On August 29, 2020—a date I had been counting down to for 10 years—I walked out of South Central Correctional Facility, a private prison in Tennessee. I’d completed my sentence.
The pod was crowded that morning; almost everyone knew it was my release day. As I stepped out of my cell, the whole pod started singing:
“Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.”
Then my friend Tony Vick picked up one of my bags and walked me down the stairs—not because I needed help, but because it gave us a few more seconds together. Others from our prison community called out their goodbyes as we passed: “See you, brother Noland.” “God bless, Drummer Boy.”
Tony and I stood at the gate and cried, trying to stretch those final moments. Then at 10:55 am we hugged and I saw his blue eyes for the last time. Unless I ended up back in prison, we knew we’d never see each other again.
“It hit me when I got back to the cell and all his stuff was gone,” Tony recalled. “A mental funeral. The loss [was] overwhelming, and I cried like a baby.”
To visit someone in prison you have to apply to get on their visit list, meaning staff will do a background check and decide whether to approve you. Like a lot of job or housing applications, you have to disclose whether you’ve ever been convicted of a felony.
“No one comes to see me—many would, but are not allowed.”
Each corrections department has its own policies that determine who is or isn’t allowed to visit, and some of them are harsher than others. Though the wording is somewhat ambiguous, Tennessee Department of Correction policy basically states that no one formerly incarcerated can be approved to visit anyone currently incarcerated unless they are immediate family. And even if they are immediate family, the warden still might say no. TDOC did not respond to Filter’s request for comment.
This wasn’t always the case. TDOC used to allow visits from people with felony records after they’d been out of prison for at least a year, even if they weren’t immediate family. Then in 2015 the old visitation policy was replaced with the current one.
“My life drastically changed,” Tony told Filter. “After so many years in prison, the only family I had was the one I created inside. Many of those that got out came to visit me, after the mandated one-year waiting period. Our continued close friendships provided emotional strength to exist in this crazy place. Hearing their success stories provided hope and inspiration—to me and to those I would recount them to. Now, at 64 years old, 30 years incarcerated and never getting out, no one comes to see me—many would, but are not allowed. It’s isolating and devastating to know that I’ll never have any in-person outside contact again.”
Tony and I had lived together for years at South Central without a single disciplinary write-up. Inside those walls—despite constant surveillance, lockdowns, violence and stress—we built a real and lasting friendship. In the middle of chaos, we built our own sense of safety. In a place built to isolate people, we created community.
“The Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) supports visitation as part of the overall rehabilitation process and encourages positive engagement with family, friends and other support contacts,” TDOC states on its website. “Visitation allows offenders to preserve valuable connections with loved ones, maintain a support system in the community, and has been proven to reduce the risk of recidivism.”
But frequently, the strongest support systems for people who are currently incarcerated are people who were formerly incarcerated, and vice versa. These are the kind of valuable connections that visitation should be helping preserve.
Research shows that cutting off pro-social support systems can actually undermine successful reentry. We say we want people to succeed after prison. We say we want rehabilitation. But we add barriers to the relationships that make rehabilitation possible.
Even TRICOR, Tennessee’s correctional industries agency where I worked for years while incarcerated, wouldn’t allow me to visit in a peer mentor capacity to talk to prisoners preparing to re-enter the outside job market. I believe that my experience with that process could be useful to share with them, and I’d also like a chance to give back to the community that helped me survive my prison sentence—but it’s against policy.
I can’t see their faces when I share good news or bad. I can’t sit next to them in a monitored visit room and offer comfort on a hard day. Everyday things that many people take for granted are all off-limits for us now.
The system justifies all this as a security precaution. But what good does it do to talk about rehabilitation and second chances, and then still treat people like permanent risks?
That gate didn’t just close behind me—it slammed shut between me and my community, the friends who had kept me alive for so many years. Knowing I’ll never see many of them again, never sit across from them or share a word in person, is a quiet, constant grief. The system calls it safety. I call it loss.
Images via Tennessee Department of Correction