Reentry is like…

A number of years ago I was on a panel with a number of criminal justice experts and formerly incarcerated people (criminal justice experts in their own right), and a formerly incarcerated woman was describing reentry. She said, “Reentry is like…walking through the Stargate.” She then asked the audience if anyone had seen the movie and or the series on the Sci-Fi Channel. She described how, when leaving one world and entering another, there’s this…this thing that happens to the body. On Stargate you see, I guess, she explained, the molecules of the body going through a subtle but visible change, because of the movement from one world to another.

I have been on almost countless criminal justice panels, conferences and the like, and this was the first time I thought that someone came close to describing reentry. Reentry can be so otherworldly that one has to use Sci-Fi metaphors and language to attempt to describe it.

I am relatively well-read. I have read widely across a number of fields, religion, law, criminal justice, literature, and for the most part am smart enough to understand what I am reading. Still, one subject matter always eluded me: physics. I have read Einstein and other scientists, and I might as well have been reading Greek (which I studied while in Seminary), and not until I read Stephen Hawking did I begin to understand the theory of relativity, black holes and the like. While reading another scientist, I had a Eureka! moment when I came across this definition of a “quantum jump”: “going from one state to another with nothing in between.” I said, “That’s reentry!”

We lock people up, America, that is, for long periods of time, and when they have served their time we release them. We send them through the Reentry Stargate, to a world that has dramatically changed since they were last in it, and wonder why the rate of return to prisons and jails (recidivism) is so high. Part of it, I think, is our fundamental misunderstanding of reentry. We think it’s simply an act, the actual return, but it’s a process. It’s a process that people reentering will need guides to successfully navigate.

Reentry is like….

Reentry is about relationships

In the last 15 years, “reentry” has become a buzzword in the criminal justice world. Reentry, however, has existed as long as we have had prisons and jails. Reentry is simply the point where people are released from prisons and jails. Period. They have “reentered” society. (I think of everything that follows as the “transition.”)

Reentry, for the people being released from prisons and jails, is complicated, and becomes more complicated the longer people have been “incapacitated” in prisons and jails. (“Incapacitation” is considered one of the “legitimate penological goals.”) For the record, which most Americans should know by now, the United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. The U.S. has other dubious distinctions in this field: the U.S. holds people in prisons for longer periods of time than any other nation in the world; the U.S. sentences more people to life without the possibility of parole than any other nation in the world; the U.S. sentences more people to life sentences than any other nation in the world; the U.S. has more juveniles sentenced to life than any other nation in the world — this list of dubious distinction goes on and on, and if I continue I won’t get to the subject at hand.

I wanted to write a little about the process of reentry, what’s most important in this process. If one were to survey organizations working in the field of reentry, as well as the people they serve, and requested a list of the Top 5 things people need in order to make a seamless and successful transition from prisons and jails to their families and their communities, the list would look something like this, not necessarily in this order: 1) employment; 2) alcohol and/or substance abuse treatment; 3) a support system (that would include financial support until the individual becomes gainfully employed); 4) Voc/Ed training and 5) counseling. To this list I would add “debriefing” the prison/jail experience (different than counseling), and financial literacy. But the most important thing, which is somewhat implied in number 3, is family.

The Osborne Association, the organization for which I work, has been serving people impacted by the criminal justice system since 1931, and under the leadership of its Executive Director, Liz Gaynes, for the past 25 years, has been one of the few if not the only organization serving people impacted by the criminal justice system that has been “family-focused,” that is, that has stressed the importance of family in reentry, beginning with working with people even before they are sentenced (through its Court Advocacy Services), during imprisonment and after imprisonment (reentry). When we look at how people manage those primary relationships (family), and if they manage them well, we would see that those people who manage those primary relationsips well, manage other relationships well, and are more successful in making the transition from prisons and jails to their families and their communities.

Indeed, reentry is about relationships, “right” relationships.

To learn more about the Osborne Association, visit its webpage at www.osborneny.org.

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

My earliest political memory is of Dr. King’s assassination. I was 7 years old. I didn’t understand the enormity or impact of his death. All I knew, as a child, using the adults’ sentiments as a barometer, was that the world we knew had changed, forever, and in some ways had remained the same; and that there were some in society who wanted the world to stay the same or not be too far removed from slavery and segregation.

As the son of a father born in the segregated South in 1926, a father who, despite his very young age, enlisted and served in the segregated U.S. Army during World War II, this history and struggle was alive in the life of my father who ended up in New York to escape the legacy of slavery, segregation, and to live a better life, that pursuit of a better life as proclaimed by the forefathers of this nation.

Dr. King’s assassination was one more death in a long line of deaths, even more evidence that the pursuit of those American ideals came with a price, that one simply couldn’t walk into a store with this promissory note and think that it would be honored; that the pursuit of liberty might even cost one his or her life.

