How Former Prisoners Are Set Up to Fail, Especially if They're Women
Orange Is the New Black has shined a light on women's experiences behind bars, but what happens when they're no longer locked up?
Tiffany Johnson felt excited, scared, and a little incredulous on the day she was released from Central California Women's Facility, the largest women's prison in the world. She'd done 16 years of her life sentence, which she got for killing her mother's boyfriend — the man she says raped her every day from age 5 to age 10. As Tiffany exited the prison gates, two thoughts ran through her mind: "I can't believe this is happening" and "It's a trick."
A few hours later, the mixed emotions distilled into fear. "I tried to take a shower," recalled Tiffany of that April 2010 night. She turned on the water, but it came out from the tub faucet below and she couldn't figure out how to get it to flow from above. "I cried and cried," she said. "I felt like if this is a problem, just turning on a shower, what else am I going to run into? What other struggles am I going to have?"
The list began with the mundane, like learning to use a cell phone and getting used to closing a door herself to be alone in a room. Then there were real challenges. As a felon, she was banned from most low-income housing, and finding a job seemed near impossible. In prison she had become an expert electrician, supervising and training the other women in her penitentiary's electrical sector. Yet every time she applied for a job, she had to check a box admitting her criminal history and never even got interviews. She finally contacted the electronic company her prison subcontractor supplied, figuring they'd give her a chance. "They didn't," Tiffany, now 46, said, rolling her eyes. "I served my time and I was out. But it didn't matter. It's like I was still serving a life sentence."
I served my time and I was out. But it didn't matter. It's like I was still serving a life sentence.
With 2.2 million people behind bars, the U.S. has the largest incarcerated population (proportional to general population) on earth. This past fall, the Department of Justice reported that the number of people in federal penitentiaries had dropped for the first time since 1980, with no increase in crime. U.S. attorney general Eric Holder attributed this development to the move away from "longer than necessary" sentences, a shift that came in part when, in August 2013, he directed federal prosecutors to stop charging nonviolent drug offenders with charges that carry mandatory minimum sentencing. But criminal justice experts say stemming the tide of mass incarceration is not only about limiting the time people are locked up, but also about making sure those who are released don't cycle back in.
More and more, attention is turning toward the problems of recidivism and the solutions of reentry. Every year, approximately 600,000 inmates are released from state or federal penitentiaries. According to a Department of Justice study, about 75 percent of those released in 2005 were rearrested — and more than half returned to prison — within five years.
But it's important to have this conversation with a specific lens on women. Though 90 percent of those behind bars are men, between 1980 and 2011, the number of women in prison grew at a rate of 1.5 times that of men. The Netflix series Orange Is the New Black has shined a light on women's experiences behind bars, but the show focuses mostly on what happens inside the prison. Though viewers get a sense that it's hard to adjust to life on the outside when, for example, Taystee returns soon after being paroled, the challenges beyond bars aren't a significant part of the narrative.
Women are slightly better at keeping themselves out than men but are still more likely than not to be rearrested. Those who get on stable footing often have a leg up. Tiffany, for example, was released to A New Way of Life (ANWOL), a not-for-profit transitional sober living facility in South Central Los Angeles. Her housemates helped her figure out the shower that first night, and, within a year, she had found an apartment and job.
"Effective reentry programs are the exception to the rule in terms of women's transitions back into society," said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a D.C.-based criminal justice research and advocacy organization. Hundreds of these programs have sprouted up over the years, but the supply is not nearly enough to deal with the demand, and few prison systems have adequate prerelease programs that inform women about their options. Though prisoners' rights advocates hold prerelease seminars when they can, often inmates are left to find out about these services through word of mouth or chance. Tiffany learned about ANWOL from an offhand comment by a member of her parole board.
Though no one keeps track of the exact number of people released into reentry programs in the U.S., experts say the vast majority of newly released people land on their own and on the street. Women face all the challenges men do, plus added pitfalls, including limited job options, specialized housing needs, and social stigma. "Compared to 20 years ago, we have a greater understanding and concern about the situation for women," Mauer said. But, he added, there's a long way to go.
The Los Angeles County Probation Office in Compton has fake wood paneling and smells like stale smoke. On a Wednesday in June 2014, the entrance metal detector beeped sporadically as Mechille Johnson sat in a small plastic chair, knees swaying together and apart, waiting to see her probation officer. A poster on the wall of Uncle Sam read: "I want YOU … to please be quiet."
When called in, she slipped between cubicles to find her officer, a pleasant middle-aged man, who asked what's been going on, how's she been feeling. They chatted as he reviewed her attendance sheets for other obligatory meetings and discussed scheduling for her behavioral science classes at a nearby community college. The meeting lasted 12 minutes. Mechille, who describes herself as a "6-foot-tall, 300-pound, bald lesbian," was almost giddy as she read her weekly evaluation: "Keep up the good work and don't get into trouble!"
