ASHLAND – When Jeremy was released from prison, he was motivated to leave the gang life behind and regain custody of his son.
But with no money to make rent, Jeremy was facing eviction.
No car and no money for a bus ticket meant Jeremy spent much of his time walking to various service providers. Often, he would arrive to find they couldn’t give him the resources he needed.
This is one of the scenarios participants in the Cost of Poverty Experience simulation encountered at Ashland University Correctional Education Program’s Re-Entry Summit Wednesday. Each scenario was based on someone’s real life.
Participants were assigned families, given few resources and tasked with navigating the process of re-entry into society after incarceration.
Every 15 minutes in the simulation represented a month in the lives of the families. A large clock in the front of the room counted down as frantic and frustrated participants spent large chunks of time waiting in line for services or just trying to determine where they needed to go next to survive.
Before long, the participant assigned the role of Jeremy found himself succumbing to temptation, taking illegally-obtained money from his former fellow gang members.
“As much as I wanted to separate myself from that lifestyle and those people, I couldn’t because I needed them to survive,” he said. “One of them offered to help get my son back. This was coming from someone who I didn’t necessarily want help from, but when I tried to go to the government, or re-entry or the courts, I was being turned away at every point.”
For Jeremy and the other former offenders, there never seemed to be quite enough time or quite enough money, but there was no shortage of guilt, anxiety or judgement.
While the adults scrambled to pay rent and buy groceries or make it to appointments with parole officers, the simulation participants assigned to play their kids sat in school feeling worried and helpless.
“It seemed like the whole process was designed to destroy not only the individual, but the family too,” one participant said.
The point of the exercise was to illustrate not only the stress and the struggle of living in poverty but also the impact incarceration and re-entry can have on low-income individuals and communities.
The situations from the simulation are not hypothetical.
The average length of stay in Ohio prisons is two and half years, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections Office of Reentry and Enterprise Development Chief Mike Davis told the approximately 200 summit attendees.
Attendees came from all over Ohio as well as out of state and represented government, law enforcement, service agencies, re-entry organizations and faith-based programs.
About 95 percent of people incarcerated in the state will return to communities in Ohio following their incarceration, Davis said.
Each year since 2000, Davis said, between 600,000 and 700,000 Ohioans have returned from incarceration to communities.
Davis advocates a holistic system of reentry that begins during the period of incarceration and continues as individuals transition back into the community.
“Recidivism as a standard of success is a low bar,” Davis said. “We need members of our communities to say, ‘I need someone not only to not go back to prison but to be integrated into the fabric of the community and to be a viable, contributing citizen.’”
To that end, Davis said Ohio needs people to step up as leaders, serving as subject-matter experts on the impact of re-entry in communities, fostering collaboration among agencies, building pathways to connect people with the resources they need for successful reintegration, and reshaping public perceptions of prisoner re-entry.
Ashland University, which has had a correctional education program since 1964, hopes to be a convener for leaders to have those conversations and make those connections. The university plans to make the summit an annual event.
