Dave
It was cold that morning and still dark at seven. The sun wouldn’t rise for another half an hour, and even then it wouldn’t lighten the sky beyond a steely gray. It had rained on and off the night before, and the pavement was slick and puddled. Dave wasn’t dressed for the raw weather. He wore khakis, tennis shoes, and a light windbreaker, clothes he selected from the “dress out” shelf in the prison. He hadn’t worn anything other than prison blues—baggy jeans and a navy T-shirt—in thirty-four years. Today, February 4, 2019, was the first time he’d been on the other side of the penitentiary walls since he had been transported to a local medical clinic for hernia repair surgery more than fifteen years before. He remembered a lot about that long-ago day: how the prison transport van parked next to a brand-new Cadillac CTS in the clinic’s lot—Dave loved cars; how the attending nurse had brought him a warmed blanket—it brought tears to his eyes; how one of the guards in the van let him look at his smartphone—the first mobile device he’d ever seen; how, on the way back that afternoon, the guard did him the kindness of not shackling and manacling him. He thought of it as a kindness, but really, what threat did he pose a few hours post-op, in pain, with stitches in his groin? He wasn’t allowed to recover at the clinic. He had to go back inside and walk up three flights of concrete stairs to the infirmary.
He remembered all of this, but he couldn’t remember the date of this excursion, or even the exact year. “Time is different in prison,” he told me. What he meant is that you keep track of it, obsessively, but then you lose track of it too, sometimes quite purposefully. He wrote about the surgery, but once he was out, in those weeks after February 4, he threw out his journals. They were too painful for him to reread, he said. But on this February day, there was no pain, only excitement. And confusion. And fear. Dave’s first parole hearing had been back in 2004. Now, a decade and a half later, he had gained release. He had big plans—graduate school, a late-life career in counseling for ex-offenders, home ownership, a loving relationship with Kevin, who had been his cellmate and had been released eight years before.
That was who was waiting for him at the entrance to the prison, Kevin. They had corresponded regularly since the man had left prison. He had visited Dave. They had talked about the future, their future. They had saved money to start a life together. In preparation for Dave’s release, Kevin had gotten him a cell phone and added him to his plan. There were three others waiting by the door to welcome Dave that morning, two friends from inside with a bit of free-world time under their belts and a man named Roger Martin, an eighty-five-year-old, six-term state legislator who had been volunteering in the prison for years. It was still dark outside when they walked together to the parking lot outside the prison and drove west three blocks, past the Hall of Strains cannabis dispensary and the Plaid Pantry and the Graveyard Bar to Sybil’s Omelettes, a breakfast joint that was the traditional first stop for the newly released. The guys inside talked about Sybil’s all the time. At the table waiting for Dave were two more people, an octogenarian friend of Martin’s and another long-time prison volunteer, a retired mental health professional who had known Dave for years.
Dave worked hard to maintain outward equanimity. Three decades behind bars had taught him how to feel one thing and show another. Plus he was a man long accustomed to keeping secrets. There was noise from the kitchen, doors swinging open and closed, plates and silverware clicking, people sitting down, getting up, busboys moving from table to table. So much activity, so much movement. People were talking around the table, asking him questions, laughing. He tried to study the menu. It offered so many choices that his brain shut down. The waitress leaned over to ask him what he wanted. It was so much. It was too much. Like an amusement park funhouse, he thought later, when he could think again. But at least he was not alone trying to negotiate everything by himself, like those participants in the reentry simulation.
The trip to the city that would be his new home was harrowing. His former cellie and, he hoped, his future partner, drove fast, or so it seemed to Dave. They were on the freeway, the scenery zipping by so quickly that Dave got carsick. He had that same disoriented feeling he had had in the restaurant, that he was on some kind of carnival ride—thrilling, wild, terrifying. His friend delivered him to the main campus of Sponsors, the reentry nonprofit that was offering Dave transitional housing for ninety days. He would be provided shelter and food, be case-managed, and have access to resources and support as he navigated his new reality. Sponsors was part of the burgeoning “reentry industry,” a reaction to the flood of those released from incarceration without the benefit of meaningful and sustained rehabilitation programs that would prepare them for their new lives. In the absence of these programs, the responsibility had shifted to small local agencies and nonprofits. The good news —if good news can be extracted from this situation—is that from 1995 to 2010, the number of reentry services organizations and criminal justice agencies increased 300 percent. The bad news is that they compete for meager state and federal funds. They compete for donor dollars and community volunteers. They are often underfunded and understaffed.
