Above Photo: Inmates walk through the yard at the Kern County Sheriff’s Office Lerdo Detention Facility in Bakersfield on August 8, 2014. Across California, more than 13,500 prisoners were released in 2014. Al Seib/Los Angeles Times/Getty.
Over the next three days, 6,000 will be released from federal prisons. The decision to release the prisoners came last April from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a judicial agency which voted to reduce sentences for drug-related crimes.
For many, it’s been years since they’ve freely walked outside prison gates—the average inmate in this release will have served nine years. What’s next for them? Re-entry, the process by which former inmates acclimate back into society. Some will have families waiting for them, others will go to treatment centers, and many others will be on their own.
Charles Simmons knows a thing or two about re-entry. In all, he spent nearly 20 years of his life in the prison system. Glenn Martin is no stranger to the system, either. He is a national leader and criminal justice reform advocate who once spent six years in New York State prisons. Martin is also the president and founder of Just Leadership USA, an organization dedicated to cutting the U.S. correctional population in half by 2030.
They share their re-entry stories and discuss the process, the excitement, the challenges, the promise of a second chance.
What you’ll learn from this segment:
- What programs are available to people leaving the criminal justice system.
- What the next steps in sentencing reform could be.
- How we might reduce the number of incarcerated people in the United States in half by 2030.