ELEVEN

THE STRUGGLES OF LIFE

You know what’s hard about getting out of jail or getting out of prison? You’re poor. You’re even poorer than you were before you got locked up. And you got nowhere to go.

—SONIA ESTEVEZ

The July 2019 briefing released by the Prison Policy Initiative made public two equally compelling pieces of information: the growing number of women released from prison and jail in the United States each year, and the long list of unmet needs that sabotaged their successful reentry. This all led up to its most meaningful finding that, as early as 2004, researchers had established that the strongest predictor of whether or not a woman would recidivate—or relapse into crime—was poverty.¹ In turn, if their basic needs are fulfilled, even in the short term, the odds of recidivism are reduced by 83 percent for poor women on probation and parole.

The reality is that women leaving prison and jail are set up for economic failure. Women who’ve been incarcerated, especially if they are Black, Indigenous, or women of color, “have much higher rates of unemployment and homelessness, and are less likely to have a high school education when compared with formerly incarcerated men.”² In addition, many states require women to pay restitution or victim compensation fines, which often rise into the thousands of dollars. In certain states, like Hawaii, women are asked to repay the state for welfare payments made to their children while they were locked up.³ All this while dealing with trauma and, in far too many cases, substance abuse.

The stories of the women I’d listened to for the past decade matched up with the examples offered in the PPI briefing. In one setting, the PPI “identified homelessness and the lack of stable housing as the biggest problem facing women in the New York City Justice System,” reporting that 80 percent of the women locked up in Rikers Island said they needed help finding housing once they were out of jail. But this wasn’t news. Over a decade earlier, in 2006, researchers in California had reported that “75% of formerly incarcerated women surveyed had experienced homelessness at some point, and 41% were currently homeless.”⁴ And when it came to public housing, formerly incarcerated women were once again out of luck. The Housing Opportunity Program Extension Act of 1996 mandated that anyone with a drug or violent crime conviction couldn’t receive assistance with public housing, whether it was living in a development or receiving a Section 8 certificate or voucher to help subsidize housing. It wasn’t their weakness or their lack of resilience that drove women back to abusive partners or dysfunctional family situations. It was their need for housing and economic survival. Relationships and a lack of money were all tangled up together.

This entanglement was exactly what had happened with Clara and what had driven her back to Eduardo in the past. Locked up in federal prison, she promised herself those days were over. She was determined to change. When she was released, Clara didn’t even think about the help she might need. She immediately took custody of Theresa, who’d been living with friends. The Lopezes sent Aracely and Veronica back from LA. All of this was easy—they weren’t being monitored by children’s services. Still, Clara didn’t know what to do. No one had hooked her up with any services; she’d served her time and she wasn’t required to live in a halfway house. There’d been no reentry planning while she was in prison. Once she was out, Arizona proved to be a wasteland in terms of women’s reentry services.

Unsure of her next move, Clara stayed put in Arizona. Eduardo was still around, making empty promises that he was going to change. But he was using and came over at all hours, keeping her awake at night. “Finally, I told him that if he didn’t leave, I was going to call immigration because he was illegal. I was fed up with him and I meant it.” He got scared and went home to Los Angeles. After that, she was free. “I was away from drugs, away from emotional abuse. I was done. I finally felt at peace.” She began looking for work and took on temporary employment—nothing illegal. Even if it meant confronting poverty, she was committed to change.

A few months after Eduardo returned to LA, he was arrested on drug charges and deported to Mexico. He called Clara for help, and, despite feeling guilty because “he was the father of my children,” she refused, feeling relieved. She needed to think about the future; so much time had passed—she’d been in Arizona almost ten years. She wanted to go back to school but couldn’t once she discovered that the state’s cheap rents were balanced by its lack of financial assistance for college. Her relationship with her daughters was loving, yet unsettled; maybe they needed a fresh start, to live somewhere new. But when she brought up the idea of moving, Theresa, now a teenager, made it clear she was staying in Arizona. As if to solidify her intentions, right after she turned sixteen, Theresa got pregnant, had a baby, and moved out on her own.

By then it was summer, and Eduardo’s parents arrived to pick up Veronica en route to Mexico with Aracely to see their son. Clara knew what she had to do. “I asked the grandparents if they could take care of Veronica along with Aracely because I wasn’t making it in Arizona anymore. I had a record and I couldn’t find a stable job. I knew I couldn’t stay there anymore, otherwise I was going to go back to my life of selling drugs to support my family. I had to get out.”

