In and Out of California’s Prisons

“I was due to go to a parole board hearing in mid-2022, when a coworker at a California state prison mentioned a recent seminar from the Creating Restorative Opportunities and Programs,” said Lamar Simms of Sacramento. That was then for him.

Today, Simms is a wage-earning service worker in Oakland, Calif., and a recent graduate of CROP’s Ready 4 Life initiative, a yearlong reentry program. It provides supportive housing and equips justice-involved workers with practical training to successfully transition from living behind bars to life outside, where employment with a livable wage is necessary to pay one’s bills.

That is no mean feat for ex-prisoners. According to the Prison Policy Initiative: “Our analysis shows that formerly incarcerated people are unemployed at a rate of over 27% — higher than the total US unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression.”

With California state funding, CROP provides a multi-tiered support system for a successful career as reentry individuals, female and male, leave prison and reintegrate into communities in Oakland and Los Angeles, Calif. The Golden State operates 32 state prisons, two of which hold women, with the remainder for males.

The application process to enroll in Ready 4 Life is robust. “We want to know what applicants have been doing with their time,” according to Jason Bryant, a co-founder of CROP, and a former state prisoner who lives in Roseville. Formerly incarcerated persons help to evaluate the applications for prospective ex-prisoners seeking to enroll in Ready 4 Life.

The evaluators use their experiences in Calif. prisons as a special focus choosing participants. Eric Hudson of the Sacramento area began the Ready 4 Life a few days after release from the state prison system following a 19-year sentence.

“It’s been a transformative time,” said Hudson. “When it comes to the CROP curriculum, it stands alone from the self-help groups that I participated in while imprisoned.”

The Ready 4 Life curriculum features four phases. Phase one focuses on participants’ mindsets.

“It’s a self-help group to redirect mentally and emotionally,” according to Simms. He for example entered state prison at age 18, and in three decades there never drove a car, had an ID card nor been a member of the civilian labor force.

The Ready 4 Life curriculum also provides digital literacy and financial wellness training. Such a practical grounding helps graduates such as Simms get by in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a low supply of affordable rental housing.

In the meantime, a unique “back to school” process is underway in Oakland and Los Angeles classrooms for recently paroled state prisoners enrolled in CROP’s “Ready 4 Life” program. The startup funding for this reentry makes budgetary sense.

Someone had to step up, fiscally speaking. She did.

Democratic Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo (Los Angeles) helped CROP secure $27 million for the Ready 4 Life program from the 2021-22 state General Fund for programming and housing costs, and another $1.5 million to support improvements and renovations.

There are 95,600 California state prisoners. The annual cost to hold them is $12.7 billion.

We are talking real money. Do the math.

“The cost of imprisoning one person in California has increased by more than 90% in the past decade, reaching a record-breaking $132,860 annually, according to state finance documents.”

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