Voices Unlocked
We share unvarnished stories from inside America's federal prison system to touch hearts and change minds.
Voices Unlocked
Halfway to Nowhere: Navigating Reentry Challenges and Red Tape
What if the pathway to freedom after incarceration was assisted with opportunities rather than riddled with obstacles? Join us as we peel back the layers of the halfway house system, officially known as residential reentry centers, with special guest Darnell Keyes. We dive into firsthand experiences from cities like Baltimore and Ohio, highlighting the glaring inconsistencies in management and support that can make or break a person's reentry journey. Darnell's story of struggle is juxtaposed with Alexander Penn's more positive experience, revealing the urgent need for standardized practices and oversight to ensure halfway houses truly support reintegration.
The episode takes a particularly close look at staffs' inability to manage the pervasive issue of drug abuse, focusing on the synthetic drug K2. Hear firsthand accounts of the chaos that ensues when untrained staff are left to handle medical emergencies without adequate resources or support. We question why the Bureau of Prisons emphasizes personal responsibility over structural support, when on-site addiction treatment and mental health services could help both those in the throes of addiction and residents who are trying to start normal lives. Our discussion probes the gap between what's needed and what's provided, raising vital questions about the resources necessary for a safe and supportive reentry.
We also tackle the bureaucratic hurdles that complicate life in halfway houses, from securing approvals for daily activities to accepting the movement restrictions imposed with global positioning monitors.
As we look to the future, the construction of a new halfway house in DC offers a glimmer of hope, affirming the potential for meaningful change in how we support individuals transitioning back into society.
Follow this podcast so you'll be informed when new episodes are uploaded (twice a month). Meanwhile, read more stories and learn how you can contribute to reform; visit MoreThanOurCrimes.
PAM BAILEY: Hi, I'm Pam Bailey. I am host of Voices Unlocked, which is produced by More Than Our Crimes. Our purpose is to bring some of the voices in federal prison out to you, so you can see their humanity and be a little more familiar with the conditions they're facing inside. And my co-hosts today are Tyrell "Tee" Peters and Darnell Keyes.
We're going to be talking about a subject ... actually, this podcast episode and the one that follows is sort of a series on some of the issues regarding reentry that people who are in prison who are close to the door, as they call it, close to getting out, are starting to think about and worry about. And I have several that I am talking to now and they're just spinning their wheels a little bit just worrying about what to expect. So the topic we're talking about today is commonly called halfway houses. The Bureau of Prisons calls them residential reentry centers and not everybody, like Tee did not go to a halfway house, but a lot of people who are in prison will go out, before they go out into the community and start their normal lives, they spend maybe up to a year,
TYRELL “TEE” PETERS: They basically just finish out their sentence in a halfway house.
PAM: So you may be wondering what that is. Tee is currently working at a DC organization called the DC Justice Lab and has been researching halfway houses. I'll have you sort of summarize for our listeners and our viewers, what is the halfway house supposed to be? We're going to be talking about reality in a little bit, but what's the mission? Why were halfway houses created to begin with?
TEE: Well, they're supposed to help returning citizens that are returning home to be able to reacclimate themselves to their communities and to serve as a bridge between being incarcerated and the community. And they're supposed to offer resources that a returning citizen needs. Those resources include helping them find jobs, helping them find housing in the future, and also abide by whatever rules that they have to abide by.
PAM: I mean, in a way, I always sort of think about it, like, when I left home for the first time and went to college, it was a way to be independent sort of because I lived in a dorm and I had all these university services around me. So actually a lot of the guys I talk to, they look forward to going to the halfway house. And in fact, they usually want as much of it as they can, not just because they're getting out of prison, they're excited about getting out of prison as early as possible, but also they do see it as a way to get assistance getting on their feet, before they're really on their own. Right? Yeah. So you're going to hear a lot today from Darnell who just came out of the halfway house as a DC resident.