The grandparents stayed in Mexico with the girls after the summer, enrolling them in school there. Clara ended up back in California with very few options. She had no money, no support, and was once again homeless. “In LA, I was in the streets for a while, back to the gang and everything that was part of that life. It was like going backwards. I’m so lucky they were there for me. I stayed at one guy’s house and he helped me out so I could start getting money.” This didn’t surprise me—I had found that gangs act as de facto social service agencies. There is a system of mutual aid among gang members and those who are no longer actively involved. I didn’t ask for details, and Clara didn’t volunteer any. Her resilience and her connections meant that she survived. Not every woman who’s been incarcerated has the ability to claw her way back. Clara’s strength was unique to her. But her lonely struggle was not. Confronted with economic obstacles, emotional trauma, and separation from her children, with no supports, she turned to what she knew—the network of gangs and the streets. This narrative is far too typical of women after they have been locked up, particularly those caught in the cycle of drugs and incarceration.

Clara’s lack of options was emblematic of what formerly incarcerated mothers face. Many of these women have been on public assistance before getting locked up. After they’re released, they have a criminal history and no longer qualify for public support. Like Clara, they find it impossible to attain the financial stability they need.⁵ The odds are stacked against women trying to find a job who know that every application asks them to “check the box” and answer the question “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” This narrows the chances of being hired in a wildly competitive employment market. Mothers who manage to get hired after incarceration most often find themselves with earnings that fall far below the poverty line.⁶ One study demonstrates this with heartbreaking clarity: less than 1 percent of released mothers have the financial resources to move into private housing with their children.⁷

Clara hustled for several months, then rented an apartment. She tried to find legitimate work and enrolled in school. But after a few months she ran out of money. She knew one thing for certain: she didn’t want to go back to the streets. She was afraid she’d get arrested and she’d promised herself that would never happen again. Despite shame and a sense of failure, she turned once more to the House of Ruth for support, and they welcomed her with open arms. “It felt good. They didn’t judge me; they helped me.” The shelter provided housing until she’d saved up enough to get an apartment.

At the House of Ruth, Clara started believing things were finally changing for the better. She felt safe in Los Angeles; Eduardo would never return. Just as importantly, she began pursuing her education more seriously, learning about programs that supported students. She returned to Los Angeles Community College (LACC) where she’d already accumulated some credits and reconnected with Rowena Smith, the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services coordinator she’d gotten to know before. Rowena told her she’d qualify to work at the EOPS office once she completed her first semester. After applying for financial aid, she enrolled in classes.

In the meantime, Theresa called Clara and told her she wanted to come live with her in Los Angeles. Then, the Lopezes returned from Mexico. Although they insisted on keeping Aracely with them, they were happy to see Clara reunited with her youngest daughter, Veronica. All these changes shaped Clara’s plans for her future. She wanted to heal the problems that incarceration and being separated from her daughters had caused. She was glad she was in California, even though it was more expensive, because at LACC there was financial and emotional support for a student facing her challenges.

She was concerned about the impact on her health from her long-term drug use and all the blows to the head she’d endured as a result of domestic violence. She was frightened that she’d fail as a student. But her determination was greater than her fear. “I always wanted an education, not only so I can feel proud of myself; I want my kids to feel proud of me. To teach them, no matter what, to look at all that I’ve gone through—I’ve been to jail, I’ve been through domestic violence, I’ve been through drugs, I’ve been in the streets, I’ve been through everything, and I know, you can still come out ahead. You can make something out of yourself. You don’t have to put up with abuse just because you don’t have an education or because you have children! Educate yourself.”

Clara and I sit across from each other at Jack’s Burgers, a Boyle Heights landmark, as she tells me this. She is getting ready to graduate from community college and move on to finish her BA at a four-year university. Her eyes sparkle with anxiety as well as excitement. She’s waiting to hear back from the three schools in the state university system. “It’s been a long trek,” she says, sighing. “It’s actually taken me seven years and three attempts to finish school and I’m proud of myself because it’s been me, all alone. I haven’t had support of my family, but I had the support of the school and the shelter. That’s what made the difference.”

