How Prison Sets Inmates Up for Failure: Racism, Mental Illness, Poverty | Shaka Senghor | Big Think

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. 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 oftentimes 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 is 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 types of programs that...