Justice Notes: Homecoming
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
At this week’s White Collar Support Group meeting, our discussion turned to reentry. Much of the public conversation about incarceration focuses on sentencing and release, as though freedom begins the moment the prison gates open.
Yet many formerly incarcerated people discover that release is not an ending but the beginning of a different struggle. Relationships have changed. Opportunities have narrowed. The emotional burden of prison often follows them home.
I wrote the following essay shortly after my release from federal prison and while still under home confinement. It reflects a difficult period of adjustment and the sense of exile that accompanied my return home.
Looking back, I no longer see reentry quite the same way. Time, family, writing, advocacy, and community have provided a measure of healing. But the emotions described here were real, and they remain part of the journey many returning citizens confront.
In light of our discussion this week, I thought it worthwhile to revisit those early days of reentry.
HOMECOMING
The moment of release is a kind of fool’s gold. A conviction to make amends, start over, and rebuild a life. But 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. Even in the relatively low-security environment of a federal prison camp, confinement becomes an internal form of torture.
The presiding judge told me that 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 that I must figure out how to free myself from this prison of my own making.
Returning home, I embraced a life of contemplation, renewal, and self-reflection. I concluded that my crime was a failure of character, something intrinsic, revealed only under great duress and crisis.
But no one’s the same as you remembered them. Friends are uncomfortable, distant, measuring, and opportunities 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, believe it yourself for a while. But it doesn’t last, 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, and maybe $100 from his prison-store account. The excruciating self-loathing, a permanent consequence.
I had hoped that release from incarceration would provide a spiritual balm and the seeds for growth. How I wish there was one. But very little of that, like planting seeds on concrete, and failure the only real prism from which to measure. Then I tried to focus on the turning points, but it’s always a moving target, with too many to count or measure. There just isn’t a path to go back or go forward. I huddle in a cocoon and harbor the simplest entreaties and memories of my past that promise an epiphany. Still, it never reveals itself, and I remain exiled in relentless remorse and turning points that passed.
In the end, there’s really no going back. Sometimes I don’t think 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 the dark corridors of incarceration I thought I’d left behind.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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