What is successful reentry?
The most common measure is how many of the hundreds of thousands of men and women released from custody every year end up back in prison after a few months, or a year or two. Those who, in the parlance of the criminal justice world, “recidivate,” are reentry failures. They have not made the transition to life in the free world. By this calculation, successful reentry is elusive. Nearly half of all who are released are rearrested within the first year, and two-thirds are rearrested within the first three years. This is according to the Department of Justice. But that distressing statistic doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it does. It doesn’t mean that within just a few years 65 percent of ex-felons go out and commit another crime. It doesn’t mean once a criminal, always a criminal. In fact, technical or administrative parole violations account for a significant percent of these rearrests. The Marshall Project, a nonprofit that focuses on criminal justice issues, calls this the “misleading math of recidivism.” Technical parole violations might be serious—or might signal a serious problem—but many are not and do not. Breaking curfew, traveling without permission, changing a residence without informing a parole officer, failure to report to a parole officer, failure to pay mandated fines or fees, and failure to take or pass a drug test are all violations that can result in being sent back to prison. In many states, these arrests are lumped with arrests for the commission of new crimes.
In a report on rearrests and reconvictions conducted by the University of California Irvine’s Center for Evidence-Based Corrections, 60 percent of those rearrested in California during the period under study were arrested for technical violations. In New York, 51 percent were technical parole violators; in Texas, it was 42 percent. Those who go back to prison (the majority of those we incarcerate) have failed to reenter successfully. But that failure is more complicated and more nuanced than the recidivism statistics indicate. Many failed not because they continued to live a life of crime but rather because the road to reentry was—is—steep and rocky, full of potholes, a winding path with unmarked detours.
When researchers survey ex-felons to evaluate their post-incarceration lives, they ask: Have you found a place to live? Have you found a job? Are you clean and sober? They might ask about family. But they very rarely ask about the way life is being lived day to day, about ordinary activities, the simple ways of being and doing that most of us take for granted: The scores of small decisions we make every day, choices we face with relative ease; our casual interactions with others; our fluency in reading body language; the way we effortlessly navigate space; our composure in crowds; our curiosity about the new and novel. These are behaviors we have learned and honed and internalized as citizens of the free world. They do not come naturally to those who have spent decades behind bars, where they have learned and honed and internalized a completely different set of behaviors. The success of those who do not recidivate is most often measured by the metrics most easy to measure—housing and employment—and not by the subtler and often far more difficult to accomplish feats of psychological and psychosocial reintegration.
A constellation of learned behaviors behind bars, the cumulative effect of what social psychologist Craig Haney has called “prisonization,” makes truly successful reentry challenging in ways that are not easily computable but are deeply felt. During those decades behind bars, prisoners become accustomed to and then dependent on the structure and regimentation of the institution, the control it has over every aspect of their lives, and consequently, the lack of control they have over their own lives. In a place where there are almost no opportunities to make meaningful decisions and few opportunities to make even trivial choices, it is easy to forget how. Learned helplessness is not so easily unlearned. It is also not easy to unlearn the masking of emotions or hypervigilance, a protective strategy in a potentially violent and toxic place, but a disabling, psychologically damaging one in the free world. Nor is it easy to override an acquired and reinforced attitude of suspicion and distrust, an “us versus them” default. It is not easy to overcome—or even recognize—the cumulative trauma of witnessing or being the victim of the violent or demeaning behavior that can be the norm behind the walls. The chronic stress of life in prison can, not surprisingly, lead to PTSD, not often diagnosed and even less often treated.
The Norwegian model of incarceration is in direct contrast to all this, with decision making, community building, self-efficacy, and mutual respect at its core. Prisoners live in small units. They plan and cook their own meals. Prisoners and guards are together in activities all day, interacting and forming bonds. The director of one prison in Norway, a trained clinical psychologist, explained to a journalist from The Guardian: “If we treat people like animals when they are in prison they are likely to behave as animals. Here we pay attention to you as human beings.” Are Hoidal, another prison director, put it this way: “Every inmate in a Norwegian prison is going back to the society. Do we want people who are angry—or people who are rehabilitated?” Norway has the lowest recidivism rate in the world.
Despite its success, the Norwegian model is not likely to make inroads in the U.S. “carceral state,” as it has been called, where philosophically, politically, and economically, punishment trumps rehabilitation. The punishment of imprisonment is not just loss of freedom and separation from family, which is how the Norwegian system defines it. It is, in this country, the creation of facilities that make life as unpleasant as possible, that inflict psychological and emotional—and too often physical—harm. We want those who have done harm to us to suffer, to pay for what they did. But in making them suffer, we create the kind of human beings we do not want back in our communities.
