Reflections from the Social Work/Re-entry Unit
D'Ann R. Penner, Ph.D., OAD Social Justice Fellow
At the Office of the Appellate Defender, we have a small, but fiercely creative Social Work/Re-entry Unit, directed by the only full-time, licensed social worker on staff, Heidi van Es. We work with incarcerated clients during the transitional times in their legal journeys: sentencing, merit and parole board hearings, and pre-release planning. Once they have returned home, our unit is available to our clients as a resource for facing re-integration challenges and economic/emotional survival. Over the course of eight months, I had the privilege of working closely with sixteen individuals of color, fourteen men and two women. I came to the OAD’s Social Work/Re-entry Unit as a middle-aged woman embarking on a career shift from academia to public interest law with a social work sensibility. Although my academic background prepared me to understand some of the complex sociological and historical reasons for the challenges faced by men and women of color in early twenty-first century American society, my clients taught me invaluable lessons about individuals scarred by their experiences within the criminal justice system and the lingering ways a criminal record complicates their efforts to create the conditions for successful avoidance of prison stays in the future.
One of the first lessons was taught to me by a middle-aged, Latino husband and father of four children, working as a butcher, who was facing a one-and-a-half to three-year prison term in upstate New York for allegedly selling twenty dollars of crack to an undercover police officer. The spiraling set of negative consequences that such a sentence would have triggered not only in the butcher’s life, but also in the lives of his entire extended family lives was staggering. Not only would he have lost his union job after working twenty years--two years short of a pension--but his children would have been forced to drop out of college and his family would have lost their rent-controlled apartment in the only neighborhood they had ever known. Fortunately, thanks to the daring argument made by an OAD supervising attorney and the fair-minded decision by the judge, our client was spared a prison stay, although his criminal record is now stained with his only felony conviction. What happens to other precariously-situated families when their breadwinners are not similarly fortunate to obtain high quality representation?
How impossible it is to overestimate the pressure our clients are under during the first few weeks after their release from prison was the second lesson I learned at OAD. This is especially true for the clients who are attempting to avoid old habits and patterns within our public shelter system. Their lack of financial resources, combined with the difficulty of securing meaningful employment quickly enough, exacerbates their stress levels and challenges the strength of their commitments to avoid comparatively easy money-making opportunities on the street. One client was so shaken by, in part, the stress of contradictory needs and the despair of his unmet expectations during his first forty-eight hours of freedom that he jumped from a six-story building. Humanizing re-entry conditions needs to be a priority on our agenda to reduce recidivism.
The third lesson my clients underscored for me is the special category of vulnerability to racist tendencies that exists for men of color with a criminal record. One of my clients, a twenty-seven year old African American church musician, who attended all of our sessions dressed in a suit and tie, was re-arrested weeks after his release for walking through the basement tunnel connecting the building where he resides with the building of the friend he was visiting at 6:00 p.m. Although the charges ultimately were dropped after fourteen days, the young man’s re-entry progress was disrupted by a two-week stay in a New York City jail for walking home as a black man with a criminal record. This precariousness is even more pronounced for our clients living in shelters and suffering from mental illnesses or missing teeth. One such client had his parole violated and spent almost two months in a city jail after being hit by a car, hospitalized, and out of consistent contact with his parole officer. After the violation was dismissed, the middle-aged man returned to his home at a MICA shelter to find all of his worldly belongings missing and his place in line for a government-subsidized apartment that might have allowed him to escape the strains of long-term shelter life evaporated.
In conclusion, I have come to see OAD as something of a twenty-first century miracle. Not only does it tenaciously continue to provide quality legal representation for indigent clients irrespective of their alleged crimes, but with an average team of one full-time social worker and one or two student interns, OAD continues to serve as a humane oasis in a social services environment ravaged by funding cuts. Without a doubt, the demystification of access to scarce resources and the referrals given to our clients play an important role in our clients’ efforts to survive economically. But in the end, it is the power of the human relationship’s healing, energizing belief in the possibility of a metaphorical redemption that engenders the energy to try again in a world where unwarranted, daily rejections grossly outnumber equal opportunities for all.