Video Transcript: Inside-Out Prisoner Re-entry and Community Engagement

Good evening, everyone. Let's try that again. I’ve just been waiting to say that. Good evening, everyone. My heart is overwhelming as we look around at what this center was created for. Well, first of all, just say Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. You are welcome here. You all look so beautiful. My name is Ramona. I'm one of the people who works a part with a part of the center, and this evening, tonight is all about you. So, for showing up, give yourselves a round of applause. Worked for the Sheriff's Department for 29 years. What's hard to deal with is the five generations of incarceration that I've seen. I know great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and to me, it's very disheartening to see our children go from juvenile hall to the county jail to state prison to the graveyard. So, what we're trying to do is break this generational curse, to break this cycle one life at a time, and what it involves right now is the community.

If you think about the state of our country, what's going on in San Francisco is going on everywhere, and everybody's looking for some tangible solutions.

And basically, there is a core group of us who work together, when I say ‘us,’ my colleagues, who we often brainstorm on how to think outside the box, how to do other things. And one of my colleagues, so I respect, he came to us, and we've done similar models of this, but nothing ever on this degree. And he said, we need to do something from the inside out. I have inside. You have the outside. How do we hook this up?

When I come up with an idea, I have to go to these three individuals to help me develop that idea. So, we came with the idea of inside out. We knew that we wanted to work with them on the inside and follow them to the outside and give them that continued support before we even got started, though, however, we didn't want to just sit down and just put our ideas on paper and say this is what the population needs. What we did is we put together a focus group of inmates, right? A focus group of inmates, and asked them, hey, when you leave this place, what are the things that you need there? Many of them are not going to be in jail or prison for the rest of their lives. They're going to be returning to the community, and who knows, they may be your neighbor or my neighbor. So then why not equip them with some type of skills that they can transfer into the community with? We do a total approach. We do from housing to education to employment to daily individual sessions with each of our men as they are being released. And now that we're going we're expanding ourselves to women. It's going to be the same thing, even with women, meaning Constant Contact, Constant Contact, Constant Contact, or it doesn't appear that you're doing too well today. What's the matter? Let's sit down and talk about never too busy to listen. Never too busy to sit and talk.

Well, when a person has been in jail or prison, they're cut off from the real world. They're cut off from society for anywhere from months to years. Usually they've lost their job, if they had one, they may have lost the place that they live, if they had one. And they really need to take care of these things when they get back out, if we expect them not to go back to a life of crime. And so, people need assistance in housing, finding housing. They need assistance in completing their education, oftentimes in substance abuse treatment, and certainly in job training or finding a job. Because unless we provide these services, we as a society, or we as a community, provide services to people, then we can generally expect that they're going to turn to the underground economy and sell drugs to survive. I had gone to a conference in which someone said that the use of programs is also a great security tool. And it finally clicked for me that we could manage the jails better if we had a set of programs that were going on at that time, and we introduced programs at the maximum-security jail without any funding. We got community-based organizations to do it, and we changed the culture there. We made it a lot more quiet. There were less crimes committed in the jails, assaults on staff, assaults on inmates. And at the same time, we were able to introduce some educational programs, some substance abuse programs and violence prevention programs that proved to be helpful to people

In most cases, in my county's case and in the case of our state prison system, money can be reallocated from incarceration to program services. It costs us $3 to $4,000 per person, compared to putting a person back in jail, which is $30-40,000 when they go back for six to nine months. So, we should use the time we have with them in jail to create programs that may help them, and we should be providing support for them when they get out. It's in all of our best interests, because by helping them, fewer of us are likely to become victims of future crime.

So, the way that we wanted the program to look, we wanted to make sure that the prisoners had access to all the resources and all the programs of the sheriff's department that would address their needs. The kind of way they would look is that we had the prisoners, we know what their needs are, and they would come from County Jail number five, which is the men's facility. The prisoners would come from County Jail number eight, which is the women's facility. And then they would come into Inside Out. Then they would go into the community, and they will would use all the resources that are in our community to help address their needs. One of the ways that we keep this program going is to make sure that we all meet once a week. We can sit down and talk about where we need to take this program, because the program is in a continual process of development; once we start talking about individual clients and individual client needs, this gives us ideas of what other programs, what other community based organizations we need to reach out to, to kind of bring into this loop, talking what they need to join, something that they don't have to create. I told them the day they get here to meet you guys. I said that hour, that's the magical hour, that's either going to be the bewitching hour where your whole countenance is going to change, or that's going to be where we see something genuine in your spirit, that you still want to pursue a life of transformation.

What we did is that we basically identified certain community based organizations and we approached them to see if they would be interested in serving on our advisory board. And we have about 12 people on the advisory board from various organizations, and we try to meet at least once a quarter, and when we meet, we talk about what we've done in Inside Out, how it's developed, how each one of those community organizations can assist us in helping to further develop the program.