I want to make it really clear right up front that all halfway houses are different. They're not all, you're going to hear some pretty negative things about a halfway house experience that did not meet the expectations. But because halfway houses are under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Prisons, but they're operated under contract with the BOP, either by a commercial enterprise or by a nonprofit. So as a result, the experience can be really different from place to place. And that's actually one part of the problem, you sort of wonder how much they're really being monitored and how much they're really sort of on their own and no one is really governing them quite the way you'd like them to be governed. I'm going to be playing a soundbite from somebody you've heard in a previous podcast episode. His name is Alexander Penn and he is still in prison today, but he was out once before and he spent time in two halfway houses in Ohio and actually had a pretty good experience overall. Although you'll also hear later that...
TEE: Probably because you said Ohio.
PAM: Oh yeah. But I mean you'll hear later that in the area of housing, it was like nothing, no help there. Let's listen to what Alex has to say right now.
ALEXANDER PENN: The establishment was nice. It wasn't like a five-star hotel, but it was very comfortable. It was not chaotic. Secondly, the people who worked there were people who understood that we were...they treated us like regular people. They didn't take on an air of authority like they were some type of police officer or correction officer. We didn't call 'em by their last names. We were all, everybody was on a first-name basis.
PAM: So one thing you heard and what Alex had to say that I really wanted to sort of emphasize, it may seem small, but it seemed to me that it's a larger in a symbolic sense. He talks about the fact that staff treated the people who were staying in the halfway house with dignity: You're just regular people, like you're all in it together, and that he could call staff by their first names. And it just struck me that every time I talked to you about the halfway house, you were always referring to staff in this very deferential way. They were your...even though you're an adult man, they act like some kind of a teacher or head of a daycare center or something. I should say right up front, Darnell just came out of the halfway house that serves DC residents. But because DC doesn't have its own halfway house yet, and we'll talk about that, right now people from DC go to Baltimore, which is about... how long does it take to drive?
DARNELL: About 45 minutes.
PAM: 45 minutes. Which doesn't seem like it's a lot, but it is when you're trying to get to a job and we'll talk about that. But let's talk about that. Alex talked about the way staff treated people. How does that compare to your experience at the halfway house? How long were you there?
DARNELL: Nine months.
PAM: Nine months.
DARNELL: I should only have wished that I had such a beautiful experience as Alex said. Volunteers of America was a...
PAM: Which is the nonprofit that runs the Baltimore halfway house.
DARNELL: It's a nonprofit organization that actually runs the halfway house through a contract with the BOP.
PAM: How would you describe the way they treated you? What was the dynamics between them and the people who stayed there?
DARNELL: The dynamics is like you were treated less than human and some of them actually spoke to you in a less-than-humane manner,
PAM: Like less than human. Like kids or something?
DARNELL: Not even kids like you're an animal or something. And several times I basically had to stand up for myself and be like, okay, hold on, wait a minute. This is not conducive to a professional environment. I'm not going to allow you to talk to me like that. However, the flip side of that is when you complain, you're complaining to the BOP. So there's no real administrative remedy [complaint] process or program that even actually remotely works. You literally have to call certain agents who are actually BOP employees dealing with people who are actually contracted to work for them. So it was like a hit-and-miss kind of thing. If you didn't know how to articulate your needs to people who are in an upper echelon in the government, you basically didn't get any of your needs met.
PAM: So do you have any thoughts about why staff were like that? Do you think it was because they didn't care about their jobs? Was it because they were understaffed? Under-resourced?
DARNELL: I think that was all the above. A lot of them were frustrated. I even used to see little rifts between case management and security staff and then bar none, there is no medical staff on duty. So... How do you guys get your medicine? They...Security passed it out to you. They hold the medicine in this big, excuse me, this big case. And then they give it to you how they see fit to give it to you. You have KOP, which is keep-on-person. But then there is other medicines, that they're not too sure of and they think you need to be watched while you're taking it. They hand it out to you and then that is so crazy, because they don't know what they're doing. They're understaffed, and they're uneducated about these medications. They're not trained. They're not trained to do it. So you may get your medicine when they feel like giving it to you or you just may not get it.
PAM: So that's jumping ahead to one of the issues that you really had. I want to touch on two things. You'll notice that when Alex talked, he said there was no chaos. It was a stable, peaceful environment. And what struck me about a lot of things that you talked about was there was chaos because drugs were just rampant.
DARNELL: Right? Oh man. I remember trying to get up and go to work. I get up at maybe four or five o'clock in the morning. That starts my day. But I can't even get into the bathroom to take care of my hygiene because there's people all over the place just stuck.
PAM: What do you mean by stuck?
DARNELL: Stuck in a drug-induced, like comatose state. You might have somebody body-locked, holding toilet paper rolled up with a joint in their mouth, and they don't know that they're stuck. Or somebody literally swimming in their own vomit on the floor.
PAM: Now what kind of drugs are we mostly talking about?
DARNELL: Oh, we're talking about K2. Marijuana is more or less legal but...
TEE: And K2 is? For our listeners who don't know what K2 is.
DARNELL: Oh, K2 is some type of synthetic marijuana. It's supposed to be a hundred times stronger than marijuana.
PAM: And I heard it really creates a zombie-like state. That's what you're talking about: stuck.
DARNELL: It does. The one time, when I had to call you early in the morning, I woke up to a guy just screaming and it was crazy because he scared everybody. I snore like a lion. So for me to hear that and wake up, to startle out of my sleep...And then this guy just got stark naked. Now staff were standing there watching this man go crazy. They've called the paramedics, and they're taking their time because they know that nine times out of 10 it's somebody wigged out on K2 and nine times out of 10 there's not really going to be a whole bunch they can do for him except for just wait for them to come down.
PAM: See, and this is a point I want to bring up. is The staff, as far as I know, weren't really trained. These are security people.
DARNELL: Yeah, they're completely untrained for any type of medical emergency.
PAM: It seems to me, what I think is really interesting here, is that drugs are such a big problem, they are in prison too. And they know it is such a big problem. It seems to me like it would make sense to have some staff on site who could help in these emergencies when people are overdosing. Instead, what I always heard you say, is that when these people choose to step in, it's to send them back to prison.
DARNELL: That was the only alternative. And here's the thing, to make it more understandable: I actually had to be the one who to calm this man down while the paramedics were on the way. So I had to literally hold, physically hold, this man for 45 minutes. That's how long they took. And not only was I scared, I didn't know what else to do. It was just like…and they're standing there just watching me the entire time and watching him. One thought it was funny,
PAM: Why not have some drug treatment on site? It's very interesting, the Corrections Information Council, which is a DC agency that does some inspections at halfway houses and prisons, and I noticed that a comment they made when they had done an inspection to the VOA halfway house is, they made the suggestion to the BOP why not have emergency drug treatment staff on site given the fact that it's such a huge problem? And the response they got from the BOP was, well we have to expect the men to be able to have some responsibility for this. That's what the answer was. But addiction, as we know, is a disease. And it just seems that if they go back to prison, they're not going to get help there. That's one of the biggest barriers to reentry. Why not? They do have, I should clarify, they do have addiction services through Royal Minds, a mental health services provider, but it's not on site.
DARNELL: Their substance abuse is actually for state prisoners. Their substance abuse program is actually for Baltimore state prisoners too.
PAM: So it seems to me that, I don't know what you think about this, but why not have a more robust drug addiction program on site?
TEE: What I think about it is that we do need more mental health professionals and we need to focus on mental health issues in those environments more because I think we're ignoring the fact that we have individuals who are returning back into society who do have to go through and suffer these societal strains. So they have a lot on their plate and using drugs is a way for them to escape this reality. Coping mechanism.
PAM: The other thing I noticed, that you used to tell me about, is the effect they had on you. You're trying to get sleep because you have to get up very early for this job because you have to travel so far to get there and yet you're sleeping in a dorm environment where the lights are on motion sensors. So people are going in and out all night long doing drugs. You can't go to sleep.
DARNELL: And not only that, you have the fact that people are just walking around you. Well, you know, coming from the federal Bureau of Prisons, first of all, at least you're in a locked cell there. So once the door is locked, it is like your comfort zone. When you're at Volunteers of America, not only are the lights motion-sensitive, so every time somebody goes in or comes out of a door, the lights turn on. Not to mention the guys who might be in the room who still are stuck on dysfunctional behavior for lack of any other word to use. I had to travel from Baltimore... Lemme say at 3:45 in the morning, maybe 4 o'clock. And my journey doesn't stop until maybe six, seven o'clock at night. And then I was actually told that if I'm out more than 12 hours per day, that I would have to go onto a GPS monitor.
