They left prison. But the work to rebuild their lives was just beginning. 

When Rea Smith came home from prison, she also stopped eating.

A drug possession charge had led her to spend two years in incarceration, first at Hennepin County jail and then at the Minnesota Corrections Facility in Shakopee. Smith got out under a status called intense supervisor release. She expected that a corrections agent would show up right away at her cousin’s house, where she was staying. But the actual visit didn’t come for a week. 

During that time, Smith anxiously stared out the door in wait. She skipped food for days. 

“I lost I think eight, ten pounds when I first got out,” Smith said. “I was anxious — like I couldn’t leave, because [I] had to get approval to leave my house.”

Smith was also mother to a young daughter — and that adjustment brought strains, too. “I was just stuck in there trying to adjust to being a mom right out of the doors of prison,” Smith said. “And nobody in my house understood what I was going through.” 

A decade later, Smith works as a Women’s Recovery Service program coordinator at a government agency. During those years, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and master’s degree in public administration. That experience has given her a complex perspective on the challenges that face the 4,000-plus Minnesotans who, like her, emerge each year from state incarceration. 

The isolation from family and friends has often affected people physically, mentally, and spiritually. What happens to these folks, then, when they leave prison and reenter society? How do they reconnect with their loved ones and cope with mental-health challenges?

Smith shared her answers and reflections as part of a conversation called “Inside, Out: Rebuilding a Life After Incarceration,” hosted by Sahan Journal digital producer Alberto Villafan and MPR News senior editor Brandt Williams. 

The live conversation, on April 24, brought together a panel of formerly incarcerated individuals and community advocates at the studios of the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network.

The panelists included: 

• Antonio Williams, the executive director of T.O.N.E. U.P. 
• Rea Smith, a Women’s Recovery Service program coordinator in a government agency
• Erick Washington, a co-founder of the Kingsmen Project and and a mentor in the District of Minnesota Reentry Court
• James Becker, assistant federal defender and also a federal defender in the District of Minnesota Reentry Court
• David Riley, a substance use counselor at RS EDEN in Minneapolis 

A childhood of trauma leads to trouble

The conversation began with panelists sharing the factors that played a role in their trips to prison.

Antonio Williams, 39, said many factors led him into the criminal justice system. While he was growing up, his parents were incarcerated; Williams ended up spending time in juvenile detention. He watched as trauma affected him and his 14 siblings. Six of them entered the foster-care system, including Williams. 

“I think about the life that was squeezed out of me as a kid,” Williams recalled. “Parts of myself that I didn’t even love and never got to know or experience, because I was dealing with all levels of abuse that you could imagine.” 

Two months after Williams’s 20th birthday, he was arrested for aiding and abetting a second-degree murder. Under a plea bargain, he spent 14 years in prison.

Erick Washington pointed to drug usage, not a difficult upbringing, as leading him toward prison.

“I didn’t learn that at home, so I went out, found that myself,” Washington said. “When I got wrapped up in that cocaine, it was like a chokehold. And next thing you know it’s 10 years later. Next thing you know it 15 years later. Next thing you know it’s 10 treatments, it’s 12 treatments,” Washington said. 

Washington served 27 months in prison for a first-degree burglary charge. But he credits that experience with altering his trajectory. “The prison sentence pretty much changed my life,” he said. “Probably the best thing that happened to me.” 

The routines of incarceration cause psychological changes

During Williams’s prison sentence, he spent time in segregation. He recalled the difficulties of living inside: intense lighting, unnatural meal routines, and limits to all kinds of privacy. 

“You got to use the bathroom in front of another man. You’re having a bad stomach day, you can’t kick them out of the cell and say, ‘Hey I need to take care of myself,’” Williams said. 

“I know at Rush City” — a Minnesota correctional facility — you can only flush your toilet once every half hour. You can’t control when you have to take a number 2. You can only run your cold water once every 10 minutes. Lights, just like these, are on from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.”

When Williams came home, he struggled to regain his appetite or show affection to family and friends. “I had to remind myself that I didn’t have to be in crisis and scarcity anymore,” Williams said. 

Smith says that some strains remain from her time in prison, even years later. She finds it difficult to be in crowded spaces, like the Mall of America, where she can’t control the environment. 

Washington described emerging from prison with new perspectives. 

“I got out and was like, ‘What’s all the noise?’” he said. “It was birds tweeting.” 

However, some habits he’d enjoyed before incarceration, like barbecuing, didn’t work with his new life. 

