*Last name has been removed to protect privacy
After a person leaves prison, they face a new set of challenges. Are they able to contact their family? Can they find a job? How are they going to eat?
And perhaps most urgently: Where will they sleep that night?
Many formerly incarcerated individuals don’t have a support network to turn to, which can make finding a place to live post-release an insurmountable task. Affordable housing can be costly and difficult to obtain, and landlords frequently won’t rent to formerly incarcerated individuals. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, former inmates are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public.
“For people getting out of prison, the penalty hasn’t ended and re-entry is its own obstacle course that everybody has to navigate,” Alex Busansky, a former prosecutor and president of Impact Justice, a nonprofit that works in justice reform, told NPR. “And housing is essential to being able to get through that obstacle course. If you don’t have a place to sleep, to shower, to keep your things, it’s very difficult to think about doing anything else.”
Enter the Homecoming Project: an Airbnb-like program for former inmates in Alameda County, California.
Impact Justice launched the Homecoming Project pilot in 2018. This program pairs people recently released from long-term incarceration with homeowners who have bedrooms to spare.
After a lengthy screening process for both the formerly incarcerated and their hosts, the Homecoming Project sets up potential roommates. By pairing like-minded people (think cat vs. dog lovers, night owl vs. early bird, clean vs. messy), the hope is to create a positive living situation with the potential for friendship. Before moving in together, the pair meets to discuss rules, preferences and if it feels like a compatible match or no. If yes, the host receives a subsidy of $25 a day and the former inmate gets a room for up to six months.
While the project is still in its pilot phase, as of this past April, 10 former inmates have been matched with hosts, and program officials hope to double that figure by the end of this year. The first former inmate has successfully left his home and moved to his own place.
For DeLora*, she gained more than just a place to rest with the Homecoming Project.
After serving eight years for conspiracy to distribute heroin, the 32-year-old had no job or stable shelter. Then she found the Homecoming Project and was welcomed into Sabina Crocette’s home.
“I just saw her as a dynamic young woman who could come back into the community and be a great resource to others,” Crocette told KPIX. “You have to recognize people’s humanity. People are not the thing that they have done. That is not who they are.”
Since arriving in Crocette’s home, DeLora has been mentored by Crocette, and in return, DeLora has mentored Crocette’s daughter.
“We didn’t know that the hosts were going to be serving — by proxy — as a role model, showing them what it’s like to live in the community,” Homecoming Project coordinator Terah Lawyer told KPIX.
Just as Airbnb has expanded across the globe, leaders at Impact Justice hope to create the same ripple effect in this compassionate twist on the sharing economy.
“[The Homecoming Project] says you’re a person and we’re going to treat you like a person and give you the footholds and the scaffolding to be able to come back home and to be a full member of society just like anybody else,” Busansky said.
If you live in Alameda County and have a room to offer or are in need of a place to stay, visit the Homecoming Project.
More: People in Prisons Are Learning to Code — and It Might Alter the Course of Their Lives
Tag: formerly-incarcerated
Foundation House Helps Single Moms Learn the Essential Skills They Need to Thrive
More than just a place where women can learn practical skills that can benefit their career, it’s also a safe haven that provides counseling, rides to doctor appointments, GED classes or other job readiness programs.
Graduates were able to find employment, and are grateful for the role Foundation House played in getting them there. “My proudest accomplishment from my time there is becoming who I am now,” says former resident Kayla Jones.
To learn more about Foundation House, watch the above video.
MORE: It’s Time To Stop Replacing Broken Things. These Cafes Have The Solution.
A Vision of Healing, and Hope, for Formerly Incarcerated Women
Topeka K. Sam sits on a plush purple sofa in the living room of an immaculate row house in the Bronx, ordaining all of the ladies in the room. Sam, a founder of Hope House, a residence for previously incarcerated women, points to her cofounder, Vanee Sykes. “She’s a Lady of Hope,” Sam says, then swivels and points at another woman who has just entered the room. “That’s another Lady of Hope.” And, apparently, so too is this reporter. “The Ladies of Hope is you, and it’s all of us,” she adds. “If you are a resource to women who are coming here, then you are a Lady of Hope, you know? It’s about all women empowering other women and providing them hope and opportunity.”
