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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.

This Is My Activism

by Simone Askew

September 28, 2018

It was the night of the Presidential Election, and my roommate and I were watching on our government-issued computers as the results were updated. The next President of the United States was announced and immediately there were thunderous cheers and yelps throughout the barracks. Two cadets on scooters pushed their way up and down the hallways making known their enthusiasm with the results. At the same time, shreeks with more depressing undertones filled the already crowded airspace. As I remained silent and observant, I struggled to find my own voice in the midst of these two dichotomous responses.

The Department of Defense outlines strict guidelines that uniformed service members must follow in Directive Number 134.10. This fifteen paged document lists everything that is acceptable and unacceptable in terms of political activities. Of these, the rules concerning prohibited political behavior are perhaps the most relevant in today’s politicized environment. These guidelines and their justifications have always been clear to me. They exist to ensure that an officer’s personal beliefs do not get in the way of her duty, and that her loyalty to the military surpasses all political differences.

Since our responsibility is to defend the United States Constitution, we can not allow the dynamic fluctuation of politics to influence our commitment to our mission or ability to defend our nation’s people. Therefore, remaining apolitical when in uniform is fundamental to maintaining professionalism and respect within the Armed Forces. This clarity, however, does not mean that execution of these requirements is as simple. The struggles that I often face come not when I am in uniform, but when I am out of it.

As an Army Officer, a Christian, a woman, an African-American, and so much more, I have a hard time finding my voice in this era of activism. I see friends marching in seas of passionate protestors. I see my church preaching the necessity of love and compassion. I see my younger sister struggle with racism in the world she sees around her. I see my friends leave on deployments and hope that care packages are enough to make them feel closer to home. I see, and have seen, all of these things from my isolated barracks room and wonder how I am making a difference. How can I be an activist in the 21st century?

While not all of the central issues today are at first glance political, a majority of them have been woven into political campaigns, political statements, and even political social media. It is virtually impossible to separate social issues from political ones and even harder to have an opinion without appearing partisan. So, as a black woman who considers the Army profession a guiding force in her life, how do I express my beliefs without leaning toward one side of the isle?

I battled with this question ever since the night of the election, wondering how I would handle myself in a time like this. Since then, answering it has only become harder. From Charlottesville to the National Anthem, the Second Amendment to immigration reform, incarceration to abortion, there is no shortage of multifaceted concerns in today’s world. What makes it even more difficult is that, while my inclusion in the military demands that I express no political opinion while in uniform, my gender and race often beg me to take a stand. The easy solution might be to simply obey the military guidelines that restrict me only when I am in uniform and then flip the switch after the duty day when the uniform comes off, a modern version of Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana. If only putting on a blonde wig and jamming out to “Nobody’s Perfect” was all I had to worry about.

One way that I have answered this question is by reconciling that activism has and still does come in so many forms. There are political leaders, community volunteers, university clubs, donating couples, praying men and women, public servants, and so many more profiles of people defending what they believe in. At West Point, I felt as though my inability to mirror these profiles of activists that I saw most meant that I could not be one myself. That could not be further from the truth.

I believe that the way that I embody activism is by protecting the space it exists in. The purpose of the U.S. military is to support and defend the freedom and security of the American people. This freedom makes it possible for people to disagree, it makes it legal to march for what you believe in, and it makes it normal to vote in democratic elections. This freedom allows us to struggle and progress through the American experiment, to fail in so many ways but to succeed in so many more. Though we are a work in progress, it is our Constitution that gives us this liberty to try toward a better tomorrow. Regardless of the ebbs and flows of American politics, it is this Constitution that I fight to defend.

This profession defines my distinctive form of activism and enables me to safeguard the space for others to fight their fight. A sense of duty to the American people and a commitment to protecting and bettering this country: these are the ways that I live out my activism. Trust that I will forever pursue these principles, and hope that my unique form of activism is remembered as one that matters too.

John Brown: America’s First Great Activist

by Jay Winik

September 18, 2018

Jay Winik is the columnist and historian in residence for frank news.

He was a revolutionary warrior named John Brown – among America’s first great activists.

Who was John Brown? With his haunting eyes, long white beard, and bony fingers, he was a lay theologian weaned on the subtleties of Jonathan Edwards. Moody and anxious, he examined slave insurrections. Old and tired, he was an abolitionist who wanted to strike a death blow into the gut of slavery. And his face flushed with anticipation like the biblical soldiers he revered, he treasured the idea of waging a war over slavery right in the center of “Babylon.”

