Incarceration | How to break the cycle of reoffending?
By recognizing the humanity within, The Last Mile is inspiring collaboration and preparation for a life outside the prison walls.
THE PROBLEM
When one conjures up the idea of prison, the immediate words that come to mind surely aren’t transformation, reformation or adjustment. Prisons are, more often than not, places that breed hatred, agony, anxiety, fear and literally all the other negative emotional words that you can add. A prison guard aptly described the jail environment as “a hate factory, a big boiling pot of anger.” Imagine, that is coming from someone that gets to go home at night.
Institutionalization can create deficits in a person’s skills based on the very nature of it. Add in the disparities of poverty, race and gender, and you have a strong cocktail of recidivism. What does it mean to recividate, you ask? Great question! The legal definition, according to Merriam Webster, means “to return to criminal activity.” Basically, it is similar to a relapse. Falling back into the destructive behaviour that led you there to begin with.
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, two out of three people released from the prison system recidivate within three years. That is over 60% percent of prisoners that wind up right back behind bars. Knowing that, where do we go from here? We can certainly remove barriers that are making it difficult for people with criminal records to turn their lives around, like The Sentencing Project suggests; but, we also need to provide them with the knowledge, tools and confidence to succeed in that turn around.
A SOLUTION
Back in 2010, Chris Redlitz, walked into prison and his life was changed. What he “discovered that evening changed [his] perspective of the US prison population and ignited [his] sense of responsibility to help change a broken system and rewrite the narrative.” Later, with his wife, Beverly Parenti, they launched The Last Mile (TLM). This program was built to educate and inspire on a skill-based level, with hopes to shake up America’s idea of incarceration-based education. TLM provides in-prison software engineering training, and readies the students for positions as web developers and front-end designers.
This organization has created a place where these people can leave a life of crime behind those bars and step forward into the world, on a new path. A path of acceptance, forgiveness and understanding that they too can belong in society. Said best by one of TLM’s success stories, Simon, “Right after I found out I got my first job offer, I thanked Beverly [Parenti, TLM’s co-founder] for the opportunity provided by TLM. However, she indicated that it was my own hard work that made all this possible. While that is true, I told her that opportunity has to come first in order for hard work to be applied. TLM is at the forefront of providing opportunity, and it’s a stepping stone to hard work. Hopefully society can follow the footsteps of TLM and build a better, more harmonious world.”
Written by Adrienne Glenn
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