Sponsors had agreed to take Dave in, even though he did not commit his crime in that county, which was usually one of the prerequisites for getting the services. The agency’s director, a dynamo named Paul Solomon, who’d served a stint behind bars himself, sometimes made exceptions for lifers like Dave, men who had been in so long that the transition to uncaged life was particularly challenging. Dave’s room would be larger than his cell, with a comfortable bed and an unbarred window that opened and closed. There was a communal kitchen, where he could prepare his meals, and a living room that was shared with a dozen or so other recently released men housed in the unit. He could choose when and what to eat. He could leave the campus, take a bus to appointments or just to explore. He could have coffee at Starbucks. But there was also a curfew and bed checks, random urine analyses for drugs, a daily schedule of programming, and the enforced expectation that he would, within ninety days, find a job and be ready to move on. It was, in many ways, an institutional setting. But for someone so new to the free world, it was a necessary first—and big—step on the reentry path.
Within his first twenty-four hours out, Dave had met the Sponsors staff, conferred with his case manager, checked in with his parole officer, and taken a bus to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get an official photo ID. The only one he had was from prison. The next morning, with the help of Sponsors staff in the computer-equipped Reentry Resource Center, he went online for the very first time. Nothing was intuitive; nothing came easily. But with assistance, he managed to apply for SNAP benefits and health insurance. When the insurance came through he could get his eyes tested for the first time in years. He needed new glasses. He could go to the dentist. He knew how bad his teeth were. That afternoon he took a bus to Goodwill where he bought a new wardrobe. Nothing blue. With support and guidance right from the start, he was able to get more accomplished in those three days after release than most of the reentry simulation participants managed in their constructed month.
***
Dave knew he was fortunate to land at Sponsors, but he didn’t realize how fortunate. Back in the early 2000s, Urban Institute’s From Prison to Home report had called for an approach to reentry that focused on a holistic coordinated continuum of services located within the community. This was echoed by Jeremy Travis, former director of the National Institute of Justice and an expert on reentry challenges, who called for “a seamless set of systems that span boundaries of prison and community.” But most who transition from caged to free do so without thoughtful and informed guidance. Many exit prison with no support and nowhere to go. They’ve got a trash bag full of belongings, a bus ticket, and maybe some gate money. They are understandably jittery, anxious, fearful—and also exhilarated, an overwhelming rush of feelings known as “gate fever.” The experience is at once thrilling and debilitating. And often lonely.
The Boston Reentry Study, part of Harvard sociology professor Bruce Western’s important and ongoing work on the experiences of those released from prison, found that in the first week after release, about 40 percent of the more than one hundred respondents the research team was tracking described feelings of anxiety or panic. (Consider that the designers of the reentry simulation found it necessary to provide on-site counseling for their sometimes distressed participants, who were merely playing a part and not actually living the experience.) Those in the Boston study reported anxiety when using public transport and in crowded places like stores. They avoided people. Western used the words “despair” and “isolation” to describe their state of mind. In a similar study of those released from a Michigan prison, a man named DeAngelo, interviewed by the Berkeley and Michigan researchers studying reentry and reintegration, said this about his experience out the gate: “My first day was the worst ever. The hardest, and the most intense challenge for me…was the anxiety… It’s not just a jittery nervousness. It’s like…you’re just scared shitless…overwhelmed with just life.” He and twenty-one others were part of the ambitious sociological analysis presented in the 2019 book On the Outside. DeAngelo had a lot going for him. He was picked up outside the prison by a supportive girlfriend. He was only twenty-seven at the time. He had been behind bars for less than five years. And still, the shock was visceral. Startlingly, or perhaps not, other researchers studying inmates released from Washington state institutions found that the former prisoners’ mortality rate during their first two weeks out was thirteen times greater than a matched cohort who had never been imprisoned.
In interview after interview chronicled in On the Outside, the released prisoners talk about their overwhelmingly positive hopes and expectations for their future. This turns out to be both a good and a bad thing. Optimism can fuel change. It can spur what psychologists call “self-efficacy,” confidence in one’s ability to take control, to make things happen, to change and grow. But these prerelease hopes can also set the bar so impossibly high that moderate success can feel like stagnation, and a slipup can feel like abject failure. Maybe that accounts for some of those post-incarceration deaths noted in the Washington state study or the quick reversion to alcohol and drug use that can scuttle any chances at making a new life. Vicki was well acquainted with that path.