Both Sam and Sykes know something about needing hope to thrive, having been formerly incarcerated themselves. Their experience with the difficulties most women face when trying to reintegrate into society led them to found Hope House, which officially opened its doors in October 2017.
The idea of Hope House, Sam says, is that women coming out of prison have the deck stacked against them. “You gotta start with basic needs,” Sam says. “I can’t advocate for myself or feel that I’m powerful enough to go get a job if I don’t have somewhere to live and I don’t have food in my stomach.”
In addition to food and shelter, Hope House provides another crucial ingredient: community. The house currently accommodates five women, all of whom sleep on the upstairs level. Signs featuring positive aphorisms, like “Love Life,” hang on the walls, and the beds — which the women are required to make every morning — are decorated with stylish coverlets. Downstairs is the kitchen and cozy living room, all walls painted a soothing shade of gray. It’s here that the women gather, cook, talk about their day, and allow themselves to grieve and to heal.
So many women who land in prison are victims of sexual abuse, Sykes says, and Hope House is a place where women can safely process their pain in order to move forward. “Any given night here, we’re hugging and we’re crying, [because] it’s a safe space,” Sykes adds, tearing up as she speaks. “And it’s not just a safe space where we can live, but it’s a safe space mentally. You know, where it’s OK for me to say that this has happened, and that there’s other women here who are not going to judge, but who are just going to say, ‘This is what worked for me’ or ‘This is how I got through this.’ And that’s what I love about being here.”
Sam and Sykes met in 2013 while at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, a low-security prison about 70 miles north of New York City, and the inspiration for the fictional “Litchfield” prison featured in the hit Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black.” Both did time for nonviolent offenses — Sykes for embezzling money, Sam for drug trafficking — and when they got out, they witnessed the insurmountable barriers that women with a rap sheet can face, the greatest of which is, arguably, finding a landlord who will rent to them. “It was in my heart to do a house [like Hope House] while I was in prison,” Sykes says.
But they were also lucky and had supportive families to come home to. Many women, especially poor women, are not so blessed. “When I got home, I started going around, organizing with other women around women’s issues and incarceration,” Sam says. “And just seeing that it was the same issues happening: Women need housing, women need resources, women need all these things.” She threw herself into community activism and founded Ladies of Hope Ministries, an organization dedicated to helping formerly incarcerated women and girls re-enter society and out of which Hope House grew.
Along the way, Sam earned several grants and fellowships, including at Columbia University, where she was named a Beyond the Bars fellow in 2015 and a Justice-in-Education Initiative scholar in 2016. She also received funding and support from Unlocked Futures, a program backed in part by singer John Legend.
Sam modeled Hope House in part off of a California-based nonprofit called A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project, which helps women with housing and related services when they leave prison. The founder of that organization, Susan Burton, became instrumental in offering guidance and seed money to help Sam get Hope House off the ground. “We need to make investments to get people started in the struggle to reduce recidivism, strengthen our communities, and repair the harm done by mass incarceration,” says Burton, who wrote a memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, about her own journey from prison to community activist. “And that’s what Hope House stands for.”
Not that Sam and Sykes didn’t hit some road bumps along the way. They scoured the city for months to find a place to set up shop before they found the cute, fully remodeled row house in the South Central Bronx neighborhood of Castle Hill, a stone’s throw from bucolic Pugsley Creek Park. The landlord loved the idea of the house, but neighbors kicked up a fuss. So Sam and Sykes took to social media and started a campaign they called Stand With Hope House. They did media interviews and went to community board meetings. Eventually their neighbors relented.
“We stood up for ourselves and said that we’re not going anywhere,” Sykes says. “We have a right to live here, just [like] anyone else.”
Sam and Sykes used similar social media savvy when decorating the house, crowd-funding the project via funds donated from strangers around the world. “We put up the registry on social media, and people donated,” Sam says. “It was absolutely phenomenal.” They now have the funding to open another Hope House in New Jersey and after, that, in Brooklyn. Their hope is that others will step in to help them scale the project, possibly turning Hope House into a franchise.
