How Prison Sets Inmates Up for Failure: Racism, Mental Illness, Poverty

The feeling of walking out of prison is something that I’ll never forget.
It was June 22, 2010 one day after my birthday, a beautiful sunny day in Detroit and I walked
out of prison with a lot of optimism despite being told by the officers that I would probably
be back in six months.
And when I walked out I thought that I was returning to a society that would be a lot
more forgiving and a lot more open to me getting a second chance if I was willing to follow
the rules of society.
So get out, look for a job, prove that I want to work, volunteer in my community, figure
out ways to add value and sadly and unfortunately society is not really forgiving and not really
as open to second chances as I thought they would be.
And it’s really sad in the sense that 90 percent of people who are incarcerated will
at some point return home and we have a choice in how we welcome men and women back to our
community.
I personally believe that there’s not a human being that isn’t without flaws, that
hasn’t had a bad moment and nobody will want to be held hostage to that moment for
the rest of their life.
Once a person has served their time that means that they should come out with a clean slate
and an opportunity to start over.
And if we want them to have a successful transition it means we have to be willing to give them
a true second chance and not keep bringing up the past unless they’re repeating that
behavior, but in most cases most people want to just get out, move on with their life,
find employment, find a safe place to live, and be free to enjoy the fullness of life.
So sadly the systems that are currently in place are very anemic and this is one of the
reasons we have almost a 70% recidivism rate because prisons are doing a horrible job of
preparing men and women to reenter society.
And when you think about the reality of somebody being gone for decades... the world has completely
shifted.
When I walked out of prison after serving 19 years I walked into a very different world;
the language was different, everything was about technology and digital and online and
social media.
And so when you think about walking out of somewhere 20 years and just being dropped
into that and then told to move along with life without being prepared it basically sets
a person up to return to prison because they just can’t cope with the reality of the
world as it exists and we don’t have the mental/psychological services in place to
help people process the trauma they just experienced as they return to society.
Like, prison is a very traumatic environment, it’s a very volatile environment and so
to take somebody literally from prison and drop them into the world as it exists now
without giving them the tools that they need to cope is really just poor management and
poor processes that we have to really kind of rethink.
And the level of mental illness inside prison isn’t something people factor in, it’s
that when men and women who have mental illness get out back to society they don’t have
much support and places to help them manage whatever their mental illness is and so often
times they end up right back in prison.
The mental illness component... when I was in solitary confinement probably the most
shocking thing to me was the treatment of the men who had mental illness, men who were
incapable of defending themselves against the onslaught of police brutality, the starvation
rituals, being denied access to psychologists or psychiatrists.
Like that was shocking to me that we’re allowing this to happen in a country that
supposed to be the leader of the free world yet we basically are torturing people who
are mentally incapable of defending themselves.
You don’t walk out of that environment without suffering from that trauma, even when it’s
not directed toward you but you’ve been exposed to it for extended periods of time.
So there are some prisons that are taking steps towards doing stuff that is meaningful
that really prepares men and women to return to society and I would like to see more of
those type of programs that’s really preparing people for how the world works now as opposed
to how it worked 10, 15, 20 years ago.
My personal views on systemic component of my incarceration and even prior to that are
very, very deep.
I think about when I got shot I was 17 years old - I was taken to the hospital I was basically
processed through as if I was a car in a car factory.
No one stepped in and said how do you feel even though your experience this deep, deep
trauma?
No one said hey here’s an outlet for you to manage your emotions and a mental reaction
to that environment.
And so the systemic nature of that is that young lives of black inner city kids have
no value in our society and the expectation that this is going to happen to them over
and over and that it should happen has been accepted as a norm in society.
When I think about my incarceration at one point I was taking college courses and I was
averaging a 4.0 and then under the President Clinton administration they changed everything
around with this crime bill he passed and it took college out and it took trades out
and it took counseling out.
And so basically in essence it was preparing the young men who I was incarcerated with
to go right back out with no resources, no assets and to eventually become a liability
to society because we just weren’t being prepared for life after.
The racial dynamics of our prison system is no secret.
The reality of police brutality that we see occurring within our communities at an alarming
rate and sadly the fact that there is no justice on the other side of these actions speaks
volumes about the systemic issues that contributed to a lot of my experiences inside prison and
a lot of things I experienced once I got out of prison.
You know, not having access to housing because I have a felony on my record and apartments
can legally discriminate against you when you have a felony.
You have to check a box about my past even though my past was 20 years prior to me trying
to get an employment opportunity.
So systemically there are so many different things that occur within the scope of our
criminal justice system that is dysfunctional, is disproportionately geared toward minorities
and people who live either right at or well below the poverty line and those are things
that we have to fix.
Systemically I think there is so much that needs to be done to correct the Department
of Corrections.
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How Prison Sets Inmates Up for Failure: Racism, Mental Illness, Poverty | Shaka Senghor

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