***
Trevor was a success inside prison. He created that for himself. He sought out challenges. He learned organizational and management skills. He took on responsibilities. He learned how to navigate an environment that was rigid and rule bound but could, occasionally and with no warning, shift the ground like an earthquake and rattle the (literal) cages. He learned to survive and adapt. He learned patience. This set him up for success upon reentry. He was also young and healthy. And perhaps most important, he had the unwavering and unconditional support of his mother. So he was primed for success. Out in the free world, he found a job that made use of his organizational skills and kept him close—sometimes he thought too close—to the world of criminal justice. Still, he took every opportunity to work for change within the system, sitting on panels, giving talks, visiting youth facilities, being as much of an activist as he felt he could be. What held him back from doing more was the knowledge that, however well-intentioned his motives were, his public persona could trigger pain and cause trauma for the family and friends of his victim. Although he was learning how to live well—his relationship with Loraine was stable and mutually supportive; they had bought a house together—his past was never that far from his present. He was preternaturally observant to his surroundings. Whenever he heard a siren or saw a flashing light, his first thought was they’re coming to get me. He had to take a breath and remember who he was, where he was. One time, he and a friend were standing on a downtown sidewalk waiting to cross the street. There were no cars in either direction. His friend stepped off the sidewalk and made his way across the street. Trevor hesitated, then walked a half block to the corner where there was a signal light and a crosswalk. Suppose a cop saw me jaywalking, he thought. Suppose that could be counted as a parole violation. Suppose I got sent back to prison.
His past lived inside him in a more profound way, preventing the creation of what the culture would consider a “normal” life for a thirty-something man in a long-term, loving relationship: he and Loraine would never have their own family. When he first told me that he didn’t want children, he said he didn’t want the responsibility. “There was so much I missed out on during those years of incarceration. I want to be able to do those things,” he said. Then he added, maybe realizing that he sounded too selfish, “The planet doesn’t need another person.” The real reason came out later, after we talked for a while. “I have a lot of shame around the fact that I was raised well and still made a terrible mistake, a terrible choice. I do not want to be responsible for a child who does something terrible.”
***
Catherine, on the other hand, put herself on the fast track to be a mother. She had her daughter with her first real boyfriend, a man she met at her first job out of prison. She gave birth to her son barely a year later. It was a headlong rush into creating the childhood she never had, a way to experience, by proxy, the simplicity and innocence of those years. She would be the protective, caring mother she never had, showering them with love, cocooning them in safety. And they would love her unconditionally. They would always see her first as Mommy, not the way others saw her, through the lens of her crime, her conviction, her years inside.
Children were at the center of her new life. But they were not everything. After dead-end fast-food jobs and a minimum-wage night shift job that left her exhausted, she now had what she called her “dream job” working for a nonprofit on a mission to help juvenile offenders. As a program director she helped shape strategy. She reached out to corporations and potential donors who could be enlisted in the cause. Like Trevor, she gave talks and sat on panels. She was the public face of her organization, Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. Her job was to change the narrative. “When they see me, when they hear me, they begin to think differently about kids who spend decades behind bars,” she told me. Behind the scenes, she led a group called Heart to Heart, a network of formerly incarcerated women who supported each other.
It had been a long haul. She thought of her post-incarceration life in five phases. First was the “time of reckoning” when the reality of freedom slapped her in the face. She hit the ground running and got little traction. Employment was a struggle. Entire occupations were permanently out of reach. Phase two began, again, with optimism: new life, a baby, a new city. But phase three—she termed this “survival mode”—and phase four, “sick and tired,” quickly followed. The reality was she was a single mother with two toddlers and a job that didn’t pay enough to afford childcare, let alone reliably cover the rent. She was a Black woman and an ex-felon, a combination that did not get you anywhere good. Unless, like Catherine, against so many odds, you believed in yourself. Did it help that she was young and smart and had no history of substance abuse? Yes. Catherine would say God had something to do with it. Perhaps that’s why she named the fifth phase, her current phase, “redemption.” This was when—is when—she learned she did not need a man, or a romantic relationship, to feel complete. It is when she changed the taillight of her car by herself. When she made a loud noise and was heard.