Clara’s family betrayed her, repeatedly. Her mother handed her fate to DCFS twice—once in childhood, then again as an adult. Yet Clara kept going, telling me, “I survived child abuse. I survived domestic abuse. And I survived drugs. Now I have a new identity. I’m a mother and I’m a student.” She has stayed off drugs, although she explains, “So far, it’s a day-by-day thing that never ends.” School is difficult; surviving economically is difficult. Still, for her, there is no other pathway now. She has a new boyfriend who works and contributes to the household, even though he doesn’t stay there all the time; she is very careful with her money and her independence.

In her life now, rebuilding her relationship with her daughters has remained her highest priority. The House of Ruth staff helped her obtain Section 8 subsidized housing, and Clara found a small house where she could live with her oldest and youngest daughters. Some of her uncertainty and anxiety have been soothed now that she is living independently with Theresa and Veronica. She talks happily about having a home that is hers, that she doesn’t share with an abusive partner. “It’s peace. And I haven’t felt that for a long time.”

Still, the wounds of incarceration endure. Her eldest, Theresa, angrily pointed out that she attended nine different schools over the years that she lived with Clara, then with Eduardo, then in the foster-care system. But Clara’s response was pragmatic: “We’re not going to solve these problems overnight. I’m still working on my own problems—so we had to get help.”

She’s also clear that she doesn’t want her kids to live the life she lived. Because of her inability to qualify for anything beyond a minimum-wage job, she sold drugs to support her family. It was a forced choice and not a desire—a by-product of how formerly incarcerated women are set up for failure. Today, Clara believes that higher education is a promising way to escape the past—otherwise, “even to work at McDonalds, they check your record.” What she experienced still haunts her. “I never want my daughters, or any women, to go through what I went through,” she tells me. “It’s bad for any woman who’s been locked up; it’s really bad if you’re Mexican, and it’s worse if you’re Black.”

A week later, sitting in my UCLA office with Denise, I bring up what happens to Black women and women of color in what Susan Burton calls “the criminal injustice system.” “You need to understand the reality, G-ma,” she says with a sigh. As she dives into her subject, her voice takes on an angry edge. “When I was locked up and after I got out, what really kept me down was my color and poverty. I’m on the lowest rung because I’m a Black woman. Lower than anyone. You know, one of my closest friends is Mexican, and she had more hope than I did. She went to the penitentiary, she lost her baby, she’d already relapsed a couple of times, and she had more hope than I did.” Denise’s voice shakes as she says this, and I know she’s talking about Clara. “And you know there are more Black women in prison than any other group.”

Her observation is backed up by the ACLU, which reports that Black women and women of color are overrepresented—substantially—in jails and prisons. Black women make up 30 percent of the population of incarcerated women in the US, even though they are only 13 percent of the female population. The ACLU’s findings track with Denise’s observation, that Latinas are overrepresented but not as drastically as Black women, who make up 16 percent of the incarcerated population while being only 11 percent of all women in the US.⁸

Denise is convinced—and her belief is borne out by statistics—that any Black formerly incarcerated woman is saddled with the lowest of statuses and the greatest of obstacles. There is the stigma of being formerly incarcerated—a diminished status for any individual. She notes, “A woman is always lower than a man. Then, in terms of color, it’s the biggest difference. No matter how educated you are, you will never get the same options. Anyone else—they’ll still have a better shot than you.”

I had no counterargument for Denise—she was right. Race figured deeply in the lives of women after incarceration. It was always there, too often unacknowledged and adding even more pressure to what Black women already encountered in terms of poverty and trauma. The economic realities women faced and the trauma they attempted to relieve through self-medication were so tangled up, it felt impossible to know how to start to deal with them. How could you confront substance abuse issues without acknowledging that women were too poor to seek treatment? Denise’s own story was a testament to this problem. This became brutally apparent as she described her battles with poverty, substance abuse, and a looming court date.

“When I think back on my life, I felt I had agency on the streets. I think that’s why I had so much trouble at rehab—I didn’t have control. Crazy as it sounds, on the streets, I made money. No one told me what to do. It didn’t matter what color I was; I could take care of myself.”

Denise laughs ruefully. “When I left rehab, it was like the party had started again . . .” Her voice trails off. The next four months passed in a blur. Because of the temporary judge’s bizarre ruling that postponed Denise’s new sentencing once she’d relapsed, she’d had four months without any supervision. The time passed swiftly, and her now delayed court date loomed. “Usually, my thing is running. But something happened inside of me—I finally knew I was done. I couldn’t go on the way I was—no home, no money, no nothing. I was always poor; I was always high. And I was tired. It’s like drugs and homelessness were gonna force me into rehab.”

