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Families Bear the Burden of Prisoner Reintegration

by David Harding

June 21, 2018

David J. Harding is Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Social Sciences D-Lab at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of 'On the Outside: Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration', which will be published by University of Chicago Press in early 2019. More information about his research can be found at https://prisonerreentryresearch.org. Follow him on Twitter here.

When “DeAngelo” walked out of the gates at the Cooper Street Prison in Jackson, Michigan after serving 11 months for drunken driving, he had little more than the clothes on his back. His girlfriend “Laura” was there to greet him, however, and she drove DeAngelo to the small house in Ypsilanti that she shared with her mother, about an hour’s drive east on Interstate 94.

Recalling that day, DeAngelo explained the rush of anxiety he felt as Laura merged into traffic on the highway. “The most intensive challenge for me when I first got out was the anxiety… It’s not just a jittery nervousness. It’s like... you’re just scared shitless…overwhelmed with just life. As soon as you get in that car and you drive off, it’s like everything hits you like, all the responsibilities you’ve got to take care of and just getting everything back on track.”

For the first three months after his release, Laura and her mother supported DeAngelo in every way possible. They provided him with his basic material needs for food and shelter and supported him emotionally as he coped with the stress of reentry and the uncertainty of “getting everything back on track.” Laura drove him to meetings with his parole officer, to job interviews, to Detroit to visit his 4-year old son, and to treatment for his alcoholism, anxiety, and bi-polar disorder. She helped him to access Washtenaw County’s health insurance for the poor so he could afford those treatments and to enroll in the local community college. After a few months working as a restaurant server, DeAngelo was able to save enough money to afford the deposit on his own apartment.

The story of DeAngelo’s reintegration is but one example of a larger pattern we saw in our study of the experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals: families are bearing most of the burden of reintegration. They provide food and housing, transportation, emotional support, and job leads. They support their loved ones while they attend school or job training, help them to comply with parole requirements, and even pay fines and fees on their behalf.

The moment of reunification with family is a joyous one, but it also creates new challenges for those who welcome formerly imprisoned loved ones into their homes. Such families are typically barely scraping by as it is, juggling complex arrangements of sporadic low-wage work combined with food stamps, welfare benefits, or disability benefits just to make ends meet. A new mouth to feed makes it even harder to make the groceries last until the end of the month, and a new body in a crowded apartment means less privacy and space for everyone else.

The social and emotional adjustment to life outside the regimented world of the prison puts new pressures on families that are often already strained by poverty and poor health.

Yet such familial support, challenging as it is to provide, is critical to successful reintegration. When “Randall” left the Cooper Street prison after serving 10 months for a parole violation, he returned to Detroit without the kind of family support that DeAngelo enjoyed. Shuffling between treatment programs, homeless shelters, short stays in spare bedrooms or on living room couches, and living rough on the streets, Randall struggled to rebuild his life without a firm foundation. Instead of treatment programs and community college, Randall spent his days walking or riding the bus around Detroit to meet his parole obligations, apply for work, and attend a job readiness program, at times resorting to selling plasma and odd jobs to keep food in his belly. In moments of desperation, he sold marijuana to get by. It was not until Randall moved into a spare bedroom in a house with his step-sister and her father, a retired auto worker, that Randall experienced any stability in his life. Three years after his release, after moving in with his fiancé in the suburbs, he eventually found a full-time job as short order cook.

DeAngelo’s and Randall’s experiences of reentry and reintegration also reveal the weaknesses of our institutional infrastructure for reintegrating formerly incarcerated individuals in the era of mass incarceration. Almost everyone who enters prison leaves at some point, but programs that serve the formerly incarcerated have not kept up with increasing incarceration and subsequent reentry.

The result is that poor families, disproportionately poor families of color, are left to bear the burden of reintegration, a hidden collateral consequence of mass incarceration.

Waiting For Asylum

by Alexis McGivern

June 25, 2019

Alexis has been championing low-plastic living since 2013. She previously worked on plastic pollution policy solutions for the International Union for Conservation of Nature and is currently conducting research with the Plastic Pollution Emissions Working Group.

In the summer of 2015, the world was inundated with images of the refugee crisis: men, women and children of all ages, with their lives in backpacks and suitcases, making treacherous journeys across boats and closed borders to claim asylum in various European countries.