And to Brown, that Babylon, once on the bloodsoaked plains of the Kansas prairie, was now in northern Virginia.

Believing small groups of fighters could fend off larger forces in rough, mountainous hills, Brown audaciously plotted a raid into the Appalachian hills of Virginia, marking the beginning of the end for slavery.

In May 1958, Brown had a surreptitious meeting with a group of thirty-four Blacks in Chatham, Canada, where they schemed and conspired. By meeting’s end, they put pen to paper and adopted a “provisional constitution” for the Republic of liberated slaves, which would be established in remote timbered forests. The group, after much deliberation, unanimously acclaimed Brown as the commander-in-chief of the Army of this “new nation.”

The idea may have been half-baked from the start, but Brown fit the bill. And it was apparent from the start that Brown was a unique figure. Where previous activist abolitionists were committed to nonviolence, Brown’s favorite New Testament passage (Hebrews 9:22) said “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” Where abolitionists embraced the suffering and martyrdom of Uncle Tom, Brown’s deity was instead “the Jehovah” who angrily swallowed up pharaoh’s minions in the turbulent waters of Egypt’s Red Sea. Where moderates eschewed a revolution in favor of the soft cadences of reason, Brown insisted that all the abolitionists do is “Talk! Talk! Talk!”

As Brown noted, triumph over slaveholders – “the thieves and murderers” – could only be won by “action – ACTION!”

In 1858 Brown continued to refine his plans for the invasion of southern Appalachia. He purchased pikes for his fledgling Army and guns to arm the slaves that he expected to march with him. Then he rented a farm in Maryland across the Potomac River from Harper’s Ferry, Virginia – a place that would one day become legendary. His goal: to seize the US armory and arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and distribute its arms to his swelling army of former slaves.

He continued to plot, and in August 1859 set up a covert meeting with the great Frederick Douglass. Removed from prying eyes of the world, they met in an old rock quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. He wanted to enlist Douglass, less for his rhetorical genius than to serve as a go-between with the slaves. Douglass, himself a former slave and the most eminent black in the North, had been through his own personal odyssey. Before 1850 he had been a pacifist. But then as the slave states increased in power and force, as slave blocks and slave trading became increasingly ubiquitous, an embittered Douglass changed his tune. “Slaveholders, tyrants and despots have no right to live,” Douglass bellowed. One of his favorite sayings now became, “who would be free must himself strike the blow.”

Nodding his head, Brown agreed.

Now, “Come with me, Douglass,” Brown boisterously insisted. “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.” But Douglass had his reservations. Certain that Brown was engaged in a doomed escapade that would “array the whole country against us,” Douglass was hesitant. He demurred.

But not before this dire warning: You “will never get out alive,” Douglass told Brown.

Brown, his activist impulses unchecked, was undeterred.

Brown wanted to proceed – despite the meager number of recruits he had. As fall rolled around, suddenly he was swept away by a desire for battle. Sitting down at an old wooden desk he wrote a “Vindication of the Invasion,” etching his place in history. In October, he finally acted; however he did so without plotting an escape route from Harper’s Ferry. In truth, after seizing the Armory buildings, he had no further plan of action, either for escape or attack.

Was he being reckless? Actually, no. This was not a mission designed to succeed, but a quest designed to fail, and to confer upon him a martyrdom far outstripping any eventual armed triumph.

On October 16, with 21 men, Brown struck. He and his men had a wagon load of guns, knives, and artillery broadsides. For two days Brown’s fighters heatedly engaged the local militia and turned Harper’s Ferry into bedlam. They quickly overwhelmed the single watchman – that was the easy part – and seized the armory. Brown then dispatched a patrol into the countryside with a message: “pass the word among the slaves; take hostages.” They did, thirty all told, including Lawrence Washington, a great grand nephew of George Washington.

Later that evening, at 1:25 AM, Brown halted the eastbound midnight train and held it hostage. For several hours, the clock ticked while Brown deliberated. Then almost inexplicably, he let the train leave – he wanted to alert the world about his crusade. Feeling almost unstoppable, Brown now warned Southerners that God had appointed him to liberate their slaves “by some violent and decisive move.”