Still, up until the last minute, Denise felt ambivalent. When she got to court, “there was still a little pushback in me—I thought if I could just finagle it, if I could just convince them to let me walk out that day, I would do it. Right there I was loaded; I had drugs in my system. The clerk told me to wait.” As she sat through both the morning and afternoon sessions of court, she realized that her case wasn’t going to get heard. The day ended and she spent the night in jail.

The next morning, she stood before her original judge, who took one look at Denise and announced she was going to impose her original sentence. Denise pleaded to go back to the program and promised to stay. The judge relented, cautioning Denise that she’d give her one more chance only if ACW agreed to take her back. If she failed, she was going to prison. “Prison, prison, prison—she kept saying it.” Denise had thirty days to make this happen. In the meantime, she’d have to stay locked up.

Getting back into ACW wasn’t a slam dunk. Denise was in jail the whole thirty days waiting to see if they’d take her back. Her doubts increased, and she knew, she said, that if she had to go to prison, “that was it. I would serve my time and then I was going back to do my thing—drinking, drugs, whatever. I was gonna do it till I died.” A supervisor, Anna, intervened on her behalf. She told the judge that ACW was willing to give Denise another shot, and if the court allowed her to come back, Anna would make sure Denise succeeded. The judge ruled that Denise would have to stay at ACW one year, followed by four years on probation.

This sounded like an eternity to Denise. “A year! I didn’t wanna go into recovery for a year! Even once I was there, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay.” Anna worked with her, and Denise decided that she’d only think about the first goal she had to fulfill: a year at ACW. After that, she’d deal with getting some money, living without drugs, and being on probation.

When her year’s residence at ACW was complete, Denise tried to plan what she’d do once she was released. She didn’t know about A New Way of Life because, in 2010, it was still operating pretty much under the radar. “I wish I’d found out about it. I could’ve used it,” she told me. Denise couldn’t work because she was still struggling with trauma, dealing with anxiety and PTSD—the laundry list of diagnoses was long. While at ACW, Anna had documented her mental health challenges, and she began receiving a small monthly disability payment. This would continue once she left; she also applied for food stamps and any other public support available. There wasn’t enough money for an apartment, so with her limited funds, she rented a room in a single-room-occupancy hotel downtown. SROs are used by individuals with extremely low incomes, serving as a form of “affordable housing” for those whose only alternative is homelessness. In most SROs, men and women share bathrooms and kitchens. Still, for Denise, despite the minimal conditions, the SRO was more of a home than the streets. She could live there because she didn’t have children. She’d always wanted a baby, but right now, she felt lucky to be alone.

While she looked every day, she couldn’t find work. Every time she filled in an application and checked the “previous felony” box, prospective employers told her the position was filled. At night, unable to sleep, she’d wonder what she was going to do with her life. She’d always loved school, and just like Clara, she saw the promise of higher education. If she checked the box saying she had a college degree that might balance checking the box for being a felon. In the fall of 2010, she enrolled in LA Community College, taking night classes, because those seemed easier to her. Like Clara had, Denise told me, “I was self-conscious about my ability to learn and retain information because of all the drugs I had taken and everything I’d been through.”

School proved difficult until a sociology professor, Anthony Clark, took an interest in her, steering her toward on-campus resources. Eventually, Clark and another professor both wrote letters recommending that Denise be released from probation, which ultimately worked. Along with going to classes, Denise checked in with her sponsor daily and attended 12-step groups; it was there she met Leroy. After several months focusing on her recovery, she began seeing him. She still felt unsure; Leroy was older and had been involved with the criminal justice system for decades. But they had a great deal in common. They’d both grown up in South Central LA; their families had been troubled. Leroy was committed to his recovery. He’d suffered with heroin addiction for over a decade. Denise felt safe with him: he understood what she’d been through and didn’t judge her. After several months, they pooled their money and began living together. Denise moved their few possessions into an apartment, while Leroy found a temporary job as a long-distance truck driver. This was the start of a new pattern in their lives: Leroy was gone whenever he could find work and Denise would stay home alone, studying and going to meetings. Six months after moving in together, they got married. Despite this, Denise still felt anxious about money and long-term security.

She learned about a UCLA program that included a summer education intensive offering classes, mentoring, and help with transferring from a community college. She signed up, participated enthusiastically, and then submitted her application to the bachelor’s program. She was overwhelmed when she received the acceptance letter that admitted her to UCLA as an undergraduate in African American studies. Once she started taking classes, she added a minor in disabilities studies. She thought about getting an MSW and enrolled in a new class, Social Welfare Policy and Practices. Which brought her to my door.

