For Virginia's Ex-Cons, Re-entering Society is Daunting

After they’ve served their time behind bars and are released back into society, prisoners often need education, employment, housing and other assistance – or else they’re likely to return to committing crime.

By Brittany Daniels

RICHMOND, VA.  – The man was released from prison at age 56 after serving 30 years of a life sentence. To him, living outside the gates seemed scarier than being behind bars.

“I had a life sentence,” the man told Barbara Slayden, executive director of Offender Aid and Restoration, a nonprofit group in Richmond. She recalls the ex-con's words:

Because prisons are so crowded, waiting lists prevent inmates from taking classes  and receiving their GEDs.

“I didn’t think I was ever going to get out. I don’t know what to do out here. Didn’t they know that I didn’t know how to take care of myself when I got out? I don’t know what they were thinking about sending me out here. I don’t know how to live out here.”

After they’ve served their time behind bars and are released back into society, prisoners often need education, employment, housing and other assistance – or else they’re likely to return to committing crime.

But such help can be hard to find.

Tax dollars fund prison systems; however, organizations that aid in prisoners’ re-entry are typically nonprofit and rely on private donors. Only a few groups receive state funding. In either case, the money is not enough.

Because prisons are so crowded, waiting lists prevent inmates from taking classes and receiving their GEDs. Ex-offenders frequently return to the streets with no friends or family to help them, no home to live in, no money to pay for housing, food or clothing, and no education beyond what they received before incarceration.

It’s a recipe for recidivism – the high rate of ex-cons who end up back in prison.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has pledged to make prisoner re-entry a priority.
 
Before his inauguration in January, he visited with inmates at Henrico County’s Regional Jail East. So far, McDonnell’s primary accomplishment on this front has been to name Banci Tewolde as Virginia’s first statewide prison re-entry coordinator.

David Coogan, an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, uses writing to help prisoners make sense of their lives.

Tewolde is a former assistant attorney general who has worked with the state and federal prison systems and the jails in Norfolk and Richmond. In her new position, she will work with government agencies and nongovernment groups to develop and implement a comprehensive plan for ex-cons being released from Virginia prisons.

It’s not the first time the commonwealth has focused on the problem.

In 2003, the National Governors Association selected Virginia to participate in its Prisoner Reentry Policy Academy to reduce recidivism rates.

About two years after the NGA brought the academy to Virginia, it was replaced by the Virginia Community Reentry Program. The program has no dedicated state funding and has been voluntarily adopted in only seven localities: Norfolk, Greensville-Emporia, Culpeper, King George, Southwestern Virginia, Albemarle/Charlottesville and Richmond.

The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services gives Offender Reentry and Transition Services grants to groups it has approved. Last year, only nine organizations could apply for part of the $2.4 million available.

The nine groups included regional jails (such as the Northern Neck Regional Jail) and nonprofit organizations, such as the Offender Aid and Restoration groups in Fairfax, Richmond and other communities.

In recent years, because of Virginia’s budget crisis, state funding for the Department of Criminal Justice Services has been cut repeatedly. That in turn has put a greater financial strain on groups such as OAR.

Offender Aid and Restoration

OAR is a nonprofit that serves people who are in prison, are getting ready for release or have been released.

Andre Simpson wrote that his "Dad graduated me to the hard knocks of life as a dope-fiend junkie."

“We continue as a support system as long as anybody needs us,” said Slayden, whose group serves offenders in Richmond, Petersburg and neighboring counties. “If you’ve been an OAR client, you can always be an OAR client if you need assistance.”

The group’s mission is “to provide community-managed services aimed at restoring the individual offender as a responsible member of the community.”

OAR helps offenders not just with their physical needs but also with social reintegration.

When prisoners 40 or older are released, most of their friends and family members have abandoned them. Some clients move into rooming houses because it’s all they can afford; they sit in their rooms alone when they aren’t at work.
“They eventually get bored and depressed,” Slayden said.

So OAR recruits volunteers to organize fellowship circles for ex-offenders. The group offers a wide range of services: It helps ex-cons find jobs and housing, get their GED and address substance abuse and other problems. OAR even operates a program specifically for convicted prostitutes.

OAR began in Roanoke in 1971 and spread to Richmond the same year. In 1982, it began receiving state support – until the economy took a turn in 2002. OAR now gets state funding only when it wins a grant from the Department of Criminal Justice Services. The organization depends on funding from United Way, the city of Richmond, federal grants, private foundations and other private donors.

