When Arnoldo walked out the gates that July, he left behind his friend and comrade, Sterling, and the more than two thousand other men who would continue to live their lives inside that maximum security prison. And he left behind the almost 2.3 million men and women enmeshed in the American criminal justice system, a system that has grown to include 110 federal penitentiaries, 1,833 state prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigrant detention centers, and 80 Indian Country jails, as well as military prisons, state psychiatric hospitals, and civil commitment centers. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for close to 25 percent of the world’s prison population. One out of every six Latino boys, like Arnoldo, can expect to go to prison in his lifetime. One out of every three Black kids, like Sterling, will spend time behind bars. (For white kids, the figure is one out of seventeen.)
Another statistical insight into what has long been called our national epidemic of mass incarceration is the per capita numbers. The United Nations estimates the median rate, worldwide, at 145 people behind bars per 100,000 population. Western Europe and Scandinavia’s rates fall far below this—76 in Germany, 60 in Norway and Sweden. The U.S. incarceration rate is 655, according to the same U.N. database. This is greater than the rate in Russia, China, or North Korea, countries known for their repressive governments and blindness to individual and civil liberties.
It was not always like this.
The U.S. incarceration rate used to be similar to those of other high-income countries and western democracies. But in the early 1970s, after fifty years of stability, the nation’s prison population began a dramatic period of growth when politicians from both sides started to push for and legislate increasingly punitive policies. Richard Nixon opened the door—literally opening the door to the country’s jails and prisons—by declaring a “war on drugs” that translated not into funds for community-based programs and treatment centers but rather into lengthy prison sentences, even for minor drug offenses. This approach, branded then and now as “tough on crime,” was part of a broader cultural, political, and institutional shift toward the use of punishment to solve social problems.
Then, during the Reagan years, the prison population exploded when changes in federal and state legislation led to longer sentences, mandatory sentences (no judicial discretion), determinate sentencing (no early parole or time off for good behavior), and Three Strikes laws. These Three Strikes state statutes significantly increased the sentences of those who had been convicted of prior crimes, often leading to life sentences for felonies that would never have incurred such harsh punishment. Add to this the default use of prisons as mental institutions, an unforeseen consequence of the reform-based deinstitutionalization movement that had hoped to improve the lives of the mentally ill. Instead, they landed in jail. When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, the total prison population was 329,000. Eight years later, it had almost doubled to 627,000. A National Research Council report that tracked incarceration rates from 1980 to 2010 found a 222 percent increase—and attributed it to changes in policy not crime rates. In 1969, the U.S. crime rate (reported crimes) was 3,680 per 100,000, and the incarceration rate was 97 per 100,000. In 2018, the crime rate was slightly lower (3,667), and the incarceration rate was seven times higher (692 per 100,000).
This half-century prison boom has had a disproportionate and disastrous impact on people of color and on poor urban communities, deepening divides and exacerbating existing racial and socioeconomic inequities. It has meant that on any given day one-third of adult Americans are either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. It has meant that one-quarter of all Americans have an arrest record of some kind. And all this carries an $81 billion a year price tag.
Those are a lot of numbers. And none of them are good. What we have, as The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik put it, is “the caging of America.” He calls it “the moral scandal of American life.”
But why should we care that there are so many people behind bars? If they broke laws and did harm, don’t they deserve to be punished, to be caged?
We should care because some of the punishments are unnecessarily harsh, because all people are not treated equally under the law, because sometimes innocent people get caught in the system, because a large body of research suggests that our approach to punishment doesn’t actually work. But there is another reason, a compelling and immediate reason that has nothing to do with whether wrongdoers deserve the punishment they get, a reason that is unrelated to politics, social reform, economics, ethics, or morality.
The reason is this: selfishness.
Ninety-five percent of those we put behind bars get out. That’s about 600,000 people each year. They may get out in four days. They may get out in forty years. But they eventually get out. They leave their cages and reenter our communities. They walk the streets we walk. Wait for the bus at the same bus stop. Shop at the local grocery store. Their kids sit in classrooms next to our kids. They are our neighbors. Living inside cages behind walls can have profound effects on personality and behavior, on health and attitude, on what kind of a person rejoins our community. That, in itself, is a reason to care.
Here’s why I care: I spent more than three years going into a maximum security prison twice a month to meet with—and teach writing to—men who had spent most of their adult lives behind bars. One of these men was Sterling. What I saw, what Sterling and the nine other men revealed to me in their writing and our many hours of unguarded (literally) conversations, was that the constrained, routinized, rule-bound, hierarchical lives they were living took away more than physical freedom and privacy. Incarcerated life took away their personal agency, their power to make decisions, even the smallest ones like when to eat breakfast, how often to take a shower, what color pen to use when writing a letter. Over time, the inability to make decisions, the persistent, entrenched, institutionalized barriers to exercising personal agency over almost anything had led to what psychologist Martin Seligman called “learned helplessness.” The men in the group had never heard of that term. But they were living it. Or fighting hard against it. Sterling was perhaps the fiercest warrior, holding on to his sense of self as he—and Arnoldo—helped others inside try to do the same. But it was a mighty struggle.