Right now, despite her success in school, worries about money are constant. Often, Denise can’t sleep at night and her anxiety makes it difficult for her to sit still and concentrate. “I know I gotta deal with my trauma,” she admits, “but where am I gonna get therapy? I went to the student counseling center—they didn’t understand me—no one there has been locked up. Hell! No one there has even worked in a prison or a jail! I’m worried about how I’m gonna pay for graduate school. And with the baby coming, I really need money now.”

Limited financial assistance represents a huge part of the lack of support for formerly incarcerated women. And over the past decade I’ve spent interviewing women, I’ve become a de facto job placement service for many of them. When they share their stories, it is the least I can do for them, along with paying them for their time. So I’m happy to find Denise a part-time job on campus. But that is one person and one job. And the need is huge. My small successes underscore the depth of the struggles these women face, the lack of available options to help them fulfill their lives and dreams.

There really is no systemic response to the needs of formerly incarcerated women. Instead, places like ANWOL, Hour Children, and House of Ruth are “one-offs” on the West and East Coasts. That’s why their work and all the initiatives they engage in represent fresh approaches that should serve as models for the entire nation to address a growing problem. But there are too many gaps, too many deficits, in terms of help for women. There are no recognized best practices—a method or a strategy generally viewed as the best of all options because research has shown it to be effective. The Prison Policy Initiative has recognized this, while offering some optimism about women’s reentry programs serving as examples of success. The last section of the latest PPI briefing enthused, “Notably, A New Way of Life Reentry Project operates eight houses and is working toward expanding its model nationally.” ANWOL was the first program among a handful of those described, and its approach was described in detail. I smiled after I read this, knowing I would be with Susan the next day to actually work on this expansion.

Twenty-four hours later, when I walk into the ANWOL conference room, Susan is eating lunch with several women on her staff; she tells me to sit down and have some food. Her dark, coiled hair frames her face as she announces, “All right! We know what we’re doing is working and we’ve got the outcomes to show it. It’s time to move on this national model.” The creation of a national model—a written blueprint to guide the development of women’s housing and reentry programs across the country—is critical. Susan’s new plan represents—again those words—something new and completely different. I also know that Susan needs to justify her model, to show that it is working and can be expanded on a national scale. Her “proof” this should happen is that ANWOL is effective. But no one is going to take this on her say-so alone. As a researcher, no matter how participatory and community-based my work is, I also have to look at and report on the data. And what I discover, based on data ANWOL has collected, is that their success rate is 96 percent. Only 4 percent of the women in their program “recidivate.”

“Recidivism” is an odd term—it smacks of the criminal justice system. I’ve never liked it, and particularly in the case of women, it’s more useful to think of women relapsing. There are other issues surrounding the concept of recidivism. Some believe the term should be used whenever an individual experiences any sort of re-incarceration, including probation violations. So, if a PO decides to record a probation violation because a woman is out past curfew, this is the same term used to describe a woman who gets caught after going out, buying a gun illegally and stealing a car. Both constitute “recidivism.” It sounds ludicrous, yet that’s how statistics are often constructed. I’ve never believed in it, and in the language of community-based participatory research, recidivism is counted only when an individual commits a brand-new crime. Probation violations are not recidivism. On top of that, it’s essential to consider whether the crime committed represents a less harmful crime than what’s occurred in the past. If a woman has been locked up for assault with a deadly weapon and the new crime she committed during a relapse is shoplifting eye makeup, it’s important to make a distinction between the two. So far, this idea has not been reflected in recidivism statistics, but there is hope of changing this.

In the meantime, at ANWOL, I’d checked and rechecked the data, and it showed that the clear majority of women were neither relapsing nor “recidivating.” Their results matched the outcomes that Hour Children, a well-known New York program that served formerly incarcerated women and their families, was reporting. It was hard to know what this really meant. There aren’t many programs for women and even fewer were collecting data. How could they? Women’s reentry programs are barely funded as it is, and there is little money for evaluation. Women’s reentry homes aren’t focused on collecting data; they are focused on survival.

