Working in the prison's Reentry Center gives me an active role in people's pre-release self-improvement efforts. It also highlights the severity of my own LWOP sentence—the infamous life without parole.
I'm allowed to help returning citizens prepare résumés, coach them for job interviews, tutor them in computer literacy, do after-hours research on other states' reentry programs, and write proposals that could bring better opportunities to these people who are so eager to return to society as engaged, productive members of society—but no one who has more than one year left on their sentence may benefit from the Department of Offender Rehabilitative Services. The DOC's computer system shows my release date to be 99/99/9999.
People ask how I can do this kind of work with such a heavy sentence hanging over me. "Isn't it hard to watch them leave, knowing you can't?" one friend asked. "How do you deal with the jealousy?" another wanted to know. Still another wanted to know if I secretly resent the clients I see. These are all good, valid questions. My answers probably seem either annoyingly vague or disgustingly pious.
I'm not jealous of others' successes. If someone has expended real effort or dearly yearned for a particular outcome, I enjoy seeing them achieve their desires. Also, it makes me happy to make people happy. Whatever the opposite of schadenfreude might be, that's what I feel.
The people I help seem sincere in their intention to do good after prison. They want to work respectable jobs, stay clean, get an education, and generally live a good life. I tell them all that my greatest hope is to never see them again. In other circumstances, that comment might be considered rude. In this place, it's a testament to my desire that they do well out there.
I don't discuss my sentence with them, but of course they talk. That's what people do. Word got around that the shadow of LWOP hangs over me, and now they have a different perspective. Before this tidbit got around, they thought I was just performing the duties of a job like any other.
In prison, almost no one gets to work a job they actually want. It's all kitchen slavery, factory toil, janitorial drudgery, library tedium—forget about interests, let alone passions. Beyond cultivating the general experience of pride in a job well done (which is tricky under these conditions), few prisoners are fortunate enough to find employment fulfilling. I recognize fully how precious an opportunity my reentry job is. That's why I sought it out.
The first client I helped to complete a Medicaid application told me he was getting out "on Thursday." It blew my mind. The excitement he must've felt, having not years or months but days remaining on his sentence! This was unfathomable to me, and I told him so. He smiled. I smiled back. Sharing in even a fraction of his joy felt nice.
"You don't get paid?" one staff member asked me this week. "If there's no money involved it's not a job, it's a passion."
In a sense, he wasn't wrong. There's purpose in this work. It doesn't just keep me from being press-ganged into food service work, it lets me share inspiration and teach life-changing skills. It's said that if you do what you like, you'll never work a day in your life. Every day I'm reminded how true that adage is.
