Hope instead of hurt

A series of bad choices, including dropping out of school and a crack cocaine addiction, “set the road map” for Deborah Daniels’ life. But after being released early from her third sentence in Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, she found a support network that helped her realize that road map didn’t have to be her future, too.

It’s that background that gives Daniels credibility when she tells other Alabama prisoners that they can create a new road map, too.

“To have us go back into prison — and especially for men or women who we did time with — there is such great hope for them,” Daniels said. “Nobody knows how it feels to be on your bunk and be faced with all the decisions and the harm and stuff that you caused and not be able to do anything, except somebody who has been on that bunk and cried those tears.”

Daniels is one of the creators of the Offender Alumni Association, which has a ministry in four state prisons — St. Clair, Limestone, Bibb County and Staton correctional facilities — and support resources for recently released prisoners who are trying to reintegrate into society. She began volunteering with Prison Fellowship after her last release from prison in 1997 and is now the Southeast Area director, but she felt that ex-offenders like herself had something unique to offer.

“I realized that one of the resources that we were not utilizing to its full capacity was equipping those of us who had actually been there, and engaging us in being part of the solution, and getting us involved in every angle of this process,” Daniels said. “We were just like them. We were the ones who dropped out of school. We were the ones who made all the bad choices. And so I felt like if we could mobilize and empower us to be part of that vehicle, part of that effort to bring about a change, that we could really make a difference.”

According to a 2016 annual report from the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), an average of 32 percent of inmates released in 2013, or 3,603 people, were within the prison system again within three years. A successful re-entry into everyday life for newly released prisoners — including jobs, social connections and a mental shift toward making new, better choices — make it less likely for them to re-offend.

Re-entry programs have been shown to reduce rates of recidivism, or returns to prison, after being released. The ADOC 2016 annual report showed the recidivism rate of inmates who participated in their Supervised Re-entry Program  (SRP) prior to release in 2013 was only 17.6 percent. There were 13,274 inmates released from Alabama prisons in 2016, of which 2,794 participated in the SRP.

In 2016, the ADOC funded almost $1.8 million for SRP, which totals about 0.41 percent of its annual budget. However, last year the department began downsizing its re-entry program and moving community supervision responsibilities to the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, according to ADOC budget documents and annual reports. 

Dena Dickerson, who helps with the OAA program in Limestone and a community engagement program in Titusville, sees the OAA as a way to pick up where state-run programs leave off.

“We are the extended arms of re-entry,” said Dickerson, who is now a case manager at Impact Family Counseling.

The OAA holds support group meetings on Monday evenings at Impact Family Counseling, 1000 24th St. S. in Southtown, and Daniels said they’re working on expanding these groups to other areas such as East Lake, Ensley and Collegeville. There are also meetings for the families of inmates before and after release.

 As Daniels knows from her own experience, families can be as much a hindrance as a help in the re-entry process.

“When you’ve been incarcerated, even though your family is there, you really haven’t been in their lives. And they really don’t know how to embrace you. You know, a lot of times they can enable you and cripple you, and it’s all in love. And it’s not because they mean to do any harm,” Daniels said.

Along with their regular programs at four facilities, Daniels said members of OAA will sometimes travel to do forums at other correctional facilities and answer inmates’ questions. In June 2016 they created a community engagement program in Titusville, where members of OAA do yard work, trash removal and other chores for residents as a way to build relationships and good will. 

“It gives us a place in the community to give back to the parts of our society that we were once part of tearing it up,” Dickerson said.

This summer, they expanded that to include a youth career readiness program for 15 students identified as at-risk.

“Our goal is to provide that role model, that support that they need in their lives to actually start making some wise decisions,” Daniels said.

As the mother of four children, Daniels said she knows how her own choices could have led her children on a similar path had they not had people to support and mentor them while she was incarcerated.

“They got the brunt of the choices that I made. Because a lot of times we think it’s just about us, and we’re only harming ourselves. But in reality, it’s not just about us. It’s all of those people that are part of our nucleus, part of our family, that are impacted by our choices,” Daniels said.

While a couple hundred Birmingham-area ex-offenders have been involved in OAA in some way since it began in 2014, Daniels said around 25 are regularly active in the group’s programs.

Once they’re released from prison, former inmates have a number of needs that can stand between them and successfully rebuilding their lives. Dickerson, who was released in 2012 after serving 10 years of a 114-year sentence for conspiracy, recalled she was “a new person coming into a world that was so foreign yet familiar to me, and not knowing whether I fit because I had been incarcerated before.”

Some of those needs are immediate, such as a place to live and a new job. Daniels said the OAA can be a built-in career network for the ex-offenders who come to them because of the community connections they’ve made. She also would like to see higher-quality housing options for men and women after they’ve been released, as Daniels said the quality can have an effect on ex-offenders’ sense of self-worth, as well as their likelihood to commit a crime again.

“When you take these men out and you put them in this drug-, crime-infested neighborhood, and you tell them, ‘I want you to do this, I want you to stay clean,’ … probably 90 percent of them fail,” she said.

But in the long term, the barriers that keep many ex-offenders from reintegrating into society are often in their own heads. As Dickerson said she often tells the men she works with at Limestone, “they don’t know that their thinking is broke.”

Carmone Owens, who relocated to Birmingham after his release from prison about a year and a half ago, said the people he counsels before and after their release often struggle with PTSD, mental illnesses, substance abuse and ingrained habits that have led them to some of the bad choices they have made. As program director for OAA, his job is to help them see the source of those problems so they can begin rooting them out.

“Behind the fence, my nickname was ‘Big Bro,’ and I have a lot of rapport and relationship with some very difficult-to-work-with people. But I’m able to penetrate the hardness and reach them and help them change their thinking and their attitude. And they trust me,” Owens said. “Nothing’s hidden in prison, nothing’s diluted in prison and the issues are far more severe.”

Through OAA and other prison ministries he has worked with, Owens said he has been able to watch ex-offenders dramatically alter their lives with “the encouragement that yes, I can do it and I don’t have to be a hostage to my past, and my past is not preventing me from becoming who I can become.”

Dickerson said one of the valuable lessons she had to learn was accountability and recognizing “most of the things that happened in my life, I was a major contributor to it,” but without being too overwhelmed by guilt to move forward and take advantage of the opportunities in front of her.

Owens said having a mentor who has walked through the prison gates themselves helps ex-offenders in a way their family and friends often can’t.

“You need a relationship with someone who understands the issues and is willing to literally take you by the hand. Rules without relationship leads to rebellion. When people come out of prison, there’s an inherent, unspoken fear of the unknown and there’s a mistrust,” Owens said. “I need help, but I don’t want to ask for help. I need somebody, but I don’t know who to trust. The people I’m familiar with are not healthy for me, but the people that are healthy for me, I’m not comfortable around. So who do I turn to?”

To learn more about the Offender Alumni Association’s programs, visit offenderalumniassociation.org.