Reentry Support Quotes

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills

In the very progress of society, the prison has in the very nature of things undergone some improvement, but there are vast stretches yet to be covered before the prison becomes, if it ever does, an institution for the reclamation and rehabilitation of erring and unfortunate men and women.

People return home from prison and face legal discrimination in virtually all areas of social and economic and political life. They are legally discriminated against employment, barred from public housing, and denied other public benefits.

I think that we need to begin talking about what does it mean to create these safe spaces in our communities, to begin welcoming one another into our homes and into our communities when they're returning home from prison, people who are on the streets. We need to begin doing the work in our own communities of creating the kind of democracy that we would like to see on a larger scale.

Prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside ... but there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that.

I was told I would be back in 90 days. If I listened to people, I would be back where I came from - the penitentiary.

Everyone needs a place to live. Everyone needs a place to come home to every night. I don't understand why our society, our government, can think that you can lock a person away for months or years... and then release them back after they pay their debt without any support and expect it to be okay.

A New Way of Life is a safe house that women can come to after they're released from prison in South Los Angeles. It's a place for women to detox the trauma, the torture of incarceration, be welcomed and embraced and live and begin their new path to - if it's recovery or receiving mental health services, go back to school, get their children back.

Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.

I wish that every community from which individuals go to prison might have an organization which would be notified when they are returned to society. It would then be this organization's responsibility to find these individuals a job, suited to their capacities and training, which would bring them a decent living.

About 70% of those released from prison return within a few years, and the majority of those who return in some states do so in a matter of months because the challenges associated with mere survival on the outside are so immense.

I feel like you don't have to go through jail, that's not part of bein' a man.

Once you have been branded a criminal or felon, you are typically trapped for life.

We cannot just say law and order. We have to say - we have to come forward with a plan that is going to divert people from the criminal justice system, deal with mandatory minimum sentences, which have put too many people away for too long for doing too little.

Ninety percent of all prisoners in all jails get out some day. So why not give them a little levity in what's otherwise a very dark life?

We are obliged – obliged – to do everything we can so that when they are released, they don’t come back.

What are people released from prison expected to do? How are they expected to survive? Can't get a job, locked out of housing, and even food stamps may be off limits. Well, apparently what we expect them to do is to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees, fines, court costs, and back child support (which continues to accrue while you are in prison).