On Reentry

This essay first appeared in California Lawyer Magazine in January 2006

Next month will be 10 years since I left prison and reentered society. In that time I got married to a kind and generous woman, and traveled throughout Europe and Mexico. My op-eds on politics, religion and other cultural events, have appeared in prominent national newspapers. My opinion on criminal justice issues has been sought by CBS NEWS/48-HOURS, CNN, CourtTV, and the O’Reilly Factor.

But even though I’m far away from my past in many ways, I can still vividly recall the fears I had about reintegrating into society. And they make me remember the early lessons I learned about real heroism.

The first test of my freedom came unexpectedly one month out of prison. I was sitting in a café patio with my girlfriend. As we ordered, a man walked into the middle of traffic and posed as if he hanging on a cross. His clothes were tattered and filthy. His hair disheveled. He screamed obscenities at the honking cars. After a few minutes, the man walked over to the café and sat down 20 feet from me. He stared at me and said: “Stupid dirty fuckin’ Mexicans. Smelly burrito-eating motherfuckers. Go back to where you came from.”

I don’t know why he singled me out, but the barrage of insults awakened something primal in me. Within seconds, my fantasies about what I should do to that man turned frantic and bloody.

This wasn’t the first time I had had this response. Not even close. Ever since I was 16, when I stabbed my father in the neck during a particularly vicious beating in which he broke my rib and elbow, I’d always been a violent person. I’d felt helpless after years of my father’s abuse, but in that one moment of retaliation, I learned that I could control situations with superior, calculated violence. I would go on to stab other men.

So with that “vengeance is mine” ethic, it was easy for me to think about picking up my restaurant knife and stabbing the man. I was on the brink of ruining my life, and I realized that I was at the place, the fatal and perilous moment, that every parolee gets to when you have to decide if you stay out or if you go back.

I already had two strikes against me, so if I attacked that man, I would go to prison for the rest of my life.

I was revving emotionally high and felt the urgent need to act.

But I didn’t act. Instead, I talked myself down. I reminded myself that I wanted to be a new man, and that I didn’t ascribe to the violent ethic of payback anymore. I told myself that I would simply ask the manager to escort the vagrant out of the restaurant if he became more aggressive.

I told my girlfriend that it pained me to sit there and do nothing, but that’s what I intended to do.

And there is the rub. I was committing the bravest act of my new free life, but because it was an absence of action, occurring in my interior world, nobody could witness it.

When we are kids, we develop our understanding of heroism by the deeds that people do. We watch cartoon superheroes crush meteors headed for earth, or defeat space armies. As we age, firemen become our heroes because they run into burning buildings to save lives. Heroism is equated with action.

With more than 600,000 men released from prison every year, re-entry into society from prison is a serious national issue. And for parolees, our measure of heroism is different. We are heroic when we don’t act. When we don’t pick up the heroin-filled needle again. When we don’t pick up a gun. Or when I didn’t stab that man who disrespected me with the most vile, racist terms.

We are heroes because we are acting against our every instinct that tells us to do what we have always done—and thus, give up our future. It takes great courage to act against our biography, to act against the defeatist story we have always told ourselves about our lives. That we are losers. That life hasn’t given us the breaks. We are heroes because we have altered our imaginations of what can be.    

In prison, I imagined becoming the type of person who would not surrender to violence. That decision occurred in the landscape of my soul. And so the parolee’s heroism is silent, without pomp and pageantry. That is the beauty of reintegrating into society and completing our parole: Time reveals what couldn’t be known in the beginning.

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