She had saved and planned for a week’s vacation with the kids. Work at the nonprofit was going well. Finally, there was some stability. What a treat, after all this time, to even think the word vacation, let alone plan for one. She booked an apartment through Airbnb. A few days later she received an email, which read in part: “We regret to inform you at this time Airbnb, Inc., has made the determination to permanently deactivate your account due, at least in part, to the following information…Criminal Records Match.” Catherine went into high gear, posting the Airbnb response on social media. She texted a friend, a cop who ran a nonprofit, who contacted his friend, who happened to be a nationally prominent social justice advocate with 29.6K Twitter followers. Suddenly, her post caught the attention of thousands. And Airbnb. At first, the company sent her an email stating that its decision was final. Then, a few hours later, she was advised that her account had been reactivated. She had advocated for herself—and won. “I would love to say that I felt a sense of victory, but I don’t,” she posted. “When we are judged based on who we are and not what we’ve done, then and only then have we won.”
This powerful “redemption” phase also included the hard work of forgiving her father, the man who failed to protect her from the sexual abuse that marked her childhood, the abuse that triggered her crime, the crime that put her in prison for sixteen years. Where does that kind of forgiveness come from? Catherine explained it this way: “To receive forgiveness, forgiveness must be extended.” It would be, she thought, hypocritical to want forgiveness for herself if she were not willing to extend it to others.
She spent months preparing for a move back to Florida. It was difficult logistically and economically. Everyone at work had to be on board. There were intense negotiations with Damon, the father of her two children. They wanted to coparent even though they had not been a couple for quite a while. Would he move across the country to continue that relationship with his kids? There was searching long distance to find an affordable place that would rent to her. But the biggest challenge was emotional. This key element to her “redemption” phase was, in large part, sparked by her father’s failing health and her need to be a good daughter, her need to show her own children the transcendent importance of family. But it was exhausting. He suffered from congestive heart failure. His lungs filled with fluid. He was always a (literal) heartbeat away from being rushed to the ER. Which is where Catherine found herself, too often, as she juggled the life she was finally, fully—and most of the time, joyfully—inhabiting.
***
Dave’s post-prison life was the least complicated and, it seemed, the least satisfying. He was successful by the reentry metrics: housed, employed, no brushes with the law. But was that all his life was going to be? A checking of boxes? He would be sixty-two soon. He was still living in supported housing, the kind of setup designed for college students. His quad mates, with whom he had almost no contact, checked all the boxes too. The wrong boxes. One was a drug addict; another had alcohol problems; the third had what Dave described as “girlfriend issues” and was never around. He was still working the same job, the deli counter at a chain grocery store, still making just over minimum wage. Even without a three-decades-long, violent offender prison record, a man in his sixties with no real-world job references was not likely to get anything much better than what Dave had. He didn’t apply for the factory job his friend told him about or for any other job. It’s not that the deli counter work fulfilled him in any way, not that he saw a promotion in his future, or anticipated more than a small raise every six months or so. It was that any change would be a risk. He would have to answer questions about himself, his past. He would have to figure out—“negotiate” is the word he always used—new relationships. How to act, what to say. At his current job, his boss knew him and, Dave thought, liked him. He had achieved a kind of anonymity.
What made his post-prison world uncomplicated is also what made it lonely. He had no family. His crime had been against his family. His older brother had testified against him at his trial. And he had few friends. He had been behind bars far too long to maintain any friendships that had existed back in his twenties. And he had been in prison more than long enough to forget what a casual, uncomplicated relationship looked like. The learning curve for that was a steep one. In his new life, he had two men he thought of as friends, both of whom were leftovers from his incarcerated life. One was more than a friend. Or so Dave had thought. They had made big plans for a combined future. Dave harbored that dream, or some small part of it, during his first year out. They were in close contact, mostly by phone. In fact, they shared a phone plan. But Kevin now had a “girlfriend”—Dave used the quotation marks when he referred to that relationship—and he was, Dave thought, going nowhere, living what turned out to be an unstable life. Nine years out and Kevin had nothing to show for it. Finally, Dave broke off the relationship by getting his own phone. He said he had been too close to see “the really bad negatives.” Whatever traits had been attractive inside did not translate to this reentered life.
Dave worked hard to maintain a friendship with the second man, but the effort was one-sided. Either Dave was blind to that, or he read the signals wrong. The nuances of facial expressions, of body language, of tone and demeanor continued to elude him. One brilliantly sunny spring day, a midweek day off for Dave, he packed up a gourmet sandwich from the deli and a slab of chocolate cake and set off in his car to surprise his friend with lunch. He related the story this way: “I knew I was sideswiping him at his workplace, but I thought lunch would be the ticket to see each other and have a quick bite.” Dave texted this to me when he got home. “Well, not only was he not happy to see me, but he also refused the lunch I brought.” The text was followed by a surprise-face emoji. Then he sent a selfie of him sitting on his couch in his room eating the cake. He had driven two hours, more than one hundred miles, to surprise the man who was clearly not his friend.
