February 2025
Read the original article on the Boston Globe
By Katie Johnston Globe Staff,Updated February 11, 2025, 10:44 a.m.
William Allen got a job at a Toyota dealership after serving 28 years in prison.
Miguel Vazquez compares the experience of leaving prison to getting on a roller coaster in the dark.
At the end of 2012, he was sent to a pre-release program in Boston, where he had to find a job with no cellphone and no knowledge of the city. He was later moved to a halfway house in Dorchester for recovering addicts, despite not having a history of substance abuse. Then moved again.
Finally, after serving more than 18 years for a gang-related homicide in Springfield, Vazquez was suddenly released on a September day in 2014. He was a free man with $647 to his name, a prison ID, a few trash bags full of belongings — and nowhere to go.
“Life is moving 1,000 times faster in society than it was behind the prison wall,” Vazquez said. “They do not prepare you.”
Reentering society after spending years, sometimes decades, in prison is daunting. People have been isolated and may have lost connections with family and friends. They come out with little money and a criminal record that makes it difficult to find work.
In recent years, prison systems across the country have been trying to fill this gap, expanding their focus beyond punishment to rehabilitation in an attempt to better prepare incarcerated people for success in the outside world. Despite the state’s progressive reputation, the Massachusetts Department of Correction hasn’t been at the forefront of this movement, observers say, but that’s starting to change.
Massachusetts has long maintained a more traditional model of corrections, said Bruce Western, a professor at Columbia Universityin New York and president-elect of the Russell Sage Foundation, a social sciences research organization: “Hold people, implement their punishment, and deprive them of liberty in safe conditions, then release people back into society without a great deal of support or planning.”
Western, a former Harvard professor, studied prisoners released in the Boston area in 2012 and 2013 for his book “Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison.” He found that more than half left prison with less than $400, a third had temporary or unstable housing, and within two months of their release, less than half had found work.
In Massachusetts, more than 3,600 people, disproportionately Black and Latino, were released from state prisons last year. And they have much more support than they used to.
In the past two years, the state has distributed tablets to incarcerated people to take online classes and job skills training programs, launched coding classes, and started sending ex-offenders behind the wall to help those about to be released. It also developed a sustainable housing program for those released from DOC custody and opened a new reentry center in Worcester.
“We’re kind of the last stop on the social services train,” said Shawn Jenkins, who has been the DOC commissioner for nearly a year, citing the mental health and substance abuse issues many incarcerated people face. “We’re really given a tall task to kind of put all those pieces back together.”
The state cut its incarceration rate by nearly half between 2012 and 2022, according to a report by Boston Indicators and MassINC, and has the lowest incarceration rate in the country.
Recidivism rates have also been dropping. Among those released from Massachusetts state prisons in 2019, 26 percent were reincarcerated within three years, down from 33 percent in 2015. Nationwide, 39 percent of those released from state prisons are back in prison within three years, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
People who’ve been in prison for a long time come out to “a whole new world,” said Sean Ellis, cofounder of the Exoneree Network at the New England Innocence Project. Ellis was freed in 2015 after serving nearly 22 years in prison when his murder conviction was overturned because of police misconduct. And the prison mindset was hard to shake.
“You have to ask for a roll of toilet paper,” he said. “You spend decades having to ask for things and not necessarily be able to take control of your own being. . . . That adversely affects you.”
William Allen served 28 years on first-degree murder charges for participating in a robbery in Brockton in which a man was killed by someone else. Following a campaign to have his life sentence commuted following a change in the law, he was released from prison in 2022.
But at first, he said, “I was lost.”
He managed to get a minimum wage job at a car dealership in Braintree owned by his lawyer’s brother’s family. But he ended up homeless a little over a year later after his father died, and struggled to sign up for subsidized housing and food assistance.
The reentry class he took in prison was “garbage,” he said. Several men he served time with ended up living in their cars or in the woods. Another resorted to selling drugs.
“I see why people keep coming back,” said Allen, 51, “because they make it so hard for guys to navigate through life.”
The fight to have Allen’s sentence commuted led to the formation of Second Chance Justice at the Massachusetts Communities Action Network to reform the state’s reentry system.
Massachusetts prides itself as a progressive state committed to equity and social justice, said William Dickerson, MCAN’s co-executive director, but when it comes to incarceration, the state has long had a punitive law and order approach
“Our whole mentality has to change,” he said.
A major shift took place after state legislators passed landmark criminal justice reform measures in 2018, and reentry was the largest area of investment. Along with funding housing and residential services, reforms included delaying probation and parole fees, reducing wait times to seal criminal records, and increasing rehabilitative programming and post-release supervision.
But the state’s annual investment in reentry services peaked in fiscal year 2023 at $32.8 million, according to MassINC, and has been shrinking since, with $26.6 million designated for reentry in the governor’s 2026 budget proposal — even as the number of people being released from jails and prisons rose slightly. Those funds are “super volatile, said Ben Forman, director of the MassINC Policy Center.
“When things get tight, these are the people that are normally overlooked,” he said.
In late January, the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security held a reentry simulation at the State House — following two similar exercises in Worcester in October — to familiarize legislators with the challenges of returning from prison. Participants were assigned the identity of a fictitious recently incarcerated person and given duties to carry out at stations around the room such as securing an ID, visiting a probation officer, or getting a urinalysis, all while using public transportation in a limited amount of time.
“We really have a very frustrating — and I would argue, broken — system,” Senator Jamie Eldridge said beforehand.
In 2022, the state increased its one-on-one support for those leaving prison, including hiring ex-offenders or their family members to become credible messengers to help residents a few months before their release. There are currently five credible messengers working with 25 to 45 people apiece to assist with everything from negotiating difficult family relationships to coordinating appointments once they’re released.
Ultimately, though, outside help can only go so far.
Ruben Pina achieved a lot in prison, including finishing high school and getting certified as an automotive technician, but he credits self-motivation, not the system, for his rehabilitation.
“I knew I had to come home a better man than I went in,” he said.
Pina, 41, who was incarcerated for more than 11 years for assault with intent to murder, was matched with a credible messenger before his release in October. Their interactions were mostly conversations, though, he said, with little concrete guidance about navigating the outside world.
Still, he managed to get on a good path. After moving in with his stepfather, Pina found work as a delivery driver and enrolled in a commercial drivers’ license course. The biggest challenge now, he said, is figuring out how to fit into his children’s lives again.
This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletterhere.