“When it comes to prisoners, they just look at the jacket.”
What were you doing when you were 14? Roberto was entering the prison system, where he would spend almost all of the next 26 years. Today, in 2018, he has only been out 90 days. Sitting in a small study in a transition program for ex-cons, Roberto explains that prison is all he’s ever known. The majority of his time in prison was for a homicide charge. Now in his 40s, Roberto says the happiest moment of his life was the day he was freed..
The Massachusetts Department of Corrections states that they “provide custody, care, and programming for those under our supervision to prepare them for safe and successful reentry into the community”. Roberto spent a quarter of a century in the hands of the Massachusetts DOC, and his story suggests otherwise.
Re-entering the real world, Roberto felt he was missing the support that he needed to survive in a foreign world. “When you’re out here you are relegated to doing things on your own, and very quickly.” Roberto has been dumped in a society very different from the one he left in the the early 90s; he says he felt uncomfortable just walking down the street. His first time going to the store, “I had to have a guy take me… I felt like a fish out of water. I felt like I was a martian like everybody was looking at me, and I was genuinely scared. I was scared just to go into a store. Handling money, I was scared.” Roberto’s GPS tracker ankle bracelet is also anxiety inducing. He describes feeling like he is “walking around with one foot in and one foot out” of prison. The tracker forces Roberto to remember that at any moment he could be re-incarcerated and he explains that this is something that he is “constantly dealing with”. Shifting to the real world has taken a psychological toll on Roberto, a burden he has had to shoulder without preparation.
Some aspects of the current Massachusetts prison system make prisoner re-entry difficult. Roberto was in a minimum security prison towards the end of his time, and recognized that his life savings of a hundred dollars was not going to be enough when he left prison and attempted to reintegrate into society. Roberto hoped to acquire work release privileges, a program which allows inmates to leave the prison to work while serving their sentences. Recognizing the importance of financial stability, Roberto went to the parole board, but his status as a lifer prevented him from acquiring work release. The legislation at the time did not allow parole boards to use their discretion in this kind of case. Fortunately for Roberto, after pressing, the parole board allowed Roberto to leave prison for a transition program. Roberto couldn’t, due to policy, work from prison, but could leave prison altogether. This kind of contradiction in monitoring prisoners demonstrates the inability of the parole board to make complicated and situational judgements.
The conditions of Roberto’s parole have been complicated. “They really make it difficult for a guy to come out here and do the right things,” Roberto states. He has to drive hundreds of miles weekly to make three weekly meetings at Dismas House, attend bimonthly mandatory counseling sessions for a substance abuse problem that he states he does not have, work, and see his family. Just getting into a transition program was very difficult, because, as Roberto explains, “if you don’t have substance abuse issues 9/10 times a recovery program is not going to take you”. Roberto has to wake up at 4 in the morning to get to work on time.
In addition to heavy schedules in post-incarceration programs, getting work is difficult for ex-cons. Employers have access to an individual’s Criminal Offender Record Information. The CORI is not formatted in a way that is easy to understand. In Roberto’s case, he committed one homicide, but the CORI includes the counts of the charge. Roberto explains, “I’m one indictment, but if you look, the CORI will say homicide, homicide, homicide, homicide, homicide, so when the employer looks at your CORI, he’s thinking that this guy is a psychopath”. This kind of oversight could be easily remedied and makes getting a job even more difficult for individuals who are re-entering society.
Roberto’s ankle bracelet also makes it hard for him to get a job. The stigma of an ankle bracelet harms ex-cons’ chances of successfully re-integrating into society. While Roberto has been lucky to find work, he is making minimum wage, and driving two hours away to see his family on Saturdays after work. Shortly after finding work, Roberto was forced to ask for time off in order to attend counseling sessions that his parole officer had scheduled without consulting Roberto. The new counseling time conflicts with Roberto’s newly acquired work. “These are the kind of struggles that I'm dealing with… and they don't take the time to really think about things.” The state has said that they are trying to improve things for prisoners like Roberto, but he hasn’t seen anything, “every step I’ve [had] to take I’ve [had] to take by myself”.
Within prison, things are not as good as they appear. As stated by Roberto, “when you guys go there, they make it look very real beautiful. You go there, the freakin floors are shining, programs… it’s a lie”. Roberto shared that the state prison he was in did not have the programs that it’s website stated it did. Prisons used to be able to use Pell Grants to obtain a college education, but during the Weld administration (Governor of Massachusetts form 1991-1997) this opportunity was taken away from prisoners. Individuals who want to help themselves can’t, “you take the hope from them you know?... it’s not an environment that's about helping individual, promoting growth, helping the people to heal”.
When asked what he fears most, Roberto immediately said being re-incarcerated. He admits that the outside is difficult, but says the difficulty is worth his freedom. Roberto got out of prison 6 years ago, but was reincarcerated after a physical altercation where he attempted to separate a fight between his pregnant daughter and her boyfriend. Prior to this altercation, a lifer had committed a murder after receiving parole. Because Roberto was also a lifer like this man, he was reincarcerated as well. Roberto feels he was not seen as an individual in this case; he was grouped in with this other man and punished because of the other lifer’s mistake. Roberto elaborates on his situation, stating “they don't take into account is you know guys that have been incarcerated for a a long time are just coming back into the family… That's an issue… I didn't know the kind of obstacles that I was going to be confronting with when it came to my children. And that impacted me greatly. You know, um, it did a lot of harm. Because I didn't know how to be a dad." Roberto did not feel like he merited six more years in prison, and the incident “filled me up with a lot of anger, a lot of resentment… I felt that I hadn’t been afforded an opportunity to have my situation looked at the way that I felt that it should have been looked at. I wasn’t committing a crime, this was a domestic issue and as a father that hasn’t been there for his child I was trying desperately to build a relationship with my kid. And then to have them look at my actions because I’m a violent offender, to have them look at it like that… and not really look at the situation and say, this guy was trying to do the right thing, how can we help him?”.
Roberto has faced a lot of challenges transitioning into society, and there are many challenges yet to come, but he knows that he has to keep trying.
Roberto is a member of Dismas House, an organization that provides "an important platform for healthy reentry from prison to those most in need of recovery, decent work, and housing." Roberto and many others benefit greatly from the support of Dismas House. To read more about the organization visit their website here.