“Ultimately our goal is to have a Hope House in every single state in our country and abroad,” says Sam.
In 2017, Sam won a Soros Justice Fellowship to work on a project around probation and parole accountability. “It came from my experience on probation and parole, [witnessing] the arbitrariness and counterproductiveness that was happening,” she says. “And I knew if this was happening to me, it had to be happening to many other people. I found out that 4.7 million people are on operational parole in this country.”
The majority of people sitting in prisons are there because of technical violations, Sam says. They need support, to be given access to resources and to opportunity — not to be dumped in a federal halfway house and then shackled with an ankle bracelet for six months, adds Sykes, speaking from personal experience. Burton’s own success speaks to this: Since 1998, she has helped over 1,000 women and children with her re-entry homes, and in 2017, she had a 100% success rate in keeping her residents from being reincarcerated.
The stakes are even higher for people of color: Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to be incarcerated in prison or jail, and Hispanic women are 69 percent more likely to be institutionalized. In addition, black children are almost nine times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison; and Hispanic children are four times more likely to have a parent behind bars.
The impact on their families can last generations. Sykes had three children when she was incarcerated — her oldest then a senior at Howard University, she says with pride — but her spouse died before she was released. And Sykes considers herself lucky: She comes from a stable upper-middle-class family, and so she saw her children, who were then living with her parents, quite frequently. Many women are not so lucky. “The hardest part of incarceration is not being with your children,” she says.
Jessie Jones (not her real name) has been living at the Hope House since last December. Jones, 64, had been out of prison for a decade — after having spent 23 years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for a drug-fueled robbery gone awry — but her housing situation had become untenable. Her last apartment was cheap, she says, because it was illegal and basically falling apart. The landlord started making passes at her, which she allowed once before trying, and failing, to make him stop. Desperate to avoid moving into a shelter, Jones stumbled upon Hope House. Like all residents, Jones had to apply to live in the house, and she pays 30% of her wages as a cook for a nonprofit as rent. (Residents are required to either have a job or be in school when they apply. Students are exempt from paying rent.)
“It’s a beautiful house, and Vanee and Topeka are the best people, the vision of healing,” Jones says. She still has her bad days, but living at Hope House with people who genuinely love and care about her is helping build her confidence back up.
“Hope House is exactly what it is,” she says. “It gives you hope.”
Putting Their Prison Pasts Behind Them
America’s criminal justice system currently houses more than 2 million people — that’s more per capita than any other nation on earth. Even worse: Many are repeat offenders who haven’t been offered the support or resources to get their lives back on track once released.
This, along with the stigma attached to a criminal record, has a devastating effect on their job prospects, with an estimated 60 percent still out of work one year after release.
A new initiative, backed in part by the singer John Legend, is hoping to reverse those dire statistics. Unlocked Futures is a joint project of the philanthropic fund New Profit, Bank of America and Legend’s own nonprofit, FreeAmerica.
Over the course of 16 months, the accelerator, which recently announced its inaugural class, will provide support, funding and mentoring to eight people chosen for their visionary prison-reform efforts. These social entrepreneurs have more in common than just a dedication to helping former inmates flourish on the outside: All of them have been either incarcerated themselves or impacted by the criminal justice system in some way.
“Too often are formerly incarcerated individuals locked out of job opportunities because of their past,” Legend said last spring, when Unlocked Futures was announced. “I have seen that entrepreneurship is a viable way for formerly incarcerated individuals to build sustainable livelihoods and contribute to their communities and neighborhoods.”
The initiative will support entrepreneurship as a powerful pathway out of the incarceration cycle, which costs America $80 billion a year in hard dollars and untold billions more in its negative impact on vulnerable families and communities. By amplifying organizations built by those whose lives have been rocked by the judicial system, Unlocked Futures also hopes to change public perception about the humanity and potential of people who refuse to be defined by their worst mistake.
The ventures founded by the first cohort of entrepreneurs and nourished by Unlocked Futures range from an app called Flikshop that lets people send photo postcards to loved ones behind bars to the Bronx, N.Y.-based Hope House, which provides transitional housing for formerly incarcerated women.