PAM: Explain what that is.
DARNELL: So, a GPS monitor, global positioning monitor, is actually how they track you.
PAM: You wear it on your ankle,
DARNELL: On your ankle, and mind you, you cannot submerge this thing in water. You got to take a shower very carefully with it. And it's not even an error-proof way to actually monitor people because the thing has so many different bugs with it. You might be in your bed sleeping, and it'll say you're in Glebe, Maryland. And then they'll come back there and look and be like, oh, he's still in his bed. But you still got to go report to wherever. You could be at work. You could be at one of the organizations that we go to see, like MORCA or Voices for a Second Chance, and it goes off. You actually have to go all the way back to Baltimore or you're going to be sanctioned. No questions asked? No questions asked.
PAM: So one thing that you're getting into now that I think... it's interesting because in a lot of ways, the halfway house is a little bit like prison. Talk a little bit about the whole... You're having to go from Baltimore to DC and in order to be allowed, because you have to get permission every single time you leave the halfway house, explain the whole itinerary thing.
DARNELL: The itinerary.
PAM: And what's involved in getting an approved itinerary and how that can really mess up job opportunities.
DARNELL: That is the itinerary. First of all, you have to get it approved by the BOP and that can take upwards of... it's supposed to only take two to three days. And this is basically the daily plan, like where you plan to go. Where you're going, what time you're going to be there, how long you're going to be there, when you're going to leave and when you're going return. Now it was amazing...
TEE: How often do you have to file or put in one of these?
DARNELL: You have to do it two weeks ahead of time. So you have to sit down and literally ask yourself, well what do I plan on doing in the next two weeks? And if it is not put in on time, you're not going anywhere. They don't care if you have to go to a meeting with MORCA...they couldn't care less because the first response is, well, if you don't like it here, you can always go back to prison.
PAM: So basically, there were examples though...I'm thinking of a situation you told me about where you'd gotten a job. They had told you that during the first two weeks you cannot miss any employment, but they had scheduled you for something else.
DARNELL: That was Home Chef.
PAM: And all that [process] messed up the job.
DARNELL: After I... First of all, let me backtrack. I was working at the Hyatt DC National Mall but because I was going out 12 hours per day or more, they wanted to put the global positioning monitor on me, which I refused. I told them I feel like I'm back in the BOP all over again. I do not feel like I need to be tracked like that.
PAM: I guess I'd ask listeners, if you were to think about this for a second...I mean, how that would make you feel having to have this large noticeable box, on your leg that everybody can see.
DARNELL: And somebody sees this big lump on your leg and think, what is this, a cyst or what do you got going on down there?
PAM: So a lot of people wouldn't want to wear that.
TEE: It's almost like a shackle.
DARNELL: It is. It is. And so when I refused it, they took all of my itineraries. The only place I could go was Royal Minds and doctor's appointments until I decided that I was going to actually cooperate in some type of manner. So what I chose to do was go through different avenues. So I found a a local job.
PAM: You got a Baltimore job.
DARNELL: Home Chef was absolutely beautiful. However, they have a very strict policy about being late and they don't want to hear any type of excuses. So the BOP, in their infinite wisdom. decided they wanted to send me out to work an hour and a half late. Now the policy already is that if you are still in the training phase, you can't miss more than two days of that training phase. You've already scheduled me for a doctor's appointment that took me away and when I tried to get it corrected, you had time to correct it, but you refused to do so. Then the other time was, you let me out at 5 o'clock in the morning when I need to actually be out of the halfway house by like 4:45, 4:30, maybe even 4 o'clock. So as opposed to adjusting my schedule, you just say, look, here you go. We're just going to kick you out at 5 o'clock in the morning. You can't leave the facility until 5 o'clock in the morning.
PAM: You cannot leave. If they decide, or if there is a mistake in your itinerary, you cannot leave. And so you got to...
DARNELL: And if you leave then you are also going to be held accountable for escape from the halfway house.
PAM: So you ended up losing another job.
TEE: So let me ask you, do you believe that it was easier for you to have a job in Baltimore?
DARNELL: It was. Because there was so much less I had to go through. It was right there in town, but then the old adage came right back, because I was like, I gave you an itinerary, you tell me you're going to put it in, but you put it in and adjust it how you see fit versus the timeframe these people need me to be there. And then when it's time for me to write an administrative remedy, the administrative remedies go right back to the people who work for Volunteers of America or straight to the people who actually run the contract. And that was a lot of, well Pam, you remember that.
PAM: It's interesting though. So even though he got a job in Baltimore, how long did it take you to get there?
DARNELL: It took me an hour and 45 minutes, because it's clean across town. You know how uptown Northeast is like going to Southern Avenue?
PAM: But see, our viewers don't know that area. The thing is that it's...
TEE: Across the town. Yeah, it's completely bad.
PAM: You have to get a combination of all these different buses and that's....
DARNELL: And a subway. And it still took me an hour and 45 minutes.
PAM: And that's the thing that the halfway house just was refusing to be flexible about and did not understand. He had to leave really early. He ended up getting there 15 minutes late one day and they had shut the doors already. He was not allowed in.
DARNELL: They literally...Security even tried to go in there and speak on my behalf. They was like, look, the man called us and you all don't have a contact number for him to be able to call you guys and let you guys know he's on his way or that he may or may not be late.
TEE: I can only imagine if someone's having to come to DC.
PAM: Oh yes. The thing is, that's where people think that, I even talked to guys in prison who don't realize this. They think they're going to be free. They're not because if you were free, you could say, "I'm going to leave this early. I'm going to leave at this time, so I'll be there on time." But no, you cannot leave when you want to leave. You have to wait until they allow you to leave.
DARNELL: Not only do you have to wait until they allow you to leave, there's another situation that's involved in this too. When you get up so early in the morning, the cafeteria isn't open, so you're missing breakfast, you're missing meals. Your work schedule. If it's past 6:30, you're missing dinner.
And then they'll tell you to sign up for a meal, but by the time you come back, half the time the meals are either ice cold or you just don't get one because they ran out. And you are not allowed to stop, especially if you have a GPS monitor. You are not allowed to stop at McDonald's or anywhere else outside of your itinerary to get anything to eat. Because you're going to get written up for it.
PAM: The other reason why he missed a day at work is because they had scheduled a doctor's appointment and weren't willing to reschedule it. They said, no, you're going to go to the doctor's appointment instead of work. That is what a parent does with a child.
DARNELL: It was a doctor's appointment that I had missed previously for the exact same reason.
PAM: So it's like you say, you can't make the smallest decisions for yourself. See, to me, if a halfway house is really designed to help you prepare for independent living, you wouldn't take away the ability to make the smallest decisions for yourself. They are still insisting on making the decisions for you. The other thing I would say that people have to realize is that in prison medical care is really bad. You may be seriously ill, you may need certain exams and you'll have to wait months to get it. By that time, your disease might be very progressed. So you'd sort of hope or think that medical care would be better in the halfway house. And yet you alluded to it before and you said that you didn't get the medication that you needed.
DARNELL: No. I remember....it was from the first part of November to the second half of December, I went without my mental health medication.
PAM: And this is psychiatric medication that you really need.
DARNELL: This is medication that you can't just stop because if you just stop it, I could go into seizures.
TEE: Oh wow.
DARNELL: I don't normally even have those types of problems, but if you're just cold turkey take people off of it...
PAM: They just didn't have the refill for you.
DARNELL: They didn't have the refill. Every time my case manager put the refill in, the BOP tells her, oh no, it's too soon for him to get this medication even though she knows I'm out of it. It's not before the time that I'm supposed to get another prescription. You just want to take the authority that you have and abuse it. Then I was sick with, I didn't know I had RSV first of all. So also while I'm waiting for my medication, I'm going through the symptoms of RSV. I'm thinking I've got the flu or maybe pneumonia or something. So finally I got so mad when I came back from work and off of a holiday, I think it was Thanksgiving when I came back two weeks later. I was like, y'all, I'm still trying to figure out when y'all going to schedule me to go to the hospital or when you're going to just send me. So finally, I actually had to call Ms. Eubanks who oversees the contract for the federal Bureau of Prisons. Ms. Rachel Eubanks was somewhat amenable to let me go, but I had to wait for her to approve it before they would let me go to Mercy Medical.