Vicki
It was a Friday in April 2017. She doesn’t remember the exact day. This would seem odd. A release date is long anticipated and planned for, circled on a calendar, starred in a journal. But Vicki had been in and out so many times that she had lost track of the particulars. She remembers it was cold and dark. She was wearing ill-fitting clothing from the free box. She waited outside the gate for a Department of Corrections shuttle van to the Greyhound station. She didn’t want Steve, the man who had stuck by her for decades, to have to drive four hours up the freeway to pick her up. She and another woman waited together, jittery, shivering, silent. They waited for the shuttle for what seemed like a long time. The ride into town to the bus station took forever. And then there was a long wait for the bus. And the six hours, with stops along the way, to get home. She read a book. She wrote in her journal. Everything was slow, but everything was also fast. She was on edge the whole time, barely holding it together. Steve met her at the bus station, another reunion, another chance. Vicki felt this time was going to be different.
She had a home to come home to—Steve owned a somewhat-worse-for-wear 1970s ranch in a safe neighborhood—but she had no plan, no services lined up to help with her transition. And most important, no help with her addiction. Or rather, addictions. Like three-quarters of those in prison, she had a long history of substance abuse. Fewer than one-third receive treatment while behind bars. Vicki had long admitted to the meth addiction. Meth was, with her street family and in prison, an “acceptable” addiction. But heroin, her twin addiction, was another thing. In her world, heroin addicts were losers. She never told anyone, including Steve about the heroin. She’d been clean in prison. She thought she could stay clean on the outside.
A few months later, she was back in custody for drug theft: pain pills, opioids she may or may not have needed for back pain. She was out again in late fall 2019. This time she got herself released directly to the inpatient drug program where I first met her and became her mentor. It was a substance abuse and treatment center, a residential facility for women with a full range of therapeutic services, mental health counseling, support groups, and mandatory classes in relapse prevention. Here she could work with a counselor to develop a treatment plan and a list of specific goals. Meeting those goals might take two months, or three, or more. She vowed to stick with it. Being honest about her hidden addiction was key. So was getting an official ADHD diagnosis that would allow for therapeutic treatment and prescription medication instead of the meth she used to self-medicate.
The rehab facility was tucked into a quiet, modest residential neighborhood near a park. She would live in a small, two-person room in a locked dorm. She would live a controlled, tightly structured life not unlike the one she had been used to in prison, with twenty-four hour monitoring, bed checks, drug tests, and daily accountability. Wake-up was at seven, meals served at seven-thirty, noon, and five in the small cafeteria. From nine to four she would follow a set schedule that included cognitive behavioral therapy sessions, debriefings with her counselor, group therapy sessions, doctor appointments, trauma healing activities, art therapy workshops, classes, and required homework assignments. She could leave the facility to participate in drug court, a county-supervised program of monitoring, oversight, and coordinated treatment for drug offenders with long criminal histories. She could also sign out to spend time with an assigned community mentor (that was me) for what the prison system called “prosocial activities.” For us that meant working out at my gym, going to a craft fair, hanging out drinking coffee, taking walks.
She stayed with it, going to every appointment, trying to learn something new from the relapse prevention classes, taking advantage of special opportunities like weekly acupuncture sessions. When she felt overwhelmed, she calmed herself by coloring in a kids’ book she carried in her purse, a suggestion from her therapist. She quit tobacco and transitioned to vaping. Her confidence grew. If she could control the addictions, she told herself that she could permanently exit “the life,” a life that not only included the drugs but also the crimes committed to support the drugs.
She could have “coined out”—graduated from the program by receiving a special coin—by Christmas, but she asked to stay another month. It was hard not to be home, especially for the holidays. But this time she was, she told herself, finally going to learn the lesson she had been failing to learn for decades. She realized now that she needed help. She needed to admit and own her mistakes. She needed to truly change. Being at home meant everyday exposure to her old life. Being at home meant facing the trauma and chaos her life had inflicted on her two now-adult children. And then there was Steve. He had stayed with her all these years. Had that support, that safety net, also enabled the life she had been leading? She refused to think about that.
