In the new book, “Free: Two Years, Six Lives and the Long Journey Home,” Lauren Kessler sets out to answer the question of what happens to the 95% of Americans who eventually are released from prison. “Free” follows six formerly incarcerated individuals whose stories paint a portrait of the institutionalized roadblocks, societal stigmas and often overwhelming psychological challenges that come with reentering their communities.

Lauren Kessler is an award-winning author and journalist whose most recent book, “A Grip of Time: When Prison is Your Life” was based on her experience leading a writers’ group for men serving life-sentences inside a maximum security prison. You can learn more about her work at laurenkessler.com. She will join David Rothenberg’s radio show on April 23 to discuss her newest book. Below is an excerpt from “Free: Two Years, Six Lives and the Long Journey Home.”

“You’re like a ray of sunshine,” the interviewer told her. And she was. Just released, almost giddy with optimism and the promise of a new life, Catherine radiated energy and goodwill. She was focused, articulate, and charming. Her smile was infectious. She was confident but not arrogant, poised but not scripted, warm but entirely professional. Her buoyancy, which might have seemed almost adolescent, was tempered by her composure, a skill born of years navigating a life behind bars. She was thirty years old, but for her this was the start of the life she was determined to live. Her résumé included a two-year college degree and a paralegal certification. She had designed and taught workshops for abused women. She wanted to be a teacher or perhaps a nurse. But first she had to establish herself, find a job that tapped into some of her skills and paid her accordingly so she could establish a work history and save for the future she dreamed of. 

After the questioning and the conversation, after the smiles and the compliments, Catherine told the interviewer about her homicide conviction. The woman would find out anyway. She thought that if she told the interviewer right then, in person, within the context of the interview that had just taken place, that person would see her in context. If instead her record was later uncovered during the background check almost all employers did these days, the interviewer would think she had tried to hide her past. Her crime, a violent crime, a crime with a gun, would stun them. They would, she figured, just toss her resume in the trash. So she told the interviewer that day. “We’ll call you,” the woman said. 

Catherine, that “ray of sunshine,” waited for a call that never came. She went out on another interview. I nailed it, she thought to herself as she left the room. “This is one of the best interviews I’ve ever conducted,” this second potential employer had told her. And as before, Catherine was forthcoming about her past. And as before, there was no callback. After the third interview, she sat in her car and cried. And then she forced herself to go out again. Surely someone would see the person she was now and give her a chance. She kept trying long after she realized that the only kind of job she was going to get was exactly the kind of job she didn’t want: mindless, dead-end, underpaid. 

She took that job anyway, minimum-wage shift work at a fast-food franchise, because she needed to be employed. Employment was not just a condition of parole; it was essential to her independence. And she took that job because they hired her and no one else would. It was, as were the jobs that followed, dead-end “McJobs.” The pay was so low that she could barely afford her rent. She was served with eviction notices for three months in a row and temporarily lived in a shelter. For almost four years she worked fast-food and convenience store gigs, trying to keep her aspirations alive. She had two toddlers now. They were going to have the safe, secure childhood she never had. And she owed it to the people who believed in her, especially the evangelical couple she called Ma and Papa who had embraced her in prison and showed her a nurturing spiritual path. And she owed it to herself. Life in prison works daily to erode self-worth, assuming a person has much to begin with, which many do not—especially women like Catherine with histories of violence and abuse. But the day-in-day-out, year-in-year-out challenges of incarcerated life can also teach stamina, perseverance, and resilience. These were lessons Catherine learned. 

As Catherine—and just about everyone else released from prison—soon discovered, there are “vastly diminished employment opportunities” for those with criminal records. This is according to a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington, DC–based economic think tank. The stigma of having an arrest record hurts an applicant’s job prospects more than virtually any other factor (and those factors include education, race, and gender), according to the National Institute of Justice, the research agency of the Justice Department. Researchers tracking employment of ex-felons in cities throughout the country report uniformly dismal statistics. In a comprehensive report of employment outcomes for released prisoners in Ohio, Illinois, and Texas, researchers found that only forty-five percent of the men had jobs eight months out. Another report from that same Returning Home study included one-year-later data from men released to Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, and Houston. Just half were employed. In a Boston reentry study that included both male and female ex-felons, a scant twenty-five percent of the women were working six months out. The men fared better, with fifty-seven percent finding jobs. A Prison Policy Initiative report, compiled the year before COVID-19 temporarily upended the employment scene, offered these national unemployment rates for those with criminal records: white men, 18.4 percent; white women, 23.2 percent; Black men, 35.2 percent; Black women, 43.6 percent. And in the first-ever estimate of unemployment among five million formerly incarcerated people living in the United States, another Prison Policy Initiative study found an unemployment rate of more than 27 percent. In that year, 2018, the U.S. unemployment rate was 3.9 percent. 

Yet at the same time, the research is clear about the importance of employment to successful reentry. Stable employment can reduce recidivism, or at the very least, it can lengthen the time between release and the commission of another crime. It’s easy to see why. Wages earned through work lessen the chance that the person will be motivated to commit a crime to get money (and the higher the wage, the less the chance). Earning a wage can lead to a better relationship with family, particularly if the just-released ex-offender is living with family or depending on family funds. Earning a wage is also the first step to being able to afford a place to live. Beyond the obvious monetary benefits, employment, even a menial, minimum-wage job, gives order and organization to the day. It sets expectations and demands a level of responsibility, self-monitoring, and self-control. Psychologists who study unemployment and depression agree that having a job to go to every day is closely tied to a person’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem. And the opposite is true. Unemployed adults and those not working as much as they would like are, according to a Gallup health index poll, twice as likely to be depressed as Americans employed full time.