TEE: The hospital.
DARNELL: So it was because I had the knowledge of what I had a right to and what is not allowed... These people have the mentality that, oh well we're going to make it much more difficult for this individual just because he knows what he's talking about and he actually has outside support who will actually call in and question, like, "What are y'all doing?" I think that was the only thing that saved me from getting sent back to prison.
TEE: And what was that? The outside support.
PAM: Having other people who...
DARNELL: Having other people. Yeah, willing to call.
PAM: Darnell went three weeks without medication. This is not like cold medication. It's not like indigestion medication. This is mental health medication that you cannot go without. You will decompensate without it. And I mean I was even calling. University legal Services, another nonprofit, called.
Again though, you're totally out of control of your own health care and they wait and it seems like nobody cares. In fact, the other thing, like prison, they were getting mad at me. They were getting mad at him. They're getting mad at me for, why are you intervening?
DARNELL: You're making trouble.
TEE: Good trouble.
PAM: Yeah, but it's your health. It's your health.
PAM: So, I think that's sort of the message about the halfway house is that it's really not preparing people. I know of other people who are at the halfway house who have decided not to even try to get a job because they know that they may end up losing it. I mean, Darnell lost three different jobs because of the halfway house, the restrictions. And think about this, if you're coming out of prison and you're trying to build up confidence in yourself and a track record, the last thing you want is to lose your first experience and you get fired. So I am thinking of somebody else who's there now who decided, you know what? I'm going to wait until I'm out before I even try to get a job. What's the point?
TEE: Yeah, that's defeats the purpose.. it really does... of what the halfway house is supposed to serve and that's helping you get a job.
DARNELL: Yeah. It's helping you reintegrate back into society in a successful manner. Like, to know that you've made it that close to being back in society and then it just turns into total chaos and you have no control of what's going on. I actually told them to send me back to the BOP. Yeah. Y'all don't want to take care of me. Go, don't send me back to the BOP. And that's why a lot of people don't even want to go to the halfway house. I didn't want to go to the halfway house. But rather than be at FCI Fairton, New Jersey, I said I'm going go ahead and go to Baltimore right now and I'm going to see if I can make this work.
PAM: The ones who want to go are the ones who haven't heard. I mean, I can't tell you how many DC people I've talked to who say, "Oh, I can't wait to get to the halfway house." And I told them, I've warned them and they said, no, no, no, no. I'll be different. I know how to work the system. And then I say, "I give you two weeks." And then they'll be singing the same tune.
So, there's an opportunity coming up. There's two things, to just sum up what we heard. One is the way people are treated, they want to be treated with dignity and respect and learn, because in prison, that's sort of taken away from you already. In fact, I have seen, I worked with some other people who have a hard time making decisions for themselves because they've been taught not to in prison. So they need to be treated like adults so they can relearn how to take charge of their own lives. They're not being allowed to. And then there's just services that aren't helping you get a job. They're not helping you get housing. So then what's the point? So as you know, Tee, DC -- I say DC but it's really the BOP --
TEE: is getting a new halfway house.
PAM: Yeah. So why don't you talk a little bit about that. What do we know about it?
TEE: Well, it's a hole in the ground right now. They had an opening date for last November, 2023, and it's still a hole in the ground and it's like it's not even being built. So they're giving this misinformation on when the halfway house is supposed to be built for DC.
PAM: But when it eventually comes, I guess let me ask you, Darnell, with the experience that you've had, although now you're out and we'll talk about that later. If you had an opportunity to talk to the new management. The new halfway house will also be run by, I dunno if they're a not-for-profit or a company?
TEE: I think it is a not-for-profit. I'm not sure.
PAM: It's going to be an organization, an outside organization that's going to contract with the BOP. If you had the opportunity to sit down with somebody, a representative for this organization that'll run the DC halfway house when it opens, what would you tell them about, hey, make sure you do what?
TEE: Are we talking about the halfway house in general or just nonprofit organizations that's going to be working on them?
PAM: I guess what I'm asking him is if you had the opportunity to talk to somebody who's going to be running this new halfway house -- and then I want to get your opinion -- what advice or what request would you make? How could they do better?