By midmorning on October 17, the fight had been joined in full. Brown’s men were pinned down by sniper fire, even as the Maryland and Virginia militias quickly raced into the town. Brown now faced a series of fateful decisions. Should he continue fighting? Negotiate his way out? Surrender? He first sought to negotiate, raising the white flag. He was rebuffed. Now he chose to fight.

That afternoon eight of Brown’s men were already casualties, including two of his sons. It was a melee. The moans of the dying were all around them. Brown and his survivors and prisoners frantically retreated to a fire engine house, where they would now fight to the death. This time, the die was cast. During the night a company of US Marines arrived to much fanfare; it was commanded by two US cavalry officers, including Col. Robert E Lee, destined for his own immortality as general-in-chief of the Confederate forces in the Civil War, and Lieutenant J.E.B Stuart, the dashing cavalryman of Gettysburg fame. Lee’s Marines attacked first with battering rams and then with fixed bayonets; Lee, normally the most aggressive of soldiers, worried that gunfire might inadvertently kill the hostages. A desperate Brown himself was wounded—slashed by a sword. Blood soaked through his shirt and puddled on the floor. And less than 36 hours after it started, Brown and his men were prisoners. His brazen attempt to end slavery was pitifully ended.

It didn’t matter. Reminiscent of the ‘Great Fear,’ the whispers and shouts that swept through the countryside at the beginning of the French Revolution, the news of Harper’s Ferry’s quickly sent waves of shock and rage throughout the nation. In a terrifying sign of things to come, wild rumors circulated of armed abolitionists like Brown marching from the north, and of widespread “negro” uprisings joining them from the South, plunging the country into a racial bloodbath.

Brown’s activism was not for the faint of heart. He was a marked man as all across Virginia angry mobs roared for his head. To stave off his lynching, or prevent vigilantes from storming the prison where he was held, the state of Virginia reached a summary verdict. Brown was deemed guilty of “treason, murder, and fomenting insurrection.” His fate was never in doubt. He was to hang within a matter of weeks, on December 2.

Distinguished intellectuals like William Lloyd Garrison thought the raid was an act of terrorism, “misguided, wild, and apparently insane.” But Brown’s surprising poise during his trial quickly led to the idea that he was a Christlike figure with a hallowed cause. In his concluding words to the court, he exuded a repose and strength that touched even Virginia’s governor, Henry Wise.

Prior to sentencing, Brown was surprisingly alert. His poignant words ricochet through time to this day.

“If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in the slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.”

Moved by his plight, no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson prophesied that Brown, widely derided by many as a terrorist, would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” For his part, Theodore Parker pronounced Brown “a SAINT.”

As December 2 approached, Brown was urged by his followers to give sanction to a rescue attempt, and thereby elude the hangman’s noose. Wasn’t his duty, after all, to live? Brown refused. “I am worth inconceivably more to hang,” he whispered to his brother, “than for any other purpose."

On a cold, wintry December day, with the famed actor and one day Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth in attendance, the rope was slipped around Brown’s neck. He looked out to the crowd assembled, a white linen bag was placed over his head, then he took a step, slipped through the trapdoor, wriggled for five minutes – as it happened, the rope was actually quite short – and his spinal column broke.

As he swung back and forth, Brown was dead; but his actions would live forever. Meanwhile, in the northern United States the church bells sang. So did the minute guns, which echoed in northern towns across the nation. Thousands took off their caps and tilted their heads in hushed acclamation for this suffering son of liberty.

“I’ve seen nothing like it,” wrote Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard, nearly moved to tears. For his part, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his diary, “the date of the new revolution – quite as much-needed as the old one.” When the Virginians hanged Brown they were “sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.” Come soon it did. Two years later, “John Brown’s body,” sung in rich and reverant tones, would become the favorite marching song of Northern troops.

And Henry David Thoreau, himself one of America’s great thinkers and activists, pronounced Brown “a crucified hero.”

Brown’s activism led to the sparks that would help ignite the Civil War, ennoble the anti-slavery impulses among abolitionists, and help pave the way for the Emancipation Proclamation promulgated by Abraham Lincoln in the 13^th amendment that would free the slaves for time immemorial. An extraordinary legacy.

We remember him still. So should today’s and tomorrow’s activists.

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