Trevor
Seventeen years, six months, and three days after he was imprisoned for murder, at age fourteen, Trevor emerged from the maximum security penitentiary that had been his home all of his adult life. He was wearing a state-issue T-shirt and a thin jacket he had gotten from the prison’s supply of street clothing. He had been given twenty-four-hours notice about the release. His case was a complicated one, and his release this chilly February morning was both controversial and contentious. He had been sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after thirty years. But at his Second Look hearing that allowed for juvenile offenders to be considered for early release once they had served half of their original sentence, a long list of character witnesses testified to his rehabilitation. A judge listened, agreed, and ordered his release. But the state appealed, and for more than a year had fought to keep Trevor behind bars while the appeal was pending. The state lost. Now, today, this morning, Trevor was free.
He might have had only a day’s notice about the release, but he had been preparing for that day for most of his time in prison, worked his way into a top job in the prison, showing determination, leadership, and an ability to navigate both the system itself and the culture it created. He had a quick mind, ambition without ego, and—nurtured by his extraordinary mother and his half brother, who was his codefendant and cellmate—he had a belief in his own power to remake his life.
His mother, Karen, should have been there this morning to meet him at the gate. She had uprooted her life, ended her marriage, changed her career, and become a prison reform activist to support Trevor and his older brother. This was the moment she had worked for and dreamed about for years. Instead, because the release was so contentious with the state still jockeying for position, Trevor was released directly into the custody of his parole officer who drove him to the county’s parole office where he was fitted with a GPS ankle monitor. His mother and his attorney were waiting for him there and were able to see him for a few minutes before they were told to leave. It would take all morning for Trevor to be processed. He had an hour-long psych evaluation at the office. There were questions to answer, forms to read and sign, restrictions and rules to learn about. It felt surreal. He was out. But was he? He was “in the world,” but right now that world was still the controlled, rule-bound world he had known since he was fourteen. He spent more than three hours in that office, full of both uncertainty and wonder. There was a chance the court could reverse his release. There was a chance he could go back.
It was early afternoon when his parole officer drove him to his mother’s house. That’s when it began to sink in. There was another person in the house besides Karen. It was Loraine, the young woman he had met while in prison. Karen had connected with the girl and honored the relationship. In fact, she had taken Loraine in, giving her a place to stay while she attended a local community college. Trevor spent a long time walking through the house, slowly, room by room, in an odd state between hyperalertness and somnambulance. It surprised him how low the ceilings were, how small the spaces. His cell had been closet sized, but all the other spaces he had inhabited for more than a decade and a half were institutional—the cavernous laundry facility, the high school gym–sized activities floor, the echoing chow hall. Karen watched her son as he worked to make sense of his new surroundings. Then she asked if he wanted to go out for lunch. It had been a very long morning at the parole office. It would be good to get outside, to be part of the wider world. Trevor said no. A police car was parked in front of the house. Daily surveillance was part of the parole plan, at least for a while. Trevor did not want to be tailed by a cop car. Instead, Karen went by herself to pick up some sub sandwiches. For dinner that night she made one of Trevor’s favorites: pot roast.
The next morning they drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles where Trevor took—and effortlessly passed—his permit test. Driving was a very big deal to him. He had a street-legal motorcycle when he was thirteen. He had, in fact, at thirteen, taken the bike for a spin on the interstate and gotten a ticket from an astonished highway patrol officer. When, permit in hand, he got behind the wheel of his mother’s car, it all came back to him: the freedom, the speed, the open road. He couldn’t wait to get on a motorcycle again, but he would have to. He needed to pass another test for that. Until that happened, there was no chance he would risk a violation. So he contented himself with the lesser thrill of being behind the wheel of a car. Together, he and his mother drove around town taking care of the business of rejoining the world. He bought a phone, opened a bank account, shopped for clothes. With his mother’s help, and his mother’s car, his own sense of urgency coupled with his self-nurtured motivation, he accomplished those first important tasks of reentry—the ones that stymied the simulation participants—in short order.
He wanted to truly start living his new life, but he couldn’t. The supervision he was under was intense, the strictest possible. Beginning in the 1970s, the focus of the parole system had shifted from assistance to surveillance. Trevor had to report to his parole officer in person every weekday. On weekends, the local police came by his mother’s house to check on him. This level of surveillance, in addition to the ankle monitor, was not just because of the early release but also, he was told, for his own protection. He was getting threats and hate mail. You’re a piece of garbage. You don’t deserve to be free. The police were concerned someone might track him down and try to harm him. Meanwhile Trevor was also concerned that the state was not finished with him. The district attorney was contemplating another challenge to the second-chance release. The rug might be pulled out from under him. His parole could be revoked. In fact, it was not until late 2018, almost two and a half years later, that all the litigation was finalized and Trevor could be sure of his future.