For Mechille, an ANWOL client, that was easier said than done. "Right there," she said pointing to an alley not far from the office, "that's where I used to smoke crack." The 46-year-old grandmother has spent more of her life addicted to drugs than not. She's been behind bars four times, but she said this time out would be different. It was her second time with ANWOL, which she first found out about when, while cleaning her prison library, she uncovered a box of the organization's brochures. The first time, she "fucked up" and fell back into using. But during her last stint behind bars, she faced tough personal issues that she said made her certain she'd never let herself go back.
Nearly half of all female inmates admit to being addicted to drugs or alcohol or both at the time of their arrest. Yet, most, like Mechille, do time instead of treatment. The first two times she was released, she didn't know there were group homes for women like her. Instead, she was given $200 in "gate money" and put on a bus to L.A.'s bus station, which happens to be next to the heart of Skid Row, a neighborhood known for drugs and people living out of cardboard boxes.
You step off the bus into homelessness, mental illness, gangs, pimps, and drug dealers.
"You step off the bus into homelessness, mental illness, gangs, pimps, and drug dealers," said ANWOL's founder Susan Burton, who stepped off that bus multiple times. Burton spiraled into drug addiction when her 5-year-old son was accidentally killed by an off-duty police officer in 1981. She founded ANWOL in 1998 and started by going to Skid Row to pick up women from the bus to offer them a place to sleep. Today, at 63, she still picks up clients.
ANWOL has become a pioneer in the field, helping more than 750 women stay out of prison, an 80 percent success rate, and several of its current leaders are former prisoners (including Tiffany, who's a community organizer). For the first several weeks (or occasionally up to two months) after their release, women reside in ANWOL's main house where a housing director is there for constant support. A cook comes three times a week, and there's a 10 p.m. curfew. Then there's the second house three doors down. There's no staff presence and no cook, but the housing director checks in frequently; the women still have a curfew, and kitchen is filled for them. Finally, there are three houses where the women are on their own for food (though they can come eat at houses one and two), and there's no supervision. At this point, the women have jobs and should soon be able to find housing on their own and finish the program.
All of this is helpful considering the head-spinning list of requirements the newly released are expected to adhere to. Most parole and probation arrangements demand regular compliance checks, drug tests, limited contact with possible co-conspirators, restrictions on travel, group meetings, and frequent in-person reporting, on top of finding a job and place to live. "Who knows where she slept last night and you're asking her to do all this?" said Evelyn Ayala, ANWOL's case manager supervisor. "Disaster waiting to happen."
Release practices are just part of the problem, Mauer of the Sentencing Project said. "Almost all our correctional systems say they are committed to reentry," he said, "but the scale of what they do in practice is often pretty modest." The trouble, he explained, is twofold: not enough programming to prepare women (or men) before they are released and the availability of services once they get out.
"When you get listed on parole, they are supposed to tell you everything that is available to you," Tiffany said. "They don't tell you all that. They just inform you that you have the right to get assistance from the parole agent." And with giant caseloads, parole agents don't have the time to find every former inmate the services needed, and some don't even know what those are, explained Peggy Edwards of the Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership (LARRP), an L.A. County network that helps prisoners reintegrate into society.
This is where reentry organizations come in, offering a place to sleep as well as case management to help clients access mental health and substance abuse treatment, job training, public relief, and more. In most states, these services are stuck in a bureaucratic labyrinth. "You get substance abuse from the county here, mental health from the county there," Edwards said. For several years in L.A., she explained, each agency thought the other was handling the overlaps. She estimated that thousands were left without either service.
Doing this on your own and trying to figure out where you're going to sleep and how you're going to get money to eat every day? You just can't.
Those who do manage to access services have dizzying schedules. "Today I had group therapy, anger management, and one class," Mechille said around 4 p.m. one day as she made herself a sandwich at one of the ANWOL residences. She'd been gone since just after 8 a.m. Other residents were also just arriving, having been out all day at substance treatment sessions, meeting with probation or parole officers, having job interviews, or waiting in line to get on general relief. "Doing this on your own and trying to figure out where you're going to sleep and how you're going to get money to eat every day? You just can't," Mechille said.
Finding a job takes savvy too. Lack of employment experience, unfamiliarity with computers or other industry developments, and hard-to-explain résumé gaps are all factors. But there is also direct bias. A 2003 multi-city study found that 60 percent of surveyed employers would "definitely not" or "probably not" hire an applicant just because of his or her criminal record. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has since found bias to be so pervasive that in 2012, it issued new guidelines to make it harder for employers to use criminal history to rule out otherwise qualified applicants. Meanwhile, the reentry support community has come up with its own solutions — for instance, informal lists of "felon-friendly" businesses. Knowing which places don't discount applicants based on criminal history makes getting a job as an ex-prisoner slightly easier.
