Incarceration is a phenomenon that touches on so many aspects of what it means to be human.

Going into, living through, and returning from prison raises questions and themes that human beings have grappled with since the beginning of civilization: sin and transgression, punishment, exile, freedom, forgiveness, and homecoming to name a few. And yet, despite imprisoning more people than any other country on the planet, few Americans—those impacted directly or those whose tax dollars help fuel it—ever grapple with these things.

That’s partly why Returning Citizens Support Group, a Newark-based provider of re-entry supports and wrap-around services for systems-impacted communities, is deepening its humanistic approach in working with returning citizens. That work will entail the implementation of Ritual4Return, an arts-based dialogic cultural program for citizens who have returned home from prison.

“We see this project as a way to bring people together to think and feel together about our shared humanity and to ask if the criminal punishment system is contributing to the kind of world we all want to live in,” said Edwin ‘Chino’ Ortiz, RCSG co-founder.

It’s also a way for people caught up in the carcereal system to tell their own stories, an opportunity that is often taken from them.

“Instead, many people—police officers, lawyers, judges, news reporters—tell stories about us. Human beings are storytellers, and we hope that by learning how to tell our own stories, and by sharing them with others, we will change perceptions we have about ourselves and our own experiences, and change the limited perceptions others have about us,” Ortiz said.

We see this project as a way to bring people together to think and feel together about our shared humanity and to ask if the criminal punishment system is contributing to the kind of world we all want to live in.

By implementing the new program, RCSG hopes to impact not only the lives of the involved communities, but also the larger society’s understanding of carceal issues.

“For one, we hope that people recognize how wildly inefficient and ineffective our country’s practices of punishment are if what we want are safe and peaceful communities where all people can thrive. We hope there’s a ripple effect from what we do and from the conversation we’re initiating that pushes the people of our state to think deeply, and feel deeply, about incarceration in all its dimensions, and to ask complicated, difficult questions about what it’s for and what it actually does,” Ortiz said.

“But ultimately, we hope to help people close the gap they hold in their minds and hearts between those they think of as “us” and the people they think of as “them.” We can grow stronger as a state and as a society only when we learn to recognize the “the other” in ourselves, and ourselves in the other. We hope our project contributes to that recognition of our shared humanity.”