After spending a chunk of his teens and 20s in prison, Will Avila founded Clean Decisions, a commercial kitchen cleaning company that exclusively employs formerly incarcerated men in Washington, D.C., and its nonprofit offshoot, Changing Perceptions, which provides job training and reentry support to recently released inmates. Avila credits Unlocked Futures with validating his efforts and for giving him the confidence to inspire others.
“We are always waiting for someone to come tell us that we did something wrong, and as we get more success we struggle to know what to do because we don’t feel like we deserve it or that we belong,” says Avila. “This normalizes success ― others seeing us as actual human beings who can succeed even though we’ve gone to prison.”
In the nation’s capital, where Avila grew up, 71 percent of returning citizens were unemployed in 2015.
“There are a lot of reasons that’s the case,” he says, “but we all have felt that pain, as well as the pain of homelessness, substance abuse to numb this pain and anger that leads to violence. For this reason, when we do start our own enterprises, we want to give back. Entrepreneurship is a powerful cycle because almost every returning citizen I know is crafting a business that helps others who have served time.”
Amanda Alexander, founder of the Detroit Justice Center, which provides community lawyering services and economic opportunities to those in and around the prison system, asserts that there is a boldness to the group’s ideas, as well as a sense of urgency.
“Folks in the cohort are always talking about the brothers and sisters they left behind in prison and wanting to reach a hand back to them,” says Alexander, whose father was locked up during a portion of her childhood. “I was fortunate to have support through my dad’s incarceration, and that’s allowed us to have a lifelong relationship. I want the same for other families. My aim is to ensure that families caught up in the criminal justice system aren’t shut out of the city’s future.”
And, she adds, Unlocked Futures helps good ideas spread faster.
“Ultimately, it’s not about the eight of us and our work. It’s about movement building,” Alexander says. “Mass incarceration has touched every part of our society, so it’s going to take a broad movement to bring it down.”
As for Jason Cleveland, founder of tech platform Obodo, which helps nonprofits serving returning citizens streamline data and training systems, Unlocked Futures affirms what he’s long believed ― that there are real market opportunities within the prison-reform movement and that it is possible to both care and prosper.
“For too long, efforts to serve have been hampered by lack of access to capital and an outdated notion that to do good, a person or an organization needs to be impoverished themselves,” he says. “Entrepreneurship is not just about starting businesses; it is about seeing problems as opportunities. It is about seeing beyond the now to what is possible.”
Whenever Cleveland visits prisons around his home state of Missouri, teaching what he calls “the entrepreneurial mindset,” he encounters a glut of potential business leaders.
“Most people there do not understand that they are already entrepreneurs. They don’t see that they have been finding unique solutions to problems their entire lives,” Cleveland says. “Oftentimes, when these people are provided with a framework for making different decisions and given the tools they need to move forward, they do.”
Correction: A previous version of this article indicated that Amanda Alexander’s father had been incarcerated more than once during her childhood. NationSwell apologizes for the error.
The Art of Using Film to Transform the Lives of Formerly-Incarcerated Youth
Comics, with their rowdy action boxed within firm, familiar lines and violence reduced to harmless bams, thwacks and kapows, give Mario Rivera the ability to escape from reality. “When you’re reading the comic book, you’re no longer thinking about your problems,” says Rivera, a 24-year-old New Yorker who served time in prison for a violent crime he committed at age 15. The same goes for Rivera’s younger brother Shawn King, 21, who lived in 37 foster homes between the ages of 7 and 18 and was jailed for a few months earlier this year. Comics gave him a “way of keeping in touch with my brother and my dad…[a feeling] like they were there next to me,” he says.
The two brothers — lanky guys with the same curly, orangish hair and dozens of tattoos between them — barely saw each other during their formative years, but they recently reunited at the Community Producers program at New York City’s Maysles Documentary Center (MDC) and discovered their shared interest in not only comics, but filmmaking as well. At MDC, the siblings, along with two dozen court-involved youth, created documentary shorts about their lives. After six months of production (all at no cost to participants), the films capture day-to-day life of someone who came into contact with the law and compel audience members to change the way they view these adolescents: not as convicts, but as creatives.
