Justice Notes: Exile
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
For this week’s Justice Notes, I’m writing about the social excommunication that lingers long after release, shaping every step of reentry. This week’s essay explores that exile—its emotional imprint, its permanence, and its place in the life of every former inmate.
EXILSLE: The Long Shadow of Incarceration
Prison is a kind of Dantesque Dark Woods. A disorienting terrain somewhere between afterlife and final judgment, a place stripped of the markers that normally orient a life. You don’t walk into it so much as cross a threshold, a portal that separates the living world from something colder and less forgiving. And once you cross it, no matter how short the sentence or how minimal the security level, you are changed. You have been marked. You have been exiled.
For me, the physical conditions of incarceration were not the worst punishment. It wasn’t the fences or the counts or the dull routines that carved the deepest scars. It was the excommunication—the quiet, devastating separation from community, identity, and belonging. It was the knowledge, felt immediately, that you have been removed from the human circle, and that the circle closes behind you with a finality that borders on biblical.
The deprivation of freedom is real. The steel doors, orange jumpsuits, the loss of movement. But the punishment is far more existential. It is the sudden erasure of your membership in the world. You are no longer a citizen of anything recognizable. You are no longer part of the daily human exchange—no longer a neighbor, a colleague, a parent in the ordinary sense. Your relationships become strained approximations of what they once were, filtered through monitored calls, fixed schedules, and the constant presence of surveillance. You exist, but in a diminished register. You speak, but you have no voice in the world.
That first moment, passing through the intake doors, is its own kind of final judgment. You surrender your clothes, your name, your past, and in return receive a number, a set of rules, and an identity that has been assigned rather than earned. The system tells you, in a thousand subtle ways, that you no longer belong. That your former life exists on the other side of a wall you can see but cannot reach. That your social expiration has already occurred, and now you live in the afterlife of consequence.
And the exile does not end at release. It lingers and adheres to the psyche like a permanent watermark, visible under the smallest beam of scrutiny. You step back into the world—your home, your community, your former routines—and everything looks the same, but you are not the same. You carry the imprint of banishment. You feel it in conversations, in job applications, in the awkward pauses when your history surfaces, in the small social tremors when someone realizes they are speaking to a former inmate.
Dante wrote that the Dark Woods were a place of confusion, where the straight path had been lost. That is what post-incarceration feels like: emerging from a world that slowed your life to a crawl only to find that the outside world has sprinted ahead without you. People move faster. Time moves differently. Your place in the order of things is no longer self-evident. You are both present and irrelevant, visible and invisible at once.
The exisle persists, even with support. You learn to function with it, to navigate around it, to build a life on top of it, but it is always there. A low-grade tremor beneath the surface. This is what society rarely confronts: incarceration isn’t only a physical separation. It is a social expungement. A removal from the community ledger. A verdict that continues long after release. And despite all the rhetoric about second chances, what most former inmates receive is not reintegration but conditional admission: tentative, revocable, and saturated with suspicion.
At the end of the day, the tragedy is communal. We build the Dark Woods together, until the exile becomes permanent, the scars real, and the trauma lasting. Rejoining society is not a switch flipped at the gate but a lifelong negotiation, an ongoing effort to step out of the Dark Woods and back into the fragile light of belonging.
If you’re drawn to the idea of storytelling as self-reckoning, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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