Lunch is over, staff have gone back to their offices, and it’s time to talk about the nuts and bolts of the model. I ask Susan some questions about what she wants to do moving forward and then tell her I’m worried about the complexities of creating a national model. This is something no one has ever attempted. There are best practices—which are held out as examples of how reentry programs (again usually geared toward men) should operate—but there’s no national model. What she’s determined to implement is new and different and feels a bit overwhelming. Can she really do this? I can’t control myself and blurt out, “Have you thought about what you’re doing?”

Susan looks at me carefully and doesn’t respond right away. I worry I’ve outworn her patience, or maybe I’ve got salad in my teeth. As if reading my mind, she gently begins, “Don’t worry, you’re not the only one asking that question. And . . . I wonder if you know how many obstacles I faced even starting up and then running this organization? I’m a Black woman who didn’t graduate Yale or any Ivy League school, who was formerly incarcerated.” I nod and think about how she’s faced even more obstacles creating a program for women. Despite the ongoing lip service paid to “gender-specific programs,” very few people in the criminal justice system talk about what women faced.

I could list all the obstacles women face. Still, nothing I wrote would be as eloquent as the words of Edith Robinson, a Black single mother with three children I met in San Diego early on while conducting my research. I’ll never forget her description of what she faced after incarceration, while she was on probation. She was deeply grateful to have gotten a job at a warehouse, moving merchandise, updating inventory. But the systems that were supposed to support her all seemed to be more invested in creating stumbling blocks for her to overcome. “My PO always made appointments for me during work hours. I’d have to go to the boss and ask for time off. He was cool; he knew I had to see my PO. After he got promoted, my next boss wasn’t so great about it and would make fun of me in front of the other workers, ‘Edith’s gotta go check in with her PO,’ he’d yell out. He made me clock out and then come back and clock in and make up my hours. Sometimes that meant staying at the warehouse late, and I had to find someone to watch my kids—they’re not really old enough to watch themselves; the oldest is twelve. I couldn’t always find someone, and I’d have to leave them at home alone for an hour or two. I was scared what would happen to them. I was scared children’s services would find them home alone.

“Then I had to find a bus that would get me to the PO on time, and sometimes the buses ran late or I didn’t have the right change for the bus fare. And then I had the PO coming by my house and saying he needed me to do some random drug testing. I’d been through recovery, and I was never gonna use again—but there he was, this big white guy holding a little plastic cup. Then my children’s social worker was showing up at my house all hours of the day and night to ‘check’ on me. I knew what all of them were doing—they wanted to know if I was home, if I was high, if I had a man over, if my kids were all right. I was worried I’d lose my job; I was worried I’d lose my kids. When the social worker asked me if I was experiencing any stress, I told her ‘no’ even though I wanted to say, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’”

Edith’s “to-do” list is all too familiar. The requirements women confront after incarceration grow rather than diminish as the weeks go by. New dilemmas and requirements quickly spring up. And it feels as if it will never end.

No one knew this better and worked harder to address it than Susan Burton. Because of her unstoppable devotion to this issue, she’d been lauded by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and the brilliant academic Michelle Alexander, both of whom called her a modern-day Harriet Tubman. Instead of letting all the attention inflate her ego, the woman in front of me had doubled down on her commitment to this mission. “Let’s go over our survey and talk about how we’re going to use it to reinforce the national model”—what Susan called the Sisterhood Alliance for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) Housing Network. “And let’s talk about the replication training—how we’ll get people together and teach them about the model so they can put it into action, in whatever state they’re in.”

Over a year before, Susan had overseen new research to help shed more light on the experiences of formerly incarcerated women. There had been pockets of academic research into the lives of formerly incarcerated women, but Susan was the first executive director of a nonprofit who wanted to serve as an active research partner. This was community-based participatory research playing out in a way I’d rarely heard about and only experienced one time before—at Homeboy Industries. We worked together for three months, designing a questionnaire that would capture the depth and breadth of women’s needs and, just as significantly, the contents of their dreams and desires. ANWOL—not UCLA—sent out the survey in an email to states and organizations across the country and it was slow going—we weren’t having an overwhelming response to our email.

