Prisoner Reintegrating Into Civil Society

 My situation differs slightly from that depicted in Precarious Liminality: How Parole Keeps Ex-Prisoners Stranded Between Two Worlds, only in the details and being under the federal system. Federal supervised release is supposed to help me reintegrate into society. Federal probation is to enforce the order that I behave well in society, do not undertake any credit transactions, stay away from certain people, and undertake some sort of counseling. Of that last bit, I asked my PO what is the therapeutic purpose of the counselor he wants me to see, and he said it was in the order, he knew nothing more. That it raised the question of what therapeutic purpose my current counselor serves seemed open to question. This counselor I found because the group therapist did not want me and I questioned her methods (that is way back under the "Supervised Release" topic). Finding work, and working on keeping my depression at bay have all been on me. I was never asked about a goal for my post-prion life, even when I mentioned I was writing. It seems to me that my supervised release will reintegrate me only so far as I am willing to make it do so. The government's help is negligible where it exists. In that, I think the article above and my experience coincide.

From the linked-to article, some stats I was unaware of:

It was a violation, too, if he was discovered knowingly associating “with other persons on parole, aftercare release, or mandatory supervised release without prior written permis sion from his or her parole agent.” What was the likelihood that Michael would run into other people on parole? The neighborhoods due west of St. Leonard’s, East Garfield Park and West Garfield Park, had the highest incarceration rates in the city, more than six times greater than the national average, and also had the city’s highest percentage of residents returning from prison. Along with mass incarceration, the United States had created a symbiotic crisis of mass supervision. In 1975, there were 143,000 people out on parole in the country. From that point on, however, the prison population took off by nearly 700 percent. Hundreds of thousands of people entering prison each year meant that many more people eventually exited, most of them leaving prison and entering some required form of community control. Some 820,000 Americans are now on parole. Another three million people are on probation. The rise of this supervisory state of nearly four million Americans is unprecedented historically and unrivaled globally. In 2020, one in every sixty-six adults in America was on parole or probation. For Black men, it had been as high as one of every twelve.

That is a lot of people under government control. How many will fail in their integration because they lacked the skills I have, and the government fails to support their return?

sch 12/22