This friendship thing, even casual contact, was a continuing mystery to him. On one of his many trips out to the ocean, he had just parked his car in a visitors’ lot and was walking to a lookout point to enjoy the sunset. A guy came up to him who had parked a few spaces away and made a casual, complimentary remark about Dave’s car. And Dave immediately thought: Why would this guy start a conversation with me? What does he want? How am I supposed to respond? His thoughts were racing. If he didn’t say something friendly back, would that be rude? If he did say something friendly back, would he be “encouraging” this stranger? This is how he overthinks even chance encounters. He forced himself to be, in his words, “prosocial.” They talked for a moment about cars, which Dave deemed a safe subject for two men.
A few minutes later, as Dave was standing on the promontory staring out over the ocean, the man arrived to take in the view. Should Dave say something? Would that be too forward? He stood there momentarily paralyzed. The man nodded and smiled. Okay, Dave thought, taking a breath. This is harmless. He is just a nice guy. They watched the setting sun. When they started walking back down the path to their cars, Dave, now interested in being friendly but not sure how to do that, mentioned that he worked at the deli counter. “Stop by sometime and say hello,” he said. A week later, the man came into the store, greeted Dave behind the counter, and bought a sandwich. Dave watched him walk away and wondered, “Should I have invited him out for coffee?”
***
Vicki was the only one who “fell”—that is, in prison parlance, she was rearrested, albeit for a misdemeanor—and the only one who still, two years out, seemed to be living an only modestly sanitized version of the life that had landed her behind bars so many times. She was the only one with a long history of drug addiction. She was also the only one who, upon release, went back to the community, the street, the house, the domestic relationship that formed the foundation of her criminal life. These all seem related, although exactly how it is hard to tell.
Vicki should have been the biggest reentry success story. She was not a violent offender, so she did not have to carry the weight of that psychological burden. Although she had spent cumulative decades behind bars, none of her individual sentences took her away from the free world for longer than five years at a time. Her reentry shock would be blunted. She did not have to struggle to find—or even think about finding—a safe and comfortable place to live. She found employment. The jobs were mostly menial and low wage, but she was never in danger of not being able to pay the bills. Someone else was paying the bills. That “someone else” was a person who had been in her life for thirty years. Stability like that is seen as a good thing. Add to this that, despite her drug use, she was in decent health, and (although this should not make any difference, we are now very aware that it does) she is white. So the reentry deck was stacked in her favor. But she was the one—she is the one—holding those cards. She is the one playing the game. Even with good cards, a player who doesn’t know how to win won’t win.
Vicki returned to Oklahoma to find that her trailer had been burglarized. When she had hit the road a month before, she told a “friend” he could stay at her place. He was a recent acquaintance, a guy she’d met in town. He was an ex-felon, a drug user who was staying clean. They bonded over that. He was trying to save money working construction so he could travel to another state to look for his son. It was a twisted story that got weirder with every detail. Vicki said that the man’s children had been “stolen” by his mother-in-law. The son, a minor and the eldest of five kids, had run away. The mother, this man’s wife, was currently serving time for conspiracy to commit murder. The man was staying in her trailer, but he left town for a few days to work on a job site. When he came back, he found that the trailer had been broken into. His carpentry tools were stolen along with $1,800 in cash from unemployment benefits. He had no bank account. He cashed his checks and hid the money in his clothing. Whoever burglarized the trailer knew this guy, knew he’d be out of town, undoubtedly knew about the stashed cash.
That burglary made some sense. What didn’t make sense was that the trailer was targeted a second time. This time Vicki’s stuff—“everything I own,” she told me during a teary phone call—was taken, and the place was trashed. The “everything” that Vicki had in the trailer did not include expensive or new electronics. No jewelry. No drugs, she insisted. What the burglar took was clothing and craft supplies, nothing remotely worth the risk of the serious crime of breaking and entering. Presumably, the trailer had been cased during the previous break-in, or so Vicki thought. But what was the motive? And why ransack the place? And, to add to the mystery, why did none of Vicki’s very nearby trailer park neighbors report either break-in? Vicki knew the answers, not the specific answers but the general outline. She was living the life. She was mixing with people who were living the life. She was living amid people who were living the life. This was what happened.
Vicki looked at the mess that was her trailer, that was her life, and thought about the rush of relief she’d feel if she could just shoot up. It took so much strength for her to tell herself, remind herself, that drugs were the problem, not the solution. She was very proud of herself for that, very proud. I told her, speaking as her mentor, as a person who had come to care about her, how very proud I was too. The decision not to use gave her the energy to clean out the trailer and pack up her car. She headed back west with vague plans to move “somewhere big where no one knows me” and “somewhere hot because I love wearing shorts and a tank top.” She would find some kind of job. Steve would follow her there. Maybe.
