Justice Notes: False Hope
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
Every prison claims to prepare people for life after release. The evidence is usually pinned to a bulletin board—laminated flyers with optimistic titles and carefully chosen words. Resume Building. Successful Reentry. Finding Employment. They suggest structure, intention, and care. But for those living inside the system, these programs rarely feel like preparation. They feel like placeholders, symbols of effort standing in for the real thing.
Reentry Theater
Walk through almost any prison unit and you’ll find the same bulletin boards. Bright paper. Neatly printed headings. Resume Building. Reentering the Community Successfully. Finding Employment.
They look hopeful and official. They look like evidence that something useful is happening. But these programs exist largely as theater—performances staged for administrators, auditors, and anyone who needs to believe the system is doing more than warehousing people until their release date arrives. The problem isn’t just that the programs are ineffective. It’s that they are disconnected from reality to the point of absurdity.
Take “resume building.” In theory, it sounds responsible. In practice, it asks incarcerated people to prepare marketing documents for jobs they are unlikely to be considered for, let alone hired into. We are taught how to polish employment histories while being instructed—sometimes in the same breath—to omit the very thing that defines our recent lives. The felony becomes an elephant we are trained to dance around, as if employers don’t already see it the moment they run a background check.
Interview preparation is no better. We rehearse confidence, eye contact, and upbeat narratives while ignoring the most predictable moment in any real interview: the pause after disclosure. No one teaches how to sit with rejection, how to hear “we’ll be in touch” and know it means “no,” or how to keep going when doors close quietly but repeatedly.
Even more troubling is who teaches these courses. Many are led by other inmates—people who may be intelligent, motivated, and well-meaning, but who have never successfully navigated reentry themselves. This is not empowerment; it is substitution. It is the system outsourcing responsibility while pretending it is fostering leadership. The blind are not malicious, but they are still blind, and they are asked to lead anyway.
This isn’t a criticism of the men and women teaching these classes. Most are doing the best they can with what they’ve been given. The failure belongs to a system that mistakes activity for effectiveness and optics for outcomes.
Real preparation for release rarely happens in classrooms. It happens in quieter, less marketable ways. In honest conversations about stigma. In learning how to live without chaos. In understanding that success may mean stability, not redemption arcs. In accepting that humility, patience, and restraint will matter far more than any resume workshop.
Prison provides time—too much of it—but almost no credible guidance on how to use that time to reenter a society that is structurally suspicious of you. The official programs offer optimism without honesty, skills without context, and encouragement without realism.
If reentry programs actually worked, they wouldn’t rely on buzzwords. And if rehabilitation were truly the goal, preparation for life after prison wouldn’t be taught by people who have never been allowed to practice it themselves.
Until then, the bulletin boards will stay full, the boxes will stay checked, and the gap between what is promised and what is delivered will remain the most consistent lesson prison teaches.
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