I was proud when my small town of 2,000 people outside of Geneva, Switzerland, said we would be welcoming 50 asylum seekers, all young men between 18 and 30 years old, predominantly from Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea. A volunteer association was quickly formed, with a group of dedicated members of the community welcoming our new neighbours in ways we thought would help: warm winter clothes, French lessons, football tournaments to blow off steam and encourage new friendships, cooking exchanges and translation for complicated letters from the asylum office.

The asylum system in Switzerland, as it appears to be in most countries, seems to be less the actualisation of an international and ethical obligation to open your doors to those who are fleeing persecution and more of a slow, silent and unidirectional war of attrition. The state met the basic needs of migrants: food, shelter and safety. Beyond that, it seemed as though the asylum process was designed to wear its participants down to the point where they willingly accepted to return to their home countries.

The process of waiting for asylum is laden with anxiety at all stages, with multiple months or even years passing between your initial interview, follow-up appointments and the final decision on whether or not you are able to stay in a country that you may have called “home” (or something like it) for up to ten years in some of the worst case scenarios.

This anxiety is compounded by the fact that asylum seekers, under an “N permit” in Switzerland, are not given the right to (legally) work.

This is justified in a number of ways, including common rhetoric such as the fact that refugees would take work away from Swiss citizens or that there is an uncertainty over how long they will be staying in the country. Regardless of the reasons, this restrictive policy results in a highly motivated, often highly skilled subset of the population barred from contributing economically. This policy not only wastes a huge amount of potential, but also creates and compounds individual asylum seekers feelings of a lack of self-worth and agency.

The lack of a right to work played out like this in our small Swiss town: the shelter where the men slept each night (a converted bomb shelter meant for nuclear fallout and certainly not appropriate for long-term usage) closed each day from 9am to 5pm. Without work to pass the time, the only option was to hang around the small (and rather cramped) day centre, complete with one pool table, a few PCs and some bean bags, or to head to the train station, one of the few spots in town with free WiFi where the guys could catch up with their families or watch funny videos, a welcome distraction from the constant, humming anxiety that way playing in the background of their minds: “How long will I be able to stay here? Should I continue to invest in learning French if I might be sent to another country soon? Will my family ever be able to join me here? Will I ever see my family again?”

Early on, we had a comment from a member of our community along the lines of “hey, they´re out of danger - so what are they complaining about if they have to sit around and watch YouTube videos for a few months of their lives?” All of the asylum seekers I worked with were highly self-enterprising individuals: the first to leave amongst their families, they made the lonely and treacherous journey to pave a path for their loved ones to join them as soon as they could. They were aching to work, not only to use and hone the skills they brought with them, but also out of a deep sense of loyalty to Switzerland for being the country that took them in. I had many conversations in which many men expressed frustration that they were “draining government resources”, stating that they were deeply uncomfortable with having to be in the care of the state for the first time in their lives.

Last year, Mamadou Gassama, a 22-year old Malian refugee, scaled a building to save a child who was dangling from the fourth floor of a Parisian flat. His heroic act was rewarded with a fast-track to French residency and citizenship and a position with the city’s fire and emergency services. Why should refugees need to commit superhuman acts of heroism in order to deserve the right to safe, fair and dignified work?

We are soon coming up on the four-year anniversary of their arrival to Switzerland. For some men, they´ve had the chance to tearfully tell their family the good news: their asylum request has been granted, they can stay in Switzerland. They´ve found apprenticeships, jobs, some of them have even chosen to go back to school (in French, no less!). For those who remain in limbo, waiting with baited breath for the letter from the asylum office that could change their life forever or see their asylum request rejected and their lives thrown into flux once again, not working is simply no longer an option. Though the government gives a monthly stipend, it is not enough to cover a normal, fulfilling life in (extremely expensive) Switzerland. Many of them have transitioned into taking under the table work, sometimes being exploited to work far longer hours than is legal under threat of reporting them to the asylum office. Some men are underutilising their skills in a big way, like Abdul*, an Afghan refugee who worked as a translator for the American army during their occupation and was one of thousands left behind and in danger by an extremely restrictive visa process to enter the United States. He now picks up catering jobs, cooking Afghan food for parties and festivals in and around the Geneva area.

The ability to work can do wonders for the sense of self-worth, mental health and integration of refugees into their new communities. For the state, allowing asylum seekers to work would not only ease economic pressure, but would also promote integration among new communities and would employ the unique and varied skillsets of their new residents. If nothing else, work would also serve as a helpful distraction during an extremely difficult time of processing past traumas, panic and worry about the future, and intense loneliness from being so far away from friends and family. Refugees have beaten all odds to make it to their new homes: the least we can do is give them the right to work.

*Name changed.

