By Michelle Goldberg
On April 4, 2017, Damon Christian Watson walked out of jail in Los Angeles County after being incarcerated for nine months for identity theft, burglary and other convictions. Alone, ashamed and addicted to drugs, he wound up returning to the life he’d led before his arrest.
“I was a dead man walking,” Watson told me. “I was a homeless drug user on Skid Row. I was unrecognizable.”
If you think people are free when they get out of prison, consider Watson’s story. Like many former convicts, Watson emerged from the criminal justice system with zero resources to help change his direction, which is one reason most people who come out of prison quickly reenter the system. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 68% of people released from state prisons are arrested again within three years; 83% within nine years.
“Prison breaks people, and it makes them unable to rebuild,” Watson, now the senior director of legal services and corporate development at New Jersey Reentry Corporation, a nonprofit that assists former prisoners, said. “You come out, and you have no hope, no resources. And if you don’t have those things? You’re not much different than the person who was put in jail in the first place.”
This is the ugly back end of America’s mass incarceration disaster, a system that focuses far more on retribution than on rehabilitation or redemption. And Watson himself is a stunning example of what we lose when we, as a society, continue to punish people who have served their time.
My husband recently reconnected with Watson, whom he knew from childhood, but I didn’t know about New Jersey Reentry or Watson’s role there until I started looking into programs that assist recently released inmates.
Now 53, Watson grew up in Los Angeles and had always been a high achiever. The son of one of the first Black men in California to have both a J.D. and an M.D., and of a medical malpractice defense lawyer who worked her way through night school, Watson attended prestigious elementary and high schools, Princeton and Harvard Law School, where he roomed with Ted Cruz and made law review. He got married and joined a top law firm.
But in the span of five years, Watson lost five close family members, including both parents, plunging him into depression. Addiction ran rampant in his family, and Watson went from being a teetotaler — he didn’t have a single drink until after law school — to becoming addicted to cocaine and meth. He lost paternal rights for his two children and ended up divorced, jobless, homeless and disbarred.
During that period, he was convicted of a handful of felonies, and spent years in and out of jail and on probation.
The odds, which had once seemed distinctly in Watson’s favor, were now firmly stacked against him. When he cleaned himself up and applied for jobs — even with credentials that far surpassed those of most ex-convicts — he was repeatedly thwarted, losing job offers once a background check revealed his criminal record.
“That was very frustrating,” he said. “It was a gut punch.”
Watson heard about New Jersey Reentry, a program former Gov. Jim McGreevey helped found 10 years ago, and knew he had to work there. He applied, landed an entry-level position and has since been promoted three times. He now runs the legal services team under the organization’s general counsel. New Jersey Reentry has eight reentry sites, each of which employs a social worker, a legal services coordinator, a case manager, an employment specialist, an intake coordinator and a facility director.
Together, they have helped over 22,000 former prisoners overcome the many onerous and unnecessary obstacles they face upon release: unpaid fines, overdue child support, outstanding warrants. They connect them with social services like Medicaid, food stamps and addiction specialists. They keep a list of what they call “background-friendly employers,” companies that are willing to overlook a criminal record and give people a second chance.
Through his work at New Jersey Reentry, Watson has helped expunge the records of at least 20 former prisoners. (He is also working to expunge his own record.) He has stayed clean, remarried and this past summer completed his first Ironman competition.
When people come into his program, Watson tells them that all they need is two people to believe in them. One of them must be themselves, to know inside that they are capable of more. The other person, he tells them, is someone who will talk them out of negative thoughts and behaviors when things get tough. “At least for now, that person is me,” Watson tells them. He choked up as he described the importance, something he knows firsthand, of this message.
“They need that,” Watson said. “Nobody believes in these guys. They need people who will look them in the eye and give them a little hope.”
You could be that person too. New Jersey Reentry depends on funding from the state and from private donations. In New York, a similar organization, the Fortune Society, whose motto is “Building people, not prisons,” offers services for former prisoners in New York. Founded in 1967, the Fortune Society helped 11,673 people get back on their feet last year.
It often feels easy to give to people who seem like the most deserving. The bigger task is to give to people whom society and the systems we’ve created have repeatedly told deserve nothing at all.
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