Catherine
Prisoners are usually released from Lowell Correctional Institution at nine in the morning, but Catherine was released at midnight. The authorities were concerned that her release would turn the parking lot into a media circus. Even after seventeen years, both her crime and her sentence remained notorious. In 1999, after she and her brother, thirteen and twelve at the time, had shot and killed their father’s live-in girlfriend, they became the youngest murderers ever to be tried and sentenced as adults. They pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were each sentenced to eighteen years. Now “under cover of darkness”—that’s the way she thought of it—that girl was emerging as a thirty-year-old woman.
Catherine was in the dorm, her stomach in knots, waiting for her name to be called. At five minutes past midnight, the call came. She was scared, anxious, excited, and she suddenly realized, overwhelmingly sad. She would be leaving behind the women who had become her family, who had supported her, befriended her, mothered her. She cried as she was led down the hallways to a room where she would undergo her last strip search. As she removed her prison uniform for the last time, discarding the pale blue cotton shirt and pants that looked like nurse’s scrubs, she felt enormous relief. She stripped faster than she ever had before. She actually smiled. Then she dressed in the clothes her family had brought in for her—girl clothes, summer clothes—shorts, a tank top, and sandals. As she was led through the last set of gates to the guardhouse, women from all the dorms called out to her from behind the barred windows, waving, screaming their goodbyes. Had she ever seen a prison movie, this scene would have been familiar, a cliché even. But it was real. It was happening. At the guardhouse, the processing continued. Her papers were checked. Her identity was confirmed. She received a bag with her personal items. They were called EOS items—End of Sentence. This was it.
Was it her imagination or was the air somehow different on the other side of the gates? It was a typical midsummer night in central Florida, seventy-five degrees, the air thick and sticky, yet she had the impression as she stood waiting for the machinery of the prison bureaucracy to grind along, that the air was fresh and cool. She saw her mother and father—long divorced but together for this moment—pull up in the parking lot. She wanted to run to meet them, but there were more forms, more documents. Finally, she was told she could go, and she ran, sandals flopping, to hug them both. But she broke it off quickly. She wanted to get far away from this place as fast as she could. It would be a two-hour drive home.
Twenty minutes later, they pulled over to stop at a McDonald’s. Catherine had dreamed of this moment so often: free-world food, choices, whatever she wanted. But now, faced with all those choices, she didn’t know what she wanted. Or even if she wanted anything. Finally, she chose a yogurt parfait because it had fresh fruit on top. She so desperately wanted fresh fruit. Inside there had been the occasional banana and, ironically given that Florida grew three-quarters of all the oranges in the country, hardly ever any citrus. Next to the McDonald’s was a convenience store. She wandered the aisles, in awe of all the selections, frozen with indecision. She got nothing. Back in the car, she realized she had no appetite. She ate the parfait anyway, tasting nothing. The year before, in a letter to a local newspaper, she had written that she was fearful of being released into a “foreign society” where she would have to “learn how to function like a normal person.” She was imagining, at the time, the challenges of learning to drive, to fill out job applications, to build her credit, to get insurance. She hadn’t imagined that deciding what to eat at McDonald’s or what candy bar to buy at a 7-Eleven would be on the list.
The rest of the trip back to her father’s house went quickly. She talked nonstop to her parents. They made plans to go to the beach as soon as the sun was up, but she could barely concentrate on that. Soon, now within minutes, she would see her brother Curtis—she still thought of him as her “baby brother” although he was now twenty-nine—for the first time in seventeen years. He had been released just two weeks before. So many years ago Catherine had tried to protect him from abuse in their home, abuse she also suffered. They shared that pain, that history, the crime it pushed them to commit, and the years of imprisonment that followed. She bolted out of the car, into her father’s house, and into her brother’s arms. She remembers drinking in his scent, a man’s scent now, not a boy’s. She remembers staring into his eyes, burning this memory into her brain. Their time together was limited. The next day Catherine would be on a flight to Kansas with her mother. She had transferred her probation there, away from the trauma of her girlhood home. Her brother would stay in Florida with their father.
Embracing her grandmother was next. She had come from Alabama to welcome Catherine home and had busied herself in the kitchen for hours that night cooking all of Catherine’s favorite foods, the special dishes she told her grandmother she missed most. And so, at 2:30 in the morning, the family sat down to Cornish hens, collard greens, candied yams, corn bread, and mac and cheese. This time, Catherine tasted it all. Then she, her brother, and her mother slept for a few hours in a spare room. In the morning they drove to the beach, the place she wanted to go more than anywhere else. She and Curtis splashed together in the surf, acting like kids. She still couldn’t believe she was free, that they both were free. The next day, her new life would begin in Kansas. It would be so much harder than she thought it would be.