Not By Bread Alone

by Chris Walters

June 24, 2019

Chris Walters is a playwright, director and teacher of Drama. You can follow Chris and his work here.

A group of us were having dinner in a local restaurant the other night. We are all volunteers with an NGO operating on one of the Greek islands, which runs a number of projects connected with the refugee crisis, and we were saying goodbye to one of our number who had finished her stint as an interpreter, and was returning to the “real” world, resuming her law studies in the States. Slightly ironic that it was a farewell, as the conversation turned to the arrival the night before of some sixty refugees in an inflatable boat. Another in the group had been one of the people who had helped to pull them out of the water; he normally volunteered at the communal vegetable garden on one of the projects, but he was also part of the rota of people who stayed up all night, maintaining a watch over the coast, looking out for just such events. The mood quietened, we asked about the procedure from that point. After being given blankets and hot drinks, they were given a basic health check, before being taken to be registered and provided with somewhere to stay. I felt humbled. I am a Drama teacher, and felt that my own role was so much more peripheral and inconsequential, in comparison with helping people floundering in the waves in the dark. In those desperate moments of need, James was helping to provide that most pressing and basic need for safety, for security, for food and warmth. While I was literally playing games.

Once that immediate emergency is dealt with, that next stage in the migrants’ desperate litany of traumatic events that form their journey met and overcome, they needed to return to some form of normality, to face the mundane and tedious daily reality that is the migrant’s lot – a bleak encounter, for the most part, with most plotting the next stage of their journey. I work with unaccompanied minors, those least able to determine their own future. Having survived one terrifying experience, tossed and turned by the wind and waves in the dark, they now faced the equally random vagaries of a bureaucracy creaking at the knees. These children and young people, having received food and shelter, albeit of the most basic kind, also needed an education. Even within that, I know that what I am able to offer is rightly regarded as being of a low priority. They need the basics of numeracy and literacy, the ability to communicate in the language of their new home (however temporary they hope that to be).

And yet.

If their souls are not to be irredeemably crushed, they need to move beyond that bare and basic requirement, of words and numbers. They need to play, to sing, to laugh. And it is at this stage that I can at last make my contribution. The benefits of drama as part of a well-rounded education are well-rehearsed (sorry). It goes far beyond its role (sorry again) as the study and practice of a respected art-form. Above all, and uniquely, I would argue, it is social. It demands other people.

If you were washed up alone on a desert island, you might (once you had fed and sheltered yourself) turn to any number of forms of artistic expression. You might fashion a musical instrument, learn to play it, make beautiful music; you might use the natural resources to paint or sculpt. With access to some form of pen and ink, you might write: prose, poetry, an account of your daily life. You might even, for the sheer joy of it, sing or dance. What you would not do, unless you found yourself treading the path to madness, is act. Play a part. Tell a story. For those things, you need other people. Even a one-person show demands an audience.

Think of all those qualities that educators cite when pronouncing the benefits of drama. Communication – verbal, physical, facial. Co-operation – working as a part of a team with a common purpose. Even that most elusive and difficult to measure quality of self-confidence. All of them, I would argue, are social. And they are all part of a return to normality, to living alongside and in harmony with other people. For many, the migrant experience must have been at times a desperate, every man, woman and child for themselves struggle for survival. But they need to move beyond that, and this is when the drama teacher can help, to give them the opportunity to heal and to grow.

It includes that most non-serious of things: laughter. In my previous life as a teacher of an academic, school subject, I sometimes had to remind my students (and myself) that I was not teaching a course in comedy. That would mean abandoning one half of the art, one of the two masks that signify our subject. But laughter is so life-affirming. We laugh a lot in class – at each other, though never (all right, hardly ever) harshly; with each other, as a shared release; and at ourselves. And if there is yet one more thing that I am sure the young migrants have missed, I am sure it is laughter.

Finally, drama (and its cousin, theatre) allows the opportunity for people to reflect, in a safe environment, upon their own experiences; we play others in order to understand ourselves. I am currently working with a group of young Afghans on a greatly edited and adapted version of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. Briefly, it tells the story of a refugee, forced to flee her home, and taking with her an abandoned child. Given the probable experiences of the performers – we don’t ask – this does have the potential to invoke trauma. But theatre allows the story to be transformed. It is told as a fairy tale, of baddies mocked and defeated, of goodies cheered. We also take a stylised, frequently comic, theatrical style. And, crucially, our refugee triumphs, saves the day, and the child. And triumph, we hope, trust and pray, is what they will all do.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

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