This knowledge can be especially critical for women. Most former prisoners find work in male-dominated sectors — trucking, mechanics, shipping, and construction — and several women interviewed for this story said they were turned down because hirers say that one woman on an all-male staff will cause "problems and distractions." Traditional women's fields pose their own challenges. Nursing and home care in most states, for example, have legal prohibitions against hiring anyone with a criminal record. It can even be hard to find office work, because it often deals with money or sensitive personnel information.
For Mechille, reentry case management meant going back to school. "I thought I'd never get financial aid because of my history," she said, "but we found a way."
As helpful as they are, residential reentry programs aren't the only means of ensuring a smoother path for those trying to make it on the outside. In many cities, there is an expanding network of groups that offer ad-hoc services to former offenders. In L.A., for example, there's Chrysalis, an organization that helps the homeless and ex-prisoners find employment by providing everything from computer literacy training to interview-prep workshops to behavioral coaching. They even lend their clients clothes for an interview or first day of work. Homeboy Industries, another L.A. stalwart that serves the formerly incarcerated population (specifically those with a gang history), offers free classes, legal services, mental health counseling, and even solar-panel-installation training, in addition to jobs at its café. Just as important, they do tattoo removal. For those who want to leave a gang past behind, almost nothing matters as much as getting rid of a visible marker of past affiliations.
And of course, reentry services or programs are still a reactive measure. The prison population will mainly wane when fewer people are locked up. Innovative programs to help with this issue are popping up too — for instance, L.A.'s Women's Reentry Court, which diverts drug offenders into treatment before they reach prison or jail. Only 18 percent of the women who've gone through the program since its founding in 2007 have ended up behind bars. Nancy Richards-Chand, the court's public defender, says this program is still small but the model can be replicated and expanded. "When you have someone who's going to go to prison for 18 years, you choose to spend a fraction [of] the cost [of incarceration] and put them in treatment program that gives them a much better chance of being successful," she said. "People are starting to understand."
Janice Brown is a soft-spoken woman, whose thinning hair is pulled back in a pair of petite cornrows. She has a tendency to giggle, except when she hears the voices in her head. "It's from [my boyfriend] abusing me so much," she said, as she sat at the picnic table in the yard of one of ANWOL's houses. "He beat me with an iron, he take that hot grease from the grill and throw it on me, he thrown me down a staircase, slammed my head against a counter."
That all stopped when she stabbed and killed the boyfriend during a particularly bad beating, but the voices never did. "The medication don't help," she said. Nor did weekly chats with a prison counselor during her 11-year term. So every day, voices tell Janice they are going to kill her and her family.
A 2014 report found that about 15 percent of state prison inmates, and 20 percent of city and county jail occupants, suffer from mental illness. There wasn't a gender breakdown in their numbers, but smaller studies indicate the rate of serious mental illness among women offenders can be double that of men.
Janice said two things gave her hope when she was inside: God and her kids. "I told myself I have to live for my children," she said. Two of her kids are now grown and on their own. Her youngest was a baby when she got locked up. She said the state took him, and having been out only a little over two months when interviewed, she wasn't sure where he was. Her case manager had warned her that the state does not look kindly on mothers who have done time. But, she said, all she wanted was "a real brand-new start and life that I think that I deserve, me and my children together."
Reconnecting with family is vital for many women's success on the outside, experts say. Reentry programs with women clients spend a ton of time helping them navigate the steps of getting kids out of the foster system and pushing for anything that makes them more capable parents, including safe, affordable housing with good access to transportation, job training and placement, health care, and child care.
Reuniting families isn't just good for the mom. In 2002, more than 7 million children in the U.S. were estimated to have a parent in jail, prison, or under correctional supervision (parole or probation). Nearly 80 percent of incarcerated women were the primary caregivers for kids before they were locked up, and the children are more likely to end up in prison themselves.
We might do the same crime as men, but we are judged harsher by society.
Sometimes, though, it's not healthy for women getting out of prison to reconnect with family, especially right away. Several women interviewed for this story who were struggling with addiction were glad to be in a reentry program that was removed from the places where they used because there was less temptation to fall back into old habits. Other families want nothing to do with the women coming out. "We might do the same crime as men, but we are judged harsher by society," said Mechille, the former inmate who had gone back to school. Indeed, several studies over the past 10 years have found that social stigma is a big obstacle for women former offenders, especially when combined with the normal hurdles of finding a job and housing and reconnecting with children and family. "As a woman you supposed to be caring, nurturing, good people," Mechille continued. "When you become a criminal, it hard for people to accept you because we have strayed so far from what women are supposed to be."
