South Central Correctional Facility recently hosted a job fair, and didn’t invite anyone to attend it. There were no flyers, no advertising at all. Local Tennessee groups came in and set up booths and everything, but staff just brought them the prisoners who’d been working in the hallway so they’d have people to talk to. None of the people soon to be released, many of whom would have jumped at the chance to attend a job fair, seem to have known about it until after it was over.
South Central, where I’ve spent the past decade or so of my nearly 30 years incarcerated, is one of four private prisons in Tennessee operated by CoreCivic rather than the state corrections department. I can recall three previous job fairs here, all of which played out similarly.
Connections to the outside world are scarce here compared to what’s standard at most public prisons. At those we could count on at least six or seven volunteers who were regularly scheduled, and so every night there’d be some kind of class, usually an AA or NA meeting, because someone was there to facilitate it.
Here, the chaplain’s schedule always shows lots of volunteer-led programming, but that’s not what’s actually happening. Hardly any volunteers ever come to South Central, and never for anything besides religious programming. The approval process for volunteers at Tennessee’s private prisons seems more convoluted and unfriendly compared to the process for state-run prisons, which readily welcome whatever help they can get.
The criminal-legal system forces people rejoining society to walk a tightrope that’s arduous enough with the level of preparation they receive in state-run prisons. But it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone headed toward the path of success if they’re leaving prison with CoreCivic’s idea of re-entry planning.
Re-entry coordinators often started full of initiative, but soon received instructions to only do the mandatory audit items.
Each prison’s re-entry office generally has an incarcerated person working as a clerk—basically an aide to the re-entry coordinator, which is a staff position. Filter spoke with two currently incarcerated people who have clerked in the re-entry offices at two different CoreCivic facilities. Both ultimately quit because of moral objections to how the offices were being run.
In addition to their names, Filter is withholding the names of the two CoreCivic facilities because each prison generally only has one re-entry clerk at a time, and the accounts included here are relatively recent. The experiences the two men described were similar, and highlight the grave disparities in re-entry programming between CoreCivic facilities and the state-run facilities.
Both former clerks told Filter that new re-entry coordinators often started the job full of initiative. However, shortly after, they would receive instructions to do only the mandatory audit items—in other words, the bare minimum an audit would require they do in order to pass.
It wasn’t clear who exactly had issued the instructions; both men read them on the audit instrument, which is a printout listing the things that an upcoming audit will be looking for. In this case the mandatory items were that at 24 months, 12 months and two months out from someone’s release date, they be given the checklist of 15 things they’ll need for a successful re-entry:
– Community supervision plan if applicable
– State identification
– Birth certificate
– Vocational or educational certificate
– Monthly budget plan
– Employment portfolio
– Transportation plan
– Resident address
– Job leads
– Community health clinics
– AA/NA locations
– Food stamp application
– Education referrals
– Social security or disability eligibility forms
– Clothing bank locations
One of the men who spoke to Filter was also a re-entry clerk at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, which is a state-run facility. He said that in that system the 15 items are approached as mandatory. The forms printed for CoreCivic facilities are identical, but both former clerks said that instead of marking each item on the checklist Yes or No, the re-entry coordinators told them to write in N/A.
Mandatory audit components don’t include helping people actually complete the checklist, just telling them about it. CoreCivic did not respond to Filter’s request for comment.
The former clerks described staff coordinators so ineffective that they lost the ability to get people on food stamps, because the local benefits office got fed up and stopped scheduling calls. Similarly, a contract with the Social Security Administration office simply wasn’t renewed on time, meaning that instead of leaving prison with a social security card, people with no other state-issued ID are leaving prison with the address to a social security office, where they can hopefully figure it out themselves.
An on-site ID card machine could print them a valid state-issued ID, but the re-entry coordinator always told everyone it was out of order. It wasn’t, according to one of the former clerks; it was just farther from coordinator’s office than they’d wanted to walk.
A clerk was told to forge prisoner signatures on paperwork stating that they were offered assistance, but weren’t interested.
In one case, a re-entry coordinator told the clerk to forge prisoner signatures on paperwork stating that they’d been offered re-entry assistance, but weren’t interested.
Both former clerks had been excited to begin the job, believing they might be able to really make a difference. Instead they were often in the position of watching people preparing for re-entry—friends, neighbors, people they’d known for years in some cases—be lied to, or passively led to believe the office was doing what it could, and not being able to tell them the truth without making things worse.
One described his former supervisor checking people’s records and deciding, based on their conviction, whether to spend any time on them. These people will be back anyway, he was told, so let’s not exhaust a lot of energy.
The man who’d also clerked at Riverbend said it was slow, and insufficient, and of course had some staff who were pretty apathetic about their job. But overall, as a state-run re-entry office the culture was completely different—everyone seemed to be making an honest effort to do whatever was within their means. As far as he knew, no one was forging signatures or lying about equipment being out of order. And his job was to help people complete the re-entry checklist, not just tell them it existed.
Of the approximately 2 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, around 90,00 are in private prisons like this one. Though data on private prisons is always muddied at best, the limited research that does exist shows recidivism rates to be higher than than those for public prisons. If you and your stakeholders make money by keeping people in prison, why would you invest any resources into keeping them out of prison?
Image (cropped) via Kentucky Department of Corrections/YouTube
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