Justice Notes: Homecoming

A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption

In my Welcome post to White Collar Journal, I stated, "I'll also write about criminal justice reform—where it's working, where it's failing, and what it feels like to try to rebuild your life after falling off the map.” The following essay was written shortly after my release in 2020. I dedicate this essay to the White Collar Support group (https://prisonist.org/) that has led the effort for criminal justice reform, and to all its members who have shared their own poignant stories of reentry every Monday evening.

REENTERING THE COMMUNITY

Reentry is a journey. I’ve moved on and recovered from the sentiments expressed in the personal essay below. But I deem it worthwhile to publish its bleak, hopeless message, because it represents and depicts the challenges every former inmate must confront when reentering the community after incarceration.

Returning home from prison, the relief fades sooner than you’d think. The old failures still reside there, and prison makes the trip home with you. The experience of incarceration—its agony, sense of exile, isolation and the misery of day-to-day confinement—lingers long after the arrival home. Dreams of the prison camp and its maze of dark corridors are an every-night drama. Even in the relatively low-security environment of a federal prison camp, confinement becomes an internal form of torture, no matter its locale or facility.

At my sentencing hearing, the presiding judge told me I had already sentenced myself to a prison without bars. Still, a prison nonetheless, a prison of the soul, that I was not connected to humanity, disconnected from what makes life meaningful and worthwhile. He said I had a challenging life ahead and must figure out how to release myself from this prison. During my incarceration, I concluded that my crime was a failure of character, something intrinsic, revealed only under great duress and crisis. Returning home, I embraced a life of contemplation, renewal, and self-reflection, with a commitment to make amends and reclaim my membership in the community as a worthy constituent.

But the moment of release is a kind of fool’s gold. After a turbulent flight home, I was the last to deplane. I straggled into the baggage area, my wife looking worried at the bottom of the escalator. She wore a new straw hat, was slimmer than I last saw her, but still beautiful—a long embrace. There’s no relief like leaving prison. Walking out of the terminal, it was almost midnight. There was a sweet tropical scent of Florida and beautiful, tall palm trees on the periphery of the car park. We followed the warm flashing lights to a solo, smiling toll-taker. The air was light. I was a free man.

My release order required a call to probation the following morning. A disturbing, ageless voice, in a mumbling monotone, informed me that I was not yet a free man.

“Home Incarceration,” he said—a condition added in small print on the court order releasing me─ “is the most restrictive form of house arrest.”

“Will I be able to enter the community?” I asked.

“You can’t walk to the mailbox,” he said.

It was jarring, but I recovered. I was home; my wife was making eggs, coffee was brewing, and a bright sun was shining. It was not a big place, but it lived large, especially after living in a 54-square-foot bunk in a federal prison camp. Then, a restful sleep in a soft bed, the sheets cool and scented. It was like a drowning man pulled from the water and breathing air. Nothing else mattered. My family and others welcomed me. My daughter organized a Zoom call. Nieces, cousins, and siblings. It was nice. Except I saw myself for the first time since my release. I didn’t see it in prison. Drawn, wrinkled, skinny. Almost malnourished. And old. Really old. I’d lost thirty-five pounds in prison, and all my clothes fell off me. I looked like the old men I’d seen hanging in the lobby of my mother-in-law’s nursing home years before.

I committed to making amends, starting over, and rebuilding my life. But no one’s the same as you remember them. Friends are uncomfortable, distant, and measuring, and work opportunities are foreclosed. Ambivalence follows warm greetings. And then there are the questions asked and the more painful ones, not asked but implied in half measures and stares and pauses, more revealing, hurtful than a thousand insults. You try to put on a good face, show courage, and believe it yourself for a while. But it doesn’t last or resonate. You’re damaged goods because prison doesn’t prepare you. All the stuff on the bulletin boards, the courses, seminars: resume building, reentry strategies, interview preparedness, family orientation, all bull shit. Every inmate leaves with only a T-shirt, a new pair of jeans, a pair of sneakers, a felony conviction, maybe $100 from his prison store account and an excruciating self-loathing.

I was still divorced from the rest of the world. That’s what prison does. There’s no connection to the community anymore. In prison, exiled, surrounded by chaos, you turn inward to survive, insulate yourself from others, become hardened, and estranged from the world. I was home and re-entered the community, but I was still coldly detached. And my return didn’t happen without notice. Exiled and remote in a northern prison, I forgot I was still the center of gravity for many others. A journalist for a local Florida paper called me the day after I arrived.

“I’m writing an article about your release and will publish it tomorrow. Call me back if you’d like to make a comment,” was the message left in my VM.

I hadn’t done well in the press. My lawyer told me not to defend myself. Best not to respond. I chose the worst of both. I didn’t defend myself but spoke with them, which only worsened things.

“Why do you need my address?” I told the reporter. Ray, a journalist with his own corner: “Ray’s World.” He sounded about fifty and was pretentiously friendly until I mentioned the address.

“You got something to hide?”

“No. Yes. Of course. I don’t see how my address is germane to your article.” I answered.

I regretted saying germane. He published the comment. In retrospect, it was stupid. I answered every question with a chip on my shoulder. I had the opportunity to express gratitude and remorse, apologize, and create a story about making amends. But I didn’t. I didn’t even think about it. But it’s hard not to be defensive. Three years earlier, another writer had publicly scalded me.

I had hoped that release from incarceration would provide a spiritual balm and the seeds for growth. How I wish there were one. But very little of that, like planting seeds on concrete, and failure is the only real prism from which to measure. Then I tried to focus on the turning points, but it’s always a moving target, and there are too many of them to count or measure. My debacle was years in the making, and new starts were foreclosed by age and circumstance. There just isn’t a path to go back or go forward. I huddle in a cocoon and harbour the simplest entreaties and memories of my past, which promise an epiphany. Still, it never reveals itself, and I remain exiled in relentless remorse and the turning points that passed.

In the end, there’s really no going back. The ankle bracelet is a daily reminder. I still have goals to return to the community. I often think about my sentencing Judge. I learned about the things that make life worthwhile. I learned that much in prison. I’m not sure I didn’t know them before. But much of the time, I don’t feel as if I’ve changed at all. No matter how many times I run my life’s reel, the ending is always the same, and so is the beginning. No escape yet from the “prison of my own making, the prison without bars, the prison of the soul.” Only troubling dreams of the dark corridors, I thought I’d left behind.

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This essay was initially published in Minutes Before Six (MBS), a journal publishing writing by writers impacted by the criminal justice system. A link to this essay and other essays written by John DiMenna in MBS is provided below: https://minutesbeforesix.com/wp/category/contributors/john-dimenna-fl/