***
And then there was Arnoldo, perhaps the biggest success of them all, and the least likely: poor, brown, the son of a violent alcoholic father who gave him his first drink when he was six, a father who abused him and his mother, who beat up people on the street. A loner, an introvert, a gun-toting gangbanger who went into the system at fifteen and spent nineteen years behind bars, many of them in the hole as punishment for yard fights, for gang activities. He had to unlearn not just a way of life but a way to be. He had to remake himself from the ground up, learning how to respond rather than react, understanding the power of composure, discovering that strength comes from the opposite place he thought strength came from—vulnerability—redefining what it meant to be a man.
Today he is a positive force in the Latinx community, an emerging leader in the nonprofit that employs (and has consistently promoted) him. He is making an impact, every day, on kids who look and talk and act a lot like he did. He and Nicole have ever so carefully built an honest, thoughtful, and transparent marriage, and they work hard to keep it that way. He is a loving father who moved beyond his own rage and anger to forgive his own father. That’s what he learned in deep conversations with himself in the hole: that the not-forgiving was hurting and haunting him; that he could not move forward unless he let go.
He had—inside, alone in the hole, in long conversations with Sterling, and in small groups of men struggling to make sense of their past—achieved what Karuna, the chaplain who married him, Melissa, the professor who taught restorative justice, and most of all Sterling, his friend and his mentor, believed could happen. He had transformed trauma. “Who I am now is completely unrecognizable from who I was twenty years ago,” he told me in his deep, quiet voice, his son Sol squirming on his lap. “Even for me it is shocking how different I am.”
***
It is 6:00 a.m., dark and raining. Cheryl, Sterling’s wife, is sitting in her truck in a prison parking lot waiting for Ivan to walk through the gate. Ivan and Sterling have been friends for twenty-five years, cellmates, brothers. They are a matched set. Almost exactly two years apart in age—both Aries warriors—and two inches apart in height, Ivan’s six feet five inches edging out Sterling’s six feet three inches, they came to prison within two years of each other. Both are the sons of Black fathers and white mothers. Cheryl isn’t waiting outside the prison that housed Ivan for a quarter of a century, the prison that still houses Sterling. As often happens in the system, Ivan was transferred from that maximum security facility about a year ago to this nearby minimum security prison as part of “step-down” preparation for release.
The heater is on in the truck. The sky has lightened to a steely gray. Now it is 7:00 a.m., and he is still not out the gate. She watches as several other men—nine are set for release today—make their way across the asphalt. Finally, she sees him, a tall, lanky man hefting two enormous plastic bags that contain all his belongings. He is dressed in the black sweatpants, black hoodie, and gray T-shirt she delivered to the prison gate an hour ago, the “tall man” clothes she had to special order online. He is calm. He is always calm. Like Sterling. He gets into the truck and asks for something to wipe his hands with. The guard touched his hand. She starts driving out of the parking lot, down a little road. He is staring out the window. “This is wild,” he says, transfixed by the movement but unruffled. He hasn’t been in a private vehicle for a quarter of a century.
She drives to a nearby city park and drops him off by a trail that follows the river. He has his earbuds in, plugged into his old MP3 player. She waits in the car, stressed with the details of orchestrating this morning. Ivan was late getting out. Now he’s out walking. She wants him to enjoy this moment, but Sterling will be waiting.
They arrive at the penitentiary at 7:40 a.m. Ivan doesn’t want her to pull into the prison’s parking lot. He doesn’t want to be on prison grounds again. But they are late, and it’s the closest place to their destination. They get out of the car and start walking through the lot to State Street, to the hydrant. Ivan puts up his hood. “I don’t want anyone to see me,” he says, only half kidding. Then he realizes what he looks like to the cars passing by—a big Black man in a dark hoodie skirting the perimeter of the twenty-five-foot-high walls of a prison. “This isn’t cool, this isn’t cool,” he says, not kidding now, but still calm.
They get to the yellow hydrant. Cheryl is videoing this on her phone. They both look up at the windows on the fourth floor. It’s too far away to see Sterling’s face, but they can see an outline. Ivan bends down to touch the hydrant, and Cheryl captures the moment. Sterling watches. How many men has he seen walk into their new lives from this window? Will it ever be him out there? He waves. He turns the lights on and off, on and off. Ivan stands there in the rain. Then he asks to borrow Cheryl’s phone, and she shows him how to take his first selfie.