THE STANLEY N. KATZ PRIZE

Well, they describe the impacts in a million heartbreaking ways. Some people feel totally forgotten behind bars and then struggle to reestablish human connections when they come home. Some people talk about the trauma of having their children physically pulled away from their embrace after each and every family visit and how that trauma continues to live in them long after their release. Just last night, one man was reflecting on how he feels his absence led to his father’s untimely death because he (the participant) had been the one who visited his dad’s nursing home every day. After his incarceration, the quality of his father’s care declined, he got bedsores, and died quickly from an infection. Another man described the fear he still feels going into stores and restaurants after 30 years behind bars. He went in at age 17, in 1993. He was released in 2023. Despite the college degree he earned, his meaningful employment, and the way he can “pass” as a regular citizen, he’s terrified that his ignorance about how to navigate the banal customs of daily life will reveal his status as a former prisoner.

In his research on the perceptions of stigma among returning citizens, Thomas LeBel uses the phrase, “invisible stripes” to describe how stigma operates. It’s a term that really resonates through a lot of the stories I hear from people who participate in Ritual4Return. Stigma is not a mark you can see on the skin. It’s an internalized, psychological feeling of perpetual other-ness. It’s a sense that no matter what strides you make in life, you are always branded an “ex-con,” always defined by your mistakes and by your incarceration. One man told a story about his first time in a jail processing center, when he was a teenager. He was describing this harsh, abrasive delousing agent that the correctional officers threw onto his skin. He said the scent was unlike anything he had ever smelled, like it could peel the paint off the walls and melt the skin right off his bones. It seared his eyes and made him cry. But as he was being hosed down, he noticed that this chemical on his skin did nothing to get rid of the ink that was still on his fingertips from when he got booked. He couldn’t believe that the ink, the stain, was more powerful than the cleanser. Reflecting on that experience, he said that even now — a middle-aged man with a college degree, a close-knit family, a job he excels in — he still sees that stain on his fingers. That to me really encapsulates the ongoing stigma of incarceration. 

“Gap” is the right word, and that gap is exactly why our rituals invite people who don’t see themselves as having anything to do with mass incarceration. Criminologist Jeremy Travis says the biggest obstacle to supporting people after incarceration is bridging the gap between “us” and “them.” When people hear the stories of people who come home from prison, most have something akin to the realization, There but for the grace of God go I. Meaning, that if any of us were dealt the same hand of cards as those who participate in Ritual4Return, if any of us had been born into the same circumstances, offered the same very limited choices, it could just as easily be us up on stage telling our stories. If the only thing we know about criminal justice comes to us from television and the internet, it’s quite unlikely we’re going to be moved to do anything to effect change in our unjust system of punishment. In fact, media-generated perceptions of justice-impacted people and justice-impacted communities are likely to make us see them as quite different, almost fundamentally different, from ourselves. But when we spend time with people and listen with open minds and open hearts to the actual contexts and circumstances behind people’s choices and their incarceration, that gap closes. We’re much more likely to support people we include as “us” than we are of supporting “them.”

I grew up on stage. I’m a theater maker, and I think of theater making as the most human and humanizing activity we can undertake. It demands our bodies, our minds, our emotions, our spirit, and our imagination. And it asks would-be practitioners to harness the totality of their humanity in the service of telling a story. Behind all the sociological and criminological research and literature, and even the birds-eye view of societies and cultures that anthropology typically takes, are the complex and contradictory stories of real human beings. We are a storytelling species, and a meaning-making species. And so part of my intent is to bring the humanity behind the statistics to the foreground. Story is the best medium we have for that. And theater is an absorbing, three-dimensional storytelling medium. It’s also important to remember that prisons are dehumanizing institutions and that part of the journey from incarceration to freedom is the attempt to rehumanize oneself — to recall and reincorporate aspects of our humanity that the institution tried to kill. And so we use the most human of tools — theater and ritual, storytelling, and meaning-making — to support people in reclaiming the wholeness of their humanity.

There are two reasons stories are important in R4R. The first has to do with the fact that the central dynamic within a rite of passage is death and rebirth. Initiates within a rite of passage are attempting to shed an identity they’ve outgrown. Within the ritual, they must die, symbolically speaking, as a precondition of being born again — born into a new social and spiritual identity. The heart of people’s work in R4R revolves around reflecting on and telling old stories that no longer serve them, and which won’t be useful to the person they want to become. But dying to the old story doesn’t mean pretending it doesn’t exist. It is really dying to the meaning behind that story, usually a meaning that’s been carried for a long time, often unconsciously. 

And that brings me to the second, related, reason we focus on storytelling. One of the first books I read about life after prison was a book by criminologist Shadd Maruna called Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives. I’m proud to say that Shadd now sits on R4R’s board of trustees thanks to our shared understanding of reentry as a rite of passage. In his book, he talks about a phenomenon he calls “re-biographing,” which is a way that people who successfully move beyond their criminal lives are able to reframe their own stories. Rather than buying into the popular narrative, or even their own internalized narrative, that they are defined by the worst thing they ever did, people who can successfully re-biograph tell their stories in ways that give the entirety of their lives meaning and purpose. Our homecoming rituals culminate with participants offering vows that articulate the people they’ve become and aspire to be. These new stories assert, for themselves and to the community, that their capacity to be positive change makers is the culmination of their whole lives — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Rites of passage are as important for the community as they are for the initiates. Just as a rite of passage marks individuals’ transitions to new stages of life, it also affirms, conserves, and elevates the values and traditions of the community. There are a lot of negative misconceptions about communities that are highly impacted by the criminal justice system — that they’re apathetic, that they have low moral character, that they’re violent, etc. In our ritual, we affirm more humane values that are in fact truer reflections of the people: empathy, compassion, accountability, second chances, redemption, forgiveness, healing, etc. We refer to audience members as “witnesses” because this isn’t a traditional theater piece; those who attend are not told to “sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.” They’re invited to sit up, engage, and bear witness to the unfolding experience. And in bearing witness, they are committing to support the individuals making their transitions back home. But they are also seeing in those individuals a reflection of the strength, resilience, and courage of the entire community.

I hope for healing. Our culture is quite sick, obviously. The overall state of humanity, collectively, is one of fragmentation and brokenness. And that fragmentation and brokenness is symptomatic of trauma. Science tells us that trauma is passed intergenerationally, through DNA. So the newborn baby of a traumatized person is already living with the effects of trauma themselves. Just think of how long humans have been brutalizing one another and how long trauma has been getting passed down and compounded, generation to generation. We also know that there’s a very high correlation between trauma and shame. On a deep level, shame makes us feel unworthy of love and belonging. I think a lot of what R4R is about is, as Bob Marley says, “coming in from the cold.” We all feel on some level that we’re out in the cold, and all we all want is to come in to sit by the fire with everyone else. The thing is, as a culture we’ve mostly forgotten how to build communal fires. So everyone is out in the cold. Ritual4Return is the fire. It’s about all of us being able to see the ways we’ve been imprisoned, the ways we’ve all been hurt and hurt others. It’s about seeking forgiveness and offering it, too. And ultimately, it’s a space for recognizing that there is no “us” and “them.” We’re all in this together and we’re all invited to bear witness to one another’s experiences. In that witnessing is healing. I’ve seen it time and again. So my hope is that the warming fire experienced by participants and witnesses in our ritual space radiates out to people’s families and, from there, radiates out to the communities those families belong to. And ultimately, that it can radiate out across the entire culture, helping to heal all the broken places.