“I used to barbecue all the time,” Washington recalled. But, he added, “I wouldn’t barbecue until I was half drunk. It was part of barbecuing…. The hardest thing for me — and I don’t think I could do it for a year — was barbecue, because I was so used to having a gallon of brandy when I fired the grill up.

Restarting that habit, he realized, would probably lead him back behind bars. 

The mental toll of incarceration 

All the panelists recognized the need for mental-health services. But few said they’d easily found them. 

Willams recalled being approached during recreation time, while he was in segregation. “She had a clipboard, and she come to my cage and said, ‘Would I like to speak to mental health–care services?’ And I said ‘Yes.’ And she stood there and said, ‘Well go ahead and talk.’ Mind you, men on each side of me in these cages doing push-ups, pull-ups, spitting, talking, cursing. I said, ‘Never mind.’”

Smith said she didn’t know where to get support. Her parole officer never asked about her mental health. 

“You know what they ask you: ‘Did you find a job? You find a house? Are you getting high?’ They don’t ask, ‘Are you okay, how’s your mental health?’” Smith said. 

Smith says her mental-health challenges led to new troubles: She got a DUI and asked to be sent for treatment. At Park Avenue Center Women’s Programs, Smith said, she was able to deal with the trauma she’d experienced before and during her incarceration. 

That experience inspired her to pursue a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Metropolitan State University. She also took the initiative to learn about resources for formerly incarcerated individuals, including treatment centers and crisis-intervention tactics. She wants everyone leaving prison to have mental health service options ready for them upon release. 

“I just made a promise to myself that no matter what I had to go through, once I got on the other side that I wasn’t going back,” Smith said.

David Riley, a substance-use counselor at RS EDEN, sees mental-health treatment as an essential tool for recovery.

“A lot of people coming out of prison suffer from very deep guilt, from not being able to forgive themselves for the conditions that brought them to prison in the first place,” Riley said. 

He is no stranger to trauma. Riley describes growing up with an absent father, in a household rife with substance use and domestic violence. Today, Riley has 25 years of sobriety. Discussing that experience with clients, he said, helps build a relationship of shared understanding. 

Reconstructing relationships with family

While the panelists discussed their personal transformations, they recognized how those changes also affected their families and loved ones. 

Washington observed that his family wasn’t prepared for this shift. Based on his previous struggles, they expected him to keep bouncing in and out of treatment. “The man that I became wasn’t acceptable. They were used to that dysfunction,” Washington said. 

But this time, he was serious about changing. He was becoming a person with new routines: going to work, coming home, paying the bills. 

Eight years after his release, Washington and his wife divorced. And fourteen years later, he is still trying to reconnect with his daughter. 

Smith came home to a six-year-old daughter. At first, everything seemed OK. But in middle school her daughter started experiencing fears of abandonment. From the instability of her own childhood, Smith understood the trauma her daughter was facing. 

Smith said, “I missed my daughter’s first day of school. Her first day of kindergarten. She told me that she struggled with that. So now, I’m really trying to make sure I’m at every single thing she does.”

Offering support and giving back

James Becker works as a federal defender in the District of Minnesota’s Reentry Court. Launched in 2015, Reentry Court is a collaborative effort between judges, prosecutors, probation officers, community members and specialists to help moderate- and high-risk offenders successfully transition into the community. 

Representing his clients, Becker said, starts with listening to their experiences and learning about the settings they came from. From there, he can start to assess the challenges they’ll have upon reentry and the goals they wish to set. 

“I think most of us have heard before that we are not generally the people that we are on the worst days of our lives,” Becker said of his clients. “Yet they can continue to haunt people and hold them back.” 

Loved ones, the panelists said, play a big role in helping family members to reenter the community. 

Williams describes a need for balance. Formerly incarcerated individuals have to adjust to their new realities and pressure from family members only adds stress. “Don’t put expectations on them,” he advises. But Williams also emphasizes the importance of helping folks envision bigger lives for themselves. “Help us dream. Help us create,” he said. 

Since his incarceration, Williams has dreamed big. He’s the co-executive of T.O.N.E. U.P. (Teaching Ourselves New Examples to Uplift People), a grassroots organization empowering formerly incarcerated individuals through reentry support, civic engagement, and policy advocacy. Williams has also become an author: His book “The Dream Weaver” tells the story of a young boy who has the power to alter reality through his dreams. 

Washington helped found a mentoring program called the Kingsmen Project to help incarcerated individuals transition back into their communities. 

Near the end of the community conversation, he offered a core maxim of his organization: “Support is everything. Period.” 

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