Transition from prison can’t succeed without a little help
Last Monday the sky was drooping with heavy wreckyour-to-do-list clouds when, like clockwork, my phone rang.
“You want to hear the latest in the day-in-a-life of someone who is trying to successfully transition back to life from prison?” asks Chris Jenkins, 32.
I met Chris for the first time last week as he tinkered with his motorized bicycle by the ramshackle garage of his Pasadena transitional house where he was finally feeling at home.
Before I can get out a not-fully-caffeinated “Good morning,” he starts explaining how he paid $140 weekly rent to his recovery house on Thursday and was informed on Monday by text that he could no longer live there because the room he was in “wasn’t the cleanest.”
It seems oddly appropriate that a story about returning from prison needs a big re-write midway through because the subject is suddenly homeless. That’s what returning citizens have to do every day: rewrite their story.
“It’s not easy learning to be an adult at 32,” said Jenkins, who was released from Eastern Correctional Institute last May after serving four years for armed robbery. It was a second stint in prison. On release, he had only been out of prison for two months since 2012.
“I’ve had to start all over, starting with finding my birth certificate so I can get identification so I can get transportation,” he said. “Everything I do, I’m stuck. Even the everyday things people take for granted, like waking up and looking at myself in the mirror when I brush my teeth… I’m stuck.”
Every week in America 10,000 ex-prisoners are released from state and federal prisons. Each one lands in a unique position based in part on the life they left behind. More than half will be back in prison in three years.
For someone like Jenkins, who burned his bridges in his hometown on the Eastern Shore with the crimes he committed, there was no warm welcome home.
There was only a sheet of phone numbers, including one that listed a number for the Maryland Reentry Resource Center, and its director, Vanessa Bright.
Bright started thinking about “reentry” work in 2014, when she was teaching financial literacy classes to inmates at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup.
She had become a beekeeper that year with a for-profit business selling products made from the bee’s honey and wax.
As she got to know the women in her classes, she learned about the hardships they would face trying to find work in the outside world with their criminal records. Formerly incarcerated people face unemployment rates similar to those faced by workers during the Great Depression.
“We just started helping people,” said Bright, who decided early on, that, unless it is important to know about the crimes that her clients served time for, she doesn’t ask. “These are people just like me, but they maybe made just one mistake. The driving force in getting know them as people is that I like to know you, the person, without having focus on that.”
Jenkins is among the cohort of 800 state and federal prisoners in Maryland who became eligible for early release because he would soon be up for parole and he had health complications that made him especially vulnerable to contracting COVID19. The first weeks out of prison, with the pandemic raging, Jenkins could only find housing in a hotel that was miles by foot and train ride from where he needed to report to his parole officer.
After a rough meeting with the overwhelmed officer, Jenkins got on the train to go home, exhausted and scared he was that he wasn’t going to be able to keep up his end of the parole bargain.
Without family or friends to turn to, he called Bright, who has helped him find a job at a dry cleaner and the house in Pasadena. She has coached him in communication and technical skills.
“Most people look at me as the scum of earth. And I probably am,” said Jenkins, a slight man with watery green eyes and scrappy 16-inch beard that he wears in a messy braid. He has a hapless quality that reminds me of the sidekick Jesse Pinkman character in AMC’s Breaking Bad.
He quickly corrects himself. “I won’t allow myself to beat myself up. But it is very hard to get things right.”
He keeps trying. He finished his GED in prison and took advantage of all the counseling opportunities he could find. He has a five-year plan to someday operate his own transitional housing for returning men and women, and he has broken it down into 30- and 90-day increments.
In many ways, Bright has filled in all the places that family and friends usually do. That means a family dynamic sometimes comes into play.
“I probably do too much,” she admitted. But she is a firm believer in second chances. She has been working a proposal to bring back her old idea of a social enterprise business that would provide ex-prisoners with transitional employment where they could work for her and learn important work skills before being hired out into the community.
Finding entry-level work is the first step to integrating someone back into their community. But it can also be the hardest.
“We coach and support and give feedback,” said Bright.
Life is complicated enough with unemployment at staggering levels and pandemic worries. Adding in the impenetrable stigma of a criminal record can sometimes make it seem like time-served is never time-completed.
“If it rains heavy or snows, I’m not going anywhere,” said Jenkins, whose e-bicycle transmission has started to make some ominous sounds.
For someone like Jenkins, bad weather, like the rain now pouring down, means more than a re-write. He called Vanessa and, by the end of the day, had managed to find a new place to stay. It’s not easy to get there and he hasn’t figured out where he will store his bike. But every day, he’s figuring out how to navigate the world, and his new place in it.
To learn more about mdrrc.org, or to donate to its Second Chance Month fundraiser, go to https:// kindest.com/732533-doyou-believe-in-secondchances