One of the board members, Pastor Chris Well, had introduced me to the Inside Out program, and when he found out the kind of work I was doing and what I was involved in. He thought it would be a perfect fit to get involved with inside out because of the transitional housing the prisoners that needed, to be reconnected with the community. And we are really community based. We have a program for men that struggle with substance abuse, and they're able to enter our program that's a year-long program. It's free of charge. What we do and what they're trying to do with the inside out, and what they've been doing with inside out, it just seemed like a perfect fit.

We seem to be established, like a brotherhood. You know, we're like a fellowship and we have men that are from the 80s all the way down to even teenagers, and we all come together like a family when we go up there and when we seem to encourage each other. Growing up in San Francisco and in the inner city, you see a lot of crime and violence. And a lot of my peers got caught up in the drug arena. A lot of them are in and out of jail. I never forget, one time I was asked to speak in the at 850 which is a county jail. And I saw a lot of my friends that I hadn't seen a long time: they were in jail, and they were calling my name out, and I just felt I had an interest to help them, and then looking at the system and how it is now, and how so many of them are caught up in the drug culture and they're in and out of jail, I just felt that there was a great need to reach out to those men. So, in growing up in the inner cities, and now that I've gotten my life together, and I'm trying to do the right thing, and so I want to help somebody else do the right thing.

Morning, I've been in, been in two penitentiaries in two different states. I think mentorship is a survival kit, because you, when you start mentoring people, telling them about your life. You looking at your own life.

Hello. My name is Johnny. Good morning. I live in San Francisco. My school is Willie Brown.

How's everybody doing? My name is Theo, I go to Notre Dame University, and I'm from San Francisco.

You have to live the life that you’re trying to teach; that's important. And if you love what you're doing, you're going to do that. And I love talking to people, you know, because that helps me just as much as it helps them. I'm graduating from the streets, my PhD, too.

I got a question I want to leave with the youngsters. Have you found out what you want to be in life? If you don't, it's a good time to start figuring out what you want to be and head towards that. Don't let nothing stop you from what you want to be. Nothing, nobody stops you. Head on into whatever you want to do, and you can do that now.

Good job. It pays well. I drove my cab first day, March 19. So from February 19 to March 19, in those 30 days I went to school, graduated. I was in the Walden house Mandela program, in that you had to get into inside out, because if you're doing a good job in the Walden house Mandela program, they automatically would ask you to go to inside out. When they asked me, I was interested in it. And that's when I met Dr Jones and Floyd Johnson, I was a part of 'discover your true self' with Felicia Jones' Inside Out Mandela program and a men's mentoring group. You can't miss no days unless you really have a good excuse, you know. You can't get no write ups, and you have to be a role model while you're in there, you know. And I did all those things. I also kept a journal. The journal also helped me a lot, you know, if something happened during the day or whatever happened, good or bad, I write it in my journal, and through the night, as I'm writing in the journal, I actually figured out where I went wrong, what I did wrong, or what I did right. So, the journal writing really helps me. I still do that on our side too. A guy jumped me in front of the microwave. He was totally wrong, but the first thing came to my mind was what Dr Jones and Floyd Johnson said, I'm supposed to be a role model. There's no way I should get into an argument over the microwave. And as the thought crossed my mind, I just smiled and said, not a problem. I'll wait. Usually, I would have decked them in a heartbeat, because I would have took that as total disrespect. And although I could say it was his fault, I would have been totally acting on a feeling. So, I'm learning how to process my feelings, and that's a good thing. As I'm sitting here going over my day and everything that happened today, I sit back and as I write, I begin to really work things out for myself and learning how this journal is really helping me. I'm doing well. I'm driving Monday through Thursday, from five to five, 12 hours a day, doing pretty good.

I believe that this is this work is my purpose. My firstborn son was part of the criminal justice system before he died, and I just feel that I could surrogate a lot of these young men in this criminal justice system and mentor them, and that's how this came about for me. 

Oh, Lord, you will never walk alone

The goal of the women's event was to have an open house to showcase programs that we are offering. There were mentors there as well. And as the network were going on, they just weren't talking. They were hooking up these sisters. They were saying, Hey, let me talk to you. They talk a little bit. And next thing I know, I was like, I'd like to be your mentor.

This is Miss Marcy, and she's from Jones United Methodist Church. She was with me in both the revivals in the jail this year. She was with me for the restorative justice work. She's brought a whole cadre of women from the community to be mentors here for these sisters. It's all a part of the journey that we've been taking together that Cheryl called me and got me to join her on, and it was wonderful seeing some of the ladies that I had seen in orange jumpsuits here in street clothes, and to be able to have conversations with them that didn't have a time limit set on them, and to be able to say that I'm your sister, and talk about the fact that we're here to love one another as God has loved us, and let them know that they are supported and that there are people who care.

I see from the initial vision. I see it coming to fruition. I see we started the process on the inside, and now we're able to transition people on the outside. And I see them staying connected to create that change, to have somebody to support them through that process of change.

Everyone will change. Nothing stays the same, the young become the old and mystery do unfold, but that's the way of time, everything must change. There are not many things in life you can be sure of; everything must change.