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“If you hear from a young person who’s been incarcerated and listen to his story, you’ll leave different somehow, based on what you learned,” says Christine Peng, MDC’s education director who founded and oversees Community Producers. “Serving the communities and neighborhoods of the tri-state region is important to NBC 4 New York and Telemundo 47,” says John Durso, Jr., vice president of community and communications for NBC 4 New York and Telemundo 47. “Maysles Documentary Center provides an important service to the community in which it’s located and through 21st Century Solutions, our stations work together to support new programs and initiatives, generating positive change within our region.
APPLY: Maysles Documentary Center is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
MDC founder Albert Maysles and his brother, David, were revered documentarians known for “direct cinema,” an approach where the cameraman simply observes without intrusion and edits the clips together without narration. By letting characters in films such as “Grey Gardens” and “Salesman” speak for themselves, the brothers (now both deceased) believed, “you really get to know the world, not the philosophy or point-of-view of the narrator.” Albert’s creed was that “you can listen to someone else’s story and truly hear them out, without jumping to assumptions,” Peng explains.
Similarly, Community Producers gives participants (all racial minorities with a criminal history) the opportunity to share their real-life experiences of growing up — a chance many haven’t been afforded by the social service bureaucracy or criminal justice system. After just a few minutes onscreen, the filmmakers break through misconceptions and reveal their vulnerabilities to moviegoers. For instance, a viewer will discover that the roughly 46 tattoos crowding King and Rivera’s arms aren’t the typical jailhouse variety: they’re actually Pokémon and X-Men cartoons.
The process of breaking down stereotypes starts with the filmmakers themselves, as the adolescent New Yorkers, ever protective of their own turf and judgmental about other neighborhoods, had to learn to trust their peers at MDC. When the program first began in March, King was silent, and Rivera would only pipe up if spoken to one-on-one. They didn’t discuss life at home. “Is this a safe space for me? Are these people going to judge me?” Peng says the kids wondered. “Part of what eventually built that trust was either realizing you were totally wrong about somebody or realizing that you shared a lot in common, as people who lost parents or siblings or who had traumatic experiences growing up.”
Emulating the Maysles brothers by working in a pair, Rivera and King kept the cameras rolling nonstop, finding details from their lives that would resonate with an audience. As they debated artistic vision, their collaboration forced them to learn more about each other. While the brothers describe the experience as “fun,” Peng says she witnessed them learn “to be accountable to each other, emotionally and physically.” Often, the siblings pointed the lens toward their own family members, including a sister with whom they’d lost contact, and sometimes themselves. “The process of making the film gave them an excuse to be around people,” she noticed. “They could be involved and also be a little outside,” retreating behind the viewfinder. One afternoon, on MDC’s rooftop, Rivera and King asked each other about their relationship with their dad, the first time they’d ever discussed him together.
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When NationSwell visited MDC in late June, King had been temporarily kicked out of the MDC space. Despite his brother’s absence, Rivera said he planned to finish the film, even if he was doing it alone. “I’ve already started it, and I’m not the type who’s into starting something and not finishing it,” he told his peers after previewing a two-minute rough cut. King returned after a brief hiatus, and together, the siblings put together “Back to Reality,” a film that shows the their tangible love for each other and, as Rivera puts it, their “daily escapades.” The short movie also tackles weightier issues: learning how to parent while coping with their mother’s recent death and grappling with the lifelong appreciation of comic books their dad instilled in them even though they now hate the man for skipping out on their childhood.
Unlike most arts programs that tout the cathartic value of transforming one’s life into art, the Maysles Documentary Center Community Producers program impacts youth through alternative means. King and Rivera received something that had largely been missing from their childhood: a new way to connect with their family members and each other. With a camera in hand, they could rekindle any relationship and ask questions that previously might have been awkward. After filming her, King and Rivera’s sister arrived at the showcase to watch their finished movie. Sitting together in the back row of MDC’s theater, the siblings once again looked like a family. After years of separation, spent reading comic books alone, this reunion looked better than any caped crusader’s rescue.
Maysles Documentary Center is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!