During the 2009 fiscal year, OAR reported revenues of about $830,000 and expenses of $850,000 – leaving a $20,000 deficit. OAR has 17 staff members and more than 100 volunteers.

Last year, OAR’s pre-release services aided more than 2,000 clients in nine Richmond-area jails. Post-release services helped almost 2,300 clients through offices in Richmond and Petersburg. Of these clients, more than 1,200 attended job search classes, and more than 170 found jobs.

OAR also collaborates with a faith-based organization called Boaz & Ruth, whose mission is “to rebuild lives and communities through relationships, training, transitional jobs, and economic revitalization.”

Boaz & Ruth aids formerly incarcerated people in job searches. The nonprofit group provides employment by operating various businesses, including Mountain Movers, Parable Restoration, Firehouse 15 café and two Harvest Stores.
 
What Changed My Mind About Criminals

I used to think all criminals were guilty of being too lazy to try to live better lives. I thought criminals were criminals simply because they wanted to be – leeches who ruined life for the rest of us. I didn’t care about their “reasons” or “excuses” for what they did.

I don’t harbor those misconceptions any more – thanks to a prison literature course at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Until I signed up for the class, I had no idea why people committed crimes or why I should care. Now that I’ve completed the course, I have been exposed to several autobiographical works by ex-offenders – and I’ve personally met recently released prisoners. Those experiences have revealed several compelling and devastating reasons why people commit crimes.

From reading such books as A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca, True Notebooks by Mark Salzman and Couldn’t Keep it to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution, Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters, I have unearthed information about criminals from different backgrounds: male and female, young and old.

Most of the criminals I read about had poor family lives. They were unwanted by their parents (if indeed they had parents around). They were physically or sexually abused. Some had to quit school to work to support their families.

Women were impregnated by their fathers or were raped by grandfathers, family friends or other relatives. Children lost parents at a young age and were raised by older siblings already in gangs. Some were from rich families in good neighborhoods while others were not. Some people lived normal lives and had good jobs and merely suffered psychotic breaks brought on by being reminded of a traumatic event in their past.
Every criminal had a different story, but the root was always the same: At a critical time in their lives, they were betrayed.

A requirement of the class is to perform a service involving imprisoned or released convicts. For my project, a classmate, Josie Varnier, and I cook meals and conduct a writing workshop at a faith-based after-care home for non-violent offenders in Richmond.

Leading up to this project, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the men I would be working with; part of me was scared to meet them because they had spent time in prison, and another part of me was so excited to move forward with the workshop.

For the first night we went to the house, Josie and I prepared ribs, salad and macaroni and cheese for the men, ready to bond over a good meal.

When we arrived at the house, we met the men living there, our professor and several people from a church who often stop by for fellowship.

After dinner, my professor introduced Josie and me to the group and then led us all in our first writing assignment: to describe a time when you taught someone something or when you learned something from someone.

One of the men who lived in the house prefaced his piece by saying he had never taught a person something he was proud of. His essay was about teaching three boys how to sell crack cocaine and how dealing drugs got the youths sent to prison for a dozen years or more, or got them killed.

In the final line of his essay, the man said he had not taught these boys life but had taught them death.
While I was at the house that first night, this man showed me a flower garden he planted and told me his plans to plant a vegetable garden in the backyard as well. He said he spends his time going to school and studying at the library. He has the opportunity to work construction on weekends.

One of the other men revealed that before his incarceration, he held an executive job, earned a six-figure salary and had two college degrees. At some point, he made a mistake that sent him to prison. Now, he is trying to put his life back together: He has a job and a fiancé and is working on an autobiography.
The third man, and newest resident, has written about the changes between living in prison and living in the free world. He wrote that it is hard to get accustomed to eating and sleeping when he wants. Technology has advanced so much in the past few years that he feels completely lost.

The workshop that Josie and I conducted at this house helped these recently released convicts understand the reasons behind the crimes they committed, realize their strengths and weaknesses, and reform themselves for the free world.

Because the house is operated by a faith-based organization, the men also participate in Christian fellowship and prayer meetings. The men continue to grow because of their new or renewed faith in God.
Each man is allowed to stay in the house for six months while looking for employment and a permanent place to stay.

Professor Helps Prisoners
Find Themselves Through Writing

David Coogan has been an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University since 2004. In 2005, he started his Prison Writing Project as a form of outreach to inmates at the Richmond City Jail. Two years later, he began teaching a prison literature class to educate students about the issues revealed in his workshop.