Prison life, I also learned from these men, teaches the masking of feelings and emotions. It’s not just men; Belinda was good at this, too. Just as athletes have an impenetrable game face, inmates have an unreadable “prison face.” It is at best impassive; at worst menacing. There is only one allowable emotion in prison, Sterling once told me, and it is anger. Showing any other emotion is showing vulnerability. Showing vulnerability is dangerous. In the writing group, slowly, over time, the masks came off. It helped that they were there in the group by choice—perhaps the only freely made choice they had that day or that week. It helped that they wrote, sitting quietly with their thoughts. It helped that there wasn’t a guard in the room. It helped, I know, that I was a woman and an outsider, which made me less of a threat. In prison, when they were faced with threats, dominance became a form of self-protection. That meant, for both men and women, adopting strategies like establishing a personal reputation for toughness, joining a protective and insular group (a gang), or self-isolating. These strategies work well in prison. Because they work, because they are practiced for decades, they become deeply ingrained—tactics that become attitudes, then behaviors, finally personality traits. The tension that underlies every encounter, the fear that anything could happen at any time for any reason, the often barely suppressed (or not suppressed at all) threat of violence, the violence itself, the noise, the absence of the healing touch. This is incarcerated life. A medical researcher from Brown University put it this way: “It is unrealistic for us to imagine that people can emerge from prison psychologically intact.”
Yet they emerge, hundreds of thousands of them a year, simultaneously joyful and overwhelmed at the prospect of freedom. They are anxious, confused, sometimes terrified, and often ill prepared to face the challenges of life in the free world. To reenter.
Reentry has a clear goal—to reintegrate offenders back into their communities. But the path to achieving that goal is anything but clear. In fact, “path” is not the right metaphor. That image is of a peaceful, pastoral lane, manicured, cultivated—a garden path, a bridle path. Reentry is not that. It is a rocky, winding, switchbacked trail, overgrown in some places, terrifyingly steep in others. Sometimes the trail disappears. Other times it is so crowded with fellow travelers that it is impossible to go forward. Occasionally the trail crosses with another, and that other one looks better, easier, but (discovered too late) is neither. Sometimes the trail winds back on itself, and the journey has to begin again. There might be a map of the trail, and it might be available, or not. It might be accurate, or not. It might be too dark to read the map. Those holding the map might not have map-reading skills.
Maybe it’s not about maps and trails. Maybe reentry is best imagined as a story with complex characters, flawed as we all are, alternately motivated and discouraged, progressing, plateauing, backsliding, recovering, or not. Reentry is a story that moves in fits and starts, with plot twists and flashbacks, with endings that can be trite or completely unexpected. It is not a perfect narrative arc. It is not a neat three-act play.
Decades of research—often studies that end up tracking failures—have detailed the specifics of what successful reentry can look like. Ann Jacobs, executive director of the John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity, one of the country’s leading champions of reentry, lists six basic life needs: livelihood, residence, family, health, criminal justice compliance, and social connections. Each one is a story—or a winding, rocky path—of its own. Nick Crapser, former deputy director of a wraparound services reentry organization, an ex-con who used to be a client of that organization, likes to talk about the “Three Es”: environment, employment, and education.
Jacobs’s six needs and Crapser’s “Three Es” represent checkpoints along the journey, dots on the map, chapters in the story. But as important as they are, they highlight only the obvious part of the journey, the externals: jobs and housing, training and treatment, relationships, parole restrictions. These are challenging goals, but they are, at least, definable and quantifiable. The barriers to achievement of these goals, the rocks on the trail, are also definable and quantifiable: poverty, mental illness, addiction, poor health, lack of education. Some of these barriers are so formidable that they are almost impossible to overcome, not rocks to stumble over or kick aside but boulders that stop all progress. But reentry is also a hidden-from-view process with no quantifiable goals, no visible stumbling blocks, a mapless journey that involves cognitive, psychological, and emotional transformation. It is the internal journey from caged to free.
More than twenty years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report stating that successful reentry depended on developing a plan that began at the moment a judge sentenced a criminal and continued through to release and beyond, a plan that mobilized a network of both formal and informal support. Two decades later, there is no such plan. Two decades later, the effects of the tough-on-crime legislation of the 1980s and 1990s are even more deeply felt. “Tough on crime” translated into longer prison sentences for more people. The longer someone is inside, the more prison life is accepted as the norm; the more deeply ingrained the habits, behaviors and mindset; the harder the transition is to the outside. And tough-on-crime sentiment has, in many states, translated into lack of resources for rehabilitation efforts—central to any plan for successful reentry—including educational programs, meaningful vocational skills training, therapeutic groups. These are the opportunities that can prime inmates for success when they reenter. But these programs are often seen as “extras,” benefits that the guilty do not deserve, ways in which their time inside is softened, made more palatable. And why should prison be palatable? But a punishing environment, from beginning to end, is not an environment that promotes, teaches, nourishes—makes possible—the transformative change that may just be at the core of successful reentry.
When Arnoldo, in his spotless white T-shirt and fresh-off-the-Target-shelves baggy black shorts, stepped out the gate on that summer morning, he left behind not just his six-by-eight-foot, two-man cell and not just the walled-in world that had been his home for almost twenty years. He left behind—he wanted to leave behind, he vowed to leave behind—the prison-industrial complex that had formed who he was from his teenage years. He wanted a job, of course, and, as soon as he could manage it, a place of his own. But he wanted more. He wanted a life. Like the more than ten thousand other men and women released from custody that week in July, he now faced the obstacle course that was reentry.