When family isn't an option, group homes can fill an emotional void. Spending time at ANWOL's modest house where women live their first weeks out, it's easy to see why.
At 8 a.m. on a clear day last June, Janice, Mechille, and a handful of others gathered in the living room for morning meditation, as they do every day. One woman read a Bible passage and talked about its meaning to her. Then they went in a circle, each reflecting on what they took from the reading, sharing stories from the day before, trepidations about the day ahead, and encouragement for one another. A few cried; a few hugged. Then they held hands and ended with a prayer.
"I love morning meditation," Janice said later. "We all have hard days, but seeing others get through theirs make you feel like you can get through yours too." In fact, every resident interviewed for this story said this was one of the best parts of her day.
Burton isn't surprised. She designed this practice based on her own experience. "Morning meditation is important to start every day on a positive note," she said, adding that, without this, some residents would have a hard time getting out of bed. When Burton got clean in 1997, thanks to a mainly white Santa Monica reentry program, she started ANWOL to give her fellow women of color the same shot at a better life. The U.S. prison population in 2008 was almost 60 percent Latino and black despite these groups only representing 25 percent of the overall U.S. population. Historically, reentry programs were based in wealthier areas and word of their existence seemed to circulate only among white inmates, Burton said.
Residents also said it's nice being around others who haven't yet shed habits from lockup — like stashing toilet paper in a drawer rather than leaving it in the bathroom. In these houses, women aren't ashamed about having never typed on a computer; they never have to lie to cover up gaps in their life experience. The women admitted there can be tension among housemates, but they all stressed their bond. Though there haven't been studies on what makes women's reentry programs work and why on a national scale, it's likely that being a space that makes women feel like they are within a community is part of the reason.
Anyone who has been to prison will tell you that staying out requires strength, courage, and willpower. But even people with these qualities fall through the cracks.
"When you face barriers individually, you think something is wrong with you," Burton said. "'I'm not smart enough, not good enough.' But when you look at it collectively, you begin to realize that [there is] discrimination against formerly incarcerated people. If we can come together to fight that discrimination, perhaps we can change the world and make it fair and just for everybody."
That's the heart of All of Us or None, a national organizing initiative that fights for the rights of the formerly incarcerated founded in 2003 by Burton and other past offenders and their families. "All [we] really want to do is just make it," said Tiffany, who works on several All of Us or None campaigns. "To be prevented from living your life, it's not right."
The L.A. group had a big victory in November with the passage of Prop 47. Among other things, it makes it possible for some offenders to remove their felony convictions from their records and for others to get their charges reclassified as misdemeanors. Tens of thousands of formerly and presently incarcerated are likely to have a slightly easier time finding work and housing as a result.
Another effort in the works in L.A. is "Ban the Box," which pushes to get rid of the box on job applications that makes criminal history an initial screener. More than 45 cities and counties, including New York City, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Chicago, have removed the box for public positions. Voting rights expansion, housing policy reform, and leadership training are a few of the other All of Us or None campaigns underway.
These initiatives have gained traction lately, in part because the country is waking up to the problems created by the Drug War, which include the U.S. having 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's prison population.
My clients are raped or set on fire as children. How could they be expected to conform to society?
"You would hope that there would be a humanity aspect to this shift," said Richards-Chand, of the L.A. Women's Reentry Court. "My clients are raped or set on fire as children. How could they be expected to conform to society?" But she believes the reason for the change "is mainly economic." When prisons' budgets began outpacing allotments for education, politicians started paying attention.
Reentry advocates have financial incentives on their side too. For example, it normally takes a woman going through ANWOL's program up to a year to be stable enough to live on her own without case management, and the entire process, funded by state and county money, as well as private donations, costs approximately $16,000 per woman, according to an ANWOL spokesperson. Annual per-prisoner incarceration costs typically range between $50,000 and $60,000, ANWOL says, but reach as high as $120,000.
But Burton said this struggle could never be reduced to crunching numbers. "There are 65 million people in our country with a criminal history," she said. "Unless we address those that are leaving prisons, we can't begin to repair the damage of mass incarceration and make our communities whole and healthy once again."
Author's note: Los Angeles reporting for this article took place in June 2014. As of February 2015, Mechille Johnson had successfully completed the housing program at ANWOL, and was living on her own and active in school. Janice Brown was also living independently and reunited with her family. Tiffany Johnson continues to work as a lead organizer for All of Us or None. Sadly, Evelyn Ayala, the organization's case manager supervisor, died in late 2014.
This story has been supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.
This article was originally published on Cosmopolitan.com. It is reprinted with permission.
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