As we remember and honor the life and legacy of Dr. King, we should not forget his enormous courage and steadfastness to the principles of nonviolence, that is, he was a man that proclaimed how he would fight this struggle, that it would be fought through the principles of non-violence, and he never wavered from those principles.

Today, with the upcoming presidential election in November, candidates proclaiming this and that should look at the life and legacy of Dr. King, his courage, his steadfastness, his belief that America could be better if everyone lived up to her ideals.

In Memory of Reentry

My life, my job, has brought me in contact with both famous and infamous people. Not surprisingly, the infamous ones have been far more interesting than the famous. And perhaps this has more to do with the “take-aways,” what I have learned from them, than anything else. Makes me think of something I read in one of Clive Barker’s books: “What do the good know, but what the bad teach them by their excesses?”

The people I have met, briefly encountered, read about before and after meeting them, would be included in a Rogues’ Gallery of 20th Century Crime in America. And there are lesser knowns, but their stories, what I have learned from them, are just as valuable.

The other day I was talking with an individual who had spent 24 years in prison, from age 16 to 40. He has been home more than ten years. We were talking about memoirs, about writing memoirs, and he began to tell me what he remembered about his first year out of prison.

“I entered this ‘Not So Brave New World,’” he began, “and immediately realized that I did not exist.” He went on to explain that he did not exist in the “free world” on paper. He had a birth certificate and social security card; evidence, he said, that he had been born, and that his mother had the good sense to get him a social security number practically at birth. These were the only two “public” documents that validated his existence in the free world on paper. He went on to say that as soon as he realized this, he thought of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, but felt more like The Brother from Another Planet.

I work in the field (industry) of reentry — for an organization, the Osborne Association, that is doing remarkable, cutting-edge work transforming lives, communities, and the criminal justice system (to learn more about Osborne, visit its website at www.osborneny.org) — working with people reentering and making a transition from prisons and jails to their families, communities, and society, and I am almost always thinking about this work and this world, and how to bridge the gap between what is essentially two worlds as people who have been in prisons and jails understand them: the “free world” and the “not free world.”

This individual and I talked at length, and he told me that the first year out, everywhere he turned, everything he did or tried to do, provided more evidence that he did not exist, at least not on paper. And then he talked about the process of becoming “documented,” as if he were an “illegal alien” (his words), despite being a born and bred American. And once he did this, he said, an unfathomable sadness descended upon him. He then realized, he said, that he had practically no life and no history in the free world — he discounts the first 16 years of his life, which he said he barely remembers because he willed himself to forget and can’t even access that part of his memory anymore — and that the process of reentry, for him, would involve creating a history and memories outside of and not connected to prison.

Youth Shackled

At the Halsey Street train station in Brooklyn, four teenagers are shackled and seated on the hard wooden bench. Two police officers in plainclothes, who do not look like cops, stand near the youth. One is on his walkie-talkie. The other stands watch. I look at the teenagers, not knowing why they are shackled and seated on the bench, but they are smiling, saying something that evokes laughter. I want to tell the plainclothes officers to tighten the cuffs, to bring some pain if not gravity to the situation. I hate seeing youth shackled. I hate seeing that being shackled is not taken seriously, and even evokes laughter from those in shackles.

What is it with cops and donuts?

The sun is shining brightly. Sitting in Dunkin Donuts this morning on a high stool, looking out the window where the sun is shining in onto Halsey Street, right off Broadway, in Brooklyn, USA, eating an everything bagel, slightly toasted, with cream cheese. Brought my own drink, green tea. There are no Starbucks in this neighborhood so Dunkin Donuts will have to do, to sit and jot down notes.

A cop cruiser, carrying two of New York’s Finest, pulls into a No Standing Anytime zone. One of the policemen exits the cruiser and enters Dunkin Donuts. He has on sunglasses and enters with a swagger, stands in a line of about ten people waiting for their Dunkin Donuts fix.

Shortly, the cop gets his order and exits Dunkin Donuts with his coffee and donuts, gets into the cruiser and speeds away. To fight crime or to find a nice safe street to eat their donuts? What is it with cops and donuts? The sugar rush? I always thought it was about the thrill of the chase in crime-fighting that they got their rush.

There is always a story…

Just the other day I was walking by the Dunkin Donuts on the corner of Broadway and Halsey in Brooklyn when a man, probably my age plus twenty years of hard living on the streets, limped up to me and asked me for a dime in order to get a cup of coffee, shaking the change in his hand he had already collected. I told him to come with me into the Dunkin Donuts, and had him order his coffee once we navigated the line and made it to the register. He got his coffee, thanked me and went on his way.

When the individual had approached me, I recognized him, having seen him begging in downtown Brooklyn, so he gets around, despite his limp. I swear, though, I’ve seen him before, before this, in another lifetime. Whenever I see someone begging, I wonder what his or her story is. There is always a story, what landed people on street corners, and I think I am wise enough never to judge.