DARNELL: First of all, they need people who are going to be more benevolent to the people who are actually in need of the halfway house. There's a way to get your point across to someone without being disrespectful and antagonistic. But then above all and beyond everything else, we need adequate housing. We need adequate vocational training programs that actually target the skills that you have. We actually need housing being made available to people.
PAM: Now are you saying that you think the halfway house should be doing that?
DARNELL: The halfway house should be doing that because they're actually the go between you and your next step back into society. And if it's being done ahead of time before your projected release date, then nine times out of 10, you'll be that much more successful. Because there are other steps that you have to wait to do; you have to wait to get SNAP benefits or should I say government benefits? Government assistance. You have to wait until you're out of the halfway house for those. But by that time, you are on the street, just pushed out the door with no resources whatsoever.
PAM: So they would tell you that, oh well, the nonprofits, city organizations should do that for you. It is not the job of the BOP, or the people who run the halfway house to do that.
DARNELL: Well, that should be their job because that is one of the things that's needed. Those are primary things that are needed.
PAM: What do you think about that? I will say, and we'll get into this in the next part, the second episode in this podcast, but it does seem like one thing that I see all the time is that the people come into the halfway house and when it comes to getting a job, getting housing, getting signed up for benefits, they hear about these different services in DC and they're like little hamsters almost. Let's go here, let's go here. They're running around to all the agencies trying to figure out
TEE: Who can help them.
PAM: Who can help, and which ones are the best. And it does seem like that's so inefficient, because maybe you won't hear about somebody and there's three agencies that do the same thing. Which one's better? And so they just run around all the time. What do you think about that? Should there be something in the halfway house that coordinates at all or what?
TEE: It should be something in the halfway house that brings all of these organizations together to be able to assist the returning citizen.
PAM: Why don't you talk about your experience a little bit then? You didn't go to the halfway house, but you did.
TEE: Yeah, I did. Because I am a returning citizen as well, and I had to experience going through a transitional home. And that transitional home was supposed to be referred through my probation officer, federal probation officer. And it wasn't; they were trying to send me to Richmond, Virginia. I told my probation officer at the time that, no, I'm not moving to no Richmond.
PAM: It's like how far away?
TEE: That's almost an hour and a half away. So I told her, oh, if you need an address for me, it's going to be on one of these corners and you just come meet me there. I'm not going to Richmond, Virginia. So I did go to MORCA.
PAM: And it's the Mayor's Office for Returning Citizens. Although other people take the M off and call it ORCA.
One of the ideas that I was thinking about is rather than making people run all over the place to different agencies, figuring out which can offer me what, why not have a space in the halfway house or maybe once a month, say twice a month, all those agencies have a table or something. So you don't have to go, because think of the transportation time and costs, especially now, when you're coming from Baltimore. It's even a bigger problem. But why not? I could see why the BOP might say, well, we can't actually have people on staff that does all that for you, but why not have them all have offices there in halfway house?
TEE: And that sounds promising. That sounds like something that we need in a halfway house.
PAM: Or the other idea that I had was because you all go through this and you now know which agencies were good for you and which not, why not have returned citizens who have been through it go in maybe twice a month? And it could be peer to peer...Actually, the one need we didn't mention by the way that I think is really important is money. Everybody has no money. So before you have a job, if you don't have family giving you some cash.
DARNELL: Yeah, you're hit. Exactly. Yeah, you're hit. And those are some of the societal strains I was talking about as to why you might see people feel the need to want to escape using drugs. Yeah.
PAM: So why don't we wrap up this then? In sort of what I consider the second part, in the next podcast episode, we're going to talk about housing specifically because that is the need that I hear about more than anything.
But we can wrap this one up. I think there's a huge potential. Halfway houses could be so helpful in helping people get used to the idea of being independent. It just doesn't seem like, and some of them do, some of them are pretty good, but we just heard today about an example of how wrong it can go and there's lots of ways it could be better and we hope the new DC house, when it finally opens, will be. But yeah, so listen to the next episode. You'll hear more about the housing situation and meanwhile, please subscribe so that you'll know when that new episode is out.