Arnoldo
He headed for the yellow hydrant. Of course he hugged his mother first, and his brother, and his nieces, but the hydrant was on his mind. It was only after he got there, after he looked up and caught a glimpse of Sterling at the barred fourth-floor window, that he could focus on what this day meant to him.
It was a gloriously sunny mid-July morning, the sky cloudless and almost blindingly blue. His family came out to join him at the hydrant. They posed as Sterling’s wife, Cheryl, took their picture to commemorate the moment: Arnoldo, squinting into the sun, kneeling next to his pretty, long-haired niece, his arm around her waist; his mother on the other side, leaning into him, her hand resting on his shoulder; his brother bookending the shot, his brother whom he hadn’t seen in ten years. They looked a lot alike, both with sturdy athletic builds, both with clean-shaven heads. He wished his sister could be there too, part of this picture. But she had given birth just four days before.
His was, in many ways, a dream release. He had a supportive family waiting for him and not just a physical place to go—his mother’s house—but an emotional soft landing. And he was not nervous about the transition. He had prepared for it, not so much with services or workshops offered by the prison—meager at best—but rather with his own research over the years. When men who had been released came back, he talked to them about what problems they had, what they experienced, why they hadn’t made it on the outside. He educated himself about the pitfalls.
The most important thing was being with his family. As they headed back from the hydrant to the prison’s parking lot, his brother suggested going to a restaurant. But Arnoldo wanted to go home, to his mother’s home, to eat his mother’s cooking. They had a meal of tacos, nothing fancy, but Arnoldo savored it. Then they all headed off to his sister’s house to meet his four-day-old niece.
He didn’t do a lot those first few days, just chilled. It was all a little surreal. But it wasn’t the shock of being free and being with his family. It was the shock of how completely at home he felt, how he seemed to just slip back into life as if he were never gone, as if those nineteen years had just evaporated. He had had an epiphany when he hugged his mother in the penitentiary’s waiting room. As a kid in eastern Oregon, he had always felt he was living in a foreign land. Texas was home, that rich Hispanic culture of his early childhood was home. But when he hugged his mother in the waiting room, in that moment, he knew that home wasn’t a place. Home was people. He was with his people now. He was home.
At his mother’s house he had his own room with a brand-new queen bed. He hadn’t stretched out in so long he had to teach his body how to fully occupy this vast, new sleeping space. All those years in prison in that single cot with the thin plastic mattress, he had learned to sleep on his side. The pillows were fluffy. The blanket was soft. He slept well that first night and every night thereafter. He defined it, remembered it, as sleeping “well,” but really he slept only two hours a night. His sense of freedom awoke him. He lay in that comfortable bed thinking to himself I can get out of bed and walk out the door any time I want to. And the urge was just too great. So he got out of bed. He walked around the house. He walked to the front door and opened it. He didn’t think of this as insomnia or anything negative. In fact, he enjoyed the wakefulness. He loved that there was a place to go from the bed. In segregation, where he had lived on and off for twelve years, he did everything in bed. It was where he slept, where he read, where he sat to eat.
When he was conducting his own research about post-release life, talking to guys who had not been successful, he learned that the biggest problem they faced was having too much free time. You revert to old behaviors, they told him. It’s hard to find a job, and without a job there is no structure to the day. Sitting alone during those first days in his mother’s house while she worked where she had worked for the past twenty years, an Alzheimer’s facility, he created his own structure. He cleaned her house. Really cleaned it. He scoured everything. He scrubbed the floors. He went through her closets and gathered six bags of clothing and household items that he dropped off at Goodwill. He did yard work. He did this all to stay busy, to stay sane, and because it was the only contribution he could make at the moment. She was providing a home. She was providing food. And she was working full time at a physically demanding job. Although he also created a daily exercise regimen for himself that included a morning run through a nearby park, he worked on his mother’s house because it felt safer to be indoors. This strategy of isolation to deal with—or avoid—the potential stress of social interaction is one remarked on by the released prisoners interviewed in the On the Outside study. Arnoldo lived at this mother’s house for three months. He began, slowly, to make a life for himself. He thought of Sterling, inside, for who knew how much longer.