Good Example Of The Offenders Experience Of Post Release Life Essay

People, who have been recently released, often report the fact that they feel being in-between. On the one hand, they are free, while on the other, they still encounter a variety of complicated and sometimes depressive issues related to such challenging dimensions of release as reentry difficulties, inability to meet personal needs and barriers to success.
The release from prison seems to be euphoric event to those, who have never had the experience of being incarcerated. For a new releasee returning home after is a harsh experience of perceiving variety of changes both regarding the way the routine is being organized, and the relationships between members of releasee’s family. Furthermore, being not used to the atmosphere of out-of-prison life, releasees may experience difficulties in relationships with their relatives and friends, as well as challenges in routine decision-making. It may be emotionally hard for parolees, who have spent significant periods of time in prison, to meet their children, who have considerably changed and can even not remember a releasee. Difficulties in routine decision-making, typical for new releasees, stem from the fact that in prison all the decisions related to daily life, are being made by other people. Post-release difficulties in decision-making can be connected even with most insignificant choice-related aspects of daily life, while it is still important to note that post-release period is to great extent connected with making roadmap decisions, aimed at adapting to major change of becoming free after being incarcerated. The impression of strangeness of the new world around is supported by supervision