In June of 2018, Susan called to tell me that in September we were going to Orlando, Florida, for a meeting of the National Network of Formerly Incarcerated Men and Women. She wanted to administer the survey there. This was going to be a heavy lift, though at this point, I also knew better than to object. In the humidity of late-summer Florida, we passed out and collected hundreds of surveys, winding up with a sample of more than four hundred respondents from across the country. The women who answered our questions described reentry experiences filled with fear, trauma, and a complete lack of support. And—no surprise here—their needs were familiar yet still important to record: housing, employment, education, access to financial safety nets, mental health treatment, and connection to their children and families. But what was different about this survey was how women gave voice to their dreams and plans. They were not only interested in themselves; the majority of the women who responded described their desire to give back to others, their hope to create a better life and more opportunities for their children, their drive to engage with their community, and, most significantly, their wish to lead systems-level change for women and families affected by mass incarceration.⁹

In her study of women at a Chicago-based halfway house, the sociologist Andrea Leverentz described how “in all relationships, the women carefully attempted to balance humility with ‘carrying the message forward’ about the possibility of change and serving as a role model for others in similar situations.”¹⁰ This desire to give back, to serve as role models—to truly help the community of women who have been incarcerated—would power the SAFE Housing Network, an interconnected system of reentry homes that would operate and collaborate across the country.

After we returned from Orlando, with the survey results collected and analyzed, Susan was moving toward training the folks from states across the country who wanted to be members of the SAFE network. She was putting the survey results into action, and I documented the systematic and intentional effort she was leading, refining the model’s key components and building on the earlier work to create a national model. Susan was clear that the SAFE model was about much more than offering women a place to stay after incarceration. Most significantly, it was about building a national network of homes offering women the empowerment, opportunity, and freedom that could grow alongside secure housing.

I’d already seen the power of this idea as I watched the Global Homeboy Network evolve since it was founded in 2014. Originally the vision of Father Greg Boyle, the GHN worked with more than four hundred organizations all over the world to help create therapeutic communities, sharing tools and strategies to support marginalized men, women, and youth in a commitment to kinship and programmatic support. What Susan was developing was similar to Homeboy, but it focused specifically on women and the ways their overlooked needs affected families and communities. It also offered a specific model that could be put into practice across the country. Susan explained it eloquently to me: “The SAFE housing model and the network centers women, LGBTQIA people, children, and family in the movement to end mass incarceration and its mission to bring people back home.”

Over several days, as we talked together, Susan outlined the program’s guiding concepts, including personal agency and autonomy, multidimensional and holistic services, gender-specific support, and social transformation. It was also important to communicate in a way that anyone could understand how the work of the SAFE Housing Network was organized around three concepts: (1) basic human needs must be met; (2) reentry should address trauma and not further traumatize individuals; and (3) all barriers to accessing personal identification, housing, medical care, mental health, and public assistance should be removed.

Once we created and fine-tuned the model and posted it on the ANWOL website, I was looking forward to a brief respite, but that wasn’t in the cards.¹¹ Instead, Susan wanted to get the network going—now. Christin Runkle, the ANWOL communications manager, and I worked to assist her in designing and presenting a two-day training on the SAFE house model (after a shakedown tryout it turned into a three-day training). Through the Ford Foundation, Susan obtained a grant to pay for participants’ airfare and expenses so she could bring people together from across the country for three days, to instruct them in the SAFE house model and strengthen the network of SAFE houses that existed. I was training alongside her, and from day one, it was both an overwhelming responsibility and a joy. The participants in one room—straight, gay, lesbian, queer, trans, Black, people of color, and white—all came together to learn about this new model and to prepare to implement it in states from Minnesota to Arkansas.

Susan was the unifying figure. The people gathered responded to her with a combination of love, deep respect, and awe. While she appreciated their reverence, she was more interested in action and change. For six hours, we presented information, throwing concepts back and forth and posing examples to the group. Our training in using the model was followed and reinforced by guest speakers and field visits to the ANWOL houses. In the months that followed the second training, eleven states and fifteen cities participated in the SAFE Housing Network. A third training was on the books with eighty participants and a waiting list while ANWOL provided technical assistance to whoever desired it.

The SAFE Housing Network was a much-needed systemic answer to the needs of reentry women. It was designed to create spaces for formerly incarcerated women to be healed and lifted up. But it was also part of an effort to ensure that people who’d been incarcerated could now be empowered as the experts in a movement to ensure that civil rights as well as social and economic justice were restored and sustained for all formerly incarcerated individuals. This finally represented the chance for a strong and systemic response to the checklist of needs women faced after incarceration: help with housing, trauma, poverty, children, and the demands of probation or parole.

Yet, there was one facet of their lives that proved more difficult to address, that women struggled and needed ongoing help with: the problem of love and personal attachments. Weaving through all the obstacles they faced was the dilemma of how women dealt with the personal relationships in their lives before—and after—incarceration.