Coogan said the goal of his workshop is to help the men in jail to figure out their own issues and make sense of their lives through writing. Coogan has written a book called The Prison Inside Me, which blends his experiences of working with convicts and their personal writing on certain topics.

He hopes his book and project will “help educate people in the sort of bread-and-butter problems that ex-offenders are facing – everything from finding work to finding peace in your family or your social life to overcoming addiction to overcoming the stigma of a felony conviction.”

Coogan stays in contact with the men in his book as a friend and a mentor of sorts. Sometimes they contact him for letters for jobs. He invites some of the men to talk to his class about their lives and their writing from the book.

After his writing workshop got underway, Coogan began teaching a class called Social Change and Mobility: Prison Writing.

The course aims to expose students to published work by former and current prisoners in order to reveal social issues. A component of the course requires students to do some level of service work, which could involve going to Richmond City Jail or another facility to teach a writing class, to correspond with a prisoner through letters or simply to volunteer with an organization responsible for prison re-entry services.

Because of his writing workshop, Coogan thought he wasn’t “alone in having misconceptions or just poorly developed conceptions of criminals in prison.” His project, book and class all rub away at misperceptions in different ways.
He hopes to show people the core human connection at the basis of the workshop. He wants people to realize that they can reach out, and should try to.

“We spend so much time separating ourselves from the crimes/prison problem that we need this more connection, but of the right kind,” Coogan said. “And I define that as common ground around all the issues that we tend to share: from childhood to friends and peer pressure to sex and love to basically the life story …

“We have a lot of overlap in our life stories, but we tend not to see it because we are focused on our differences.”

Coogan believes that criminals have offended society and the community. While criminals are responsible for their crimes, the community could reach out and stop the activity, he said. He said that a person who litters and doesn’t care about what the trash does to the environment is the same as a criminal. Neither person has a stake in the community.
“We as a community are better than this. We like to see better,” Coogan said.

The root problem, he said, is “almost like a dangerous word, really; it’s almost hard to say out loud. And that’s love … The root cause of the prison problem is a lack of attention or care. It’s a loveless disregard.”

In the fall of 2009, Coogan asked one of the men from his book, Andre Simpson, to come speak to his class. Simpson came to the class on a Tuesday. By that Saturday, he was dead.

Simpson had been incarcerated in 2005 but was acquitted of all charges after spending four years arguing his case, sometimes by himself. Last December, he and an accomplice were involved in an armed robbery that resulted in a police chase through Church Hill, authorities say. The two men, who were reportedly driving around 80 mph, hit a utility pole and then a tree. Both men died on the scene.

In Coogan’s book, Simpson told parts of his life story, which included his father teaching him how to snort heroin at age 12.

“Instead of him showing me how to read, ride a bike, or the million other things I missed in my childhood, Dad graduated me to the hard knocks of life as a dope-fiend junkie,” Simpson wrote.

An article that ran in a Richmond-area newspaper about Simpson’s death prompted citizens to leave 14 pages of comments. Some of them called VCU students uneducated and Coogan naïve.

“The unfortunate thing is that the students come out of these types of classes handicapped by what they assume is insightful – that is, until they try to write their first corporate newsletter, contract or something that has to be read by the public and then the real waste of the education becomes apparent,” one person wrote.

Other respondents sided with Coogan.

“Thank you, Prof. Coogan, for your compassion, and for your reminder that all of us, even the troublemakers, are human,” one comment said. “Thank you for inviting them in, for listening to their stories, and for encouraging others to do the same. Thank you for being brave enough to meet these men where they are, even when that place is one others hold in disdain.”

Coogan has remained relatively unfazed by the article and the comments. He said he doesn’t like to get mad and stay mad because it’s better to be happy.

“If I weren’t so riled at being raked over the coals of stupidity, I guess I would have chuckled more at all of those ideas,” Coogan said.

“First at the idea that all VCU students are completely innocent and without any harm ever done in their lives, or that they themselves have done. And, second that an ex-offender who I had been working with would come to campus specifically to hurt people. Why would he do that?”

Coogan’s essays about community writing projects have appeared in several journals, including College English, College Composition and Communication, and Community Literacy, and in the books Active Voices and The Public Work of Rhetoric.

For more information, visit Coogan’s website at http://cityprisonwriters.com.
 
Brittany Daniels writes for Capital News Service.

For more information•
 
Virginia Department of Social Services Prisoner Reentry Programs: www.dss.virginia.gov/community/prisoner_reentry

• Offender Aid and Restoration, Richmond: www.oarric.org

• Boaz & Ruth: www.boazandruth.com