of others. They talked about profound alienation, of feeling as if they did not belong in any social setting, that the only place they belonged was back behind bars. There was also the strong sense that whatever good was happening in their post-incarceration lives was temporary, that freedom itself was temporary. The researchers suggested that the longer the period of incarceration and the more trauma experienced, the worse the symptoms.
There are, in some communities, mental health and counseling services that work specifically with released prisoners and recognize PICS. There are, in some communities, therapeutic programs and support groups. But they are siloed, each doing what it can but not in a coordinated manner, not in conjunction with one another, not as part of a carefully thought-out and managed plan. When people need help, when they are panicked or depressed, when they are unable to function, they need help right then. But the wait times for such services can be (or at least seem to be) endless. And then there is maybe the bigger hurdle to getting help, even where it exists, even where it can be timely. Prisoners have learned to be quiet, stay in line, wait in line, be compliant. That is how you get by inside. But in the free world, especially in the bureaucratic, oversubscribed world of social services, it is often—as they saying goes—the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. Waiting your turn can mean not getting a turn at all. And to be in line, even quietly, patiently waiting in line, means you have to reach out. Men, who make up more than 90 percent of those released, are, in general, far less likely than women to seek mental health counseling and support. To ask for help is to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is not a trait that works in prison.
And yet, despite all of this—the obstacles and roadblocks, societal stigmas and damning self-perceptions, the sometimes overwhelming psychological challenges, the grinding bureaucracies, the lack of resources—former felons do, in fact, reclaim their lives, live their lives. Yes, recidivism rates are distressingly high, with 68 percent of those released rearrested within three years. But that also means that reentry works for more than 30 percent of released prisoners. The glass may be two-thirds empty—those are the stories we hear the most, the ones about the ex-con who robs the neighborhood 7-Eleven within an hour of his release, the identity-thieving meth addict who picks up where she left off—but the glass is also one-third full. Thousands of men and women who have lived lives on the edge, who have done bad things, who have hurt others, are reentry successes. The few stories we hear about these people focus on those with spectacular accomplishments: the drug dealer who transforms himself into the executive chef at Caesars Palace; the forger who becomes a renowned psychotherapist; the bank robber who becomes an activist dynamo. But just as the persistent stories of recidivism feed our fear of those coming out of prison, the cherry-picked stories of the wildly successful obscure the realities of reentry. The truth—the many truths—about life after lockup is more interesting, more nuanced, and both more troubling and more deeply triumphant than these alpha and omega tales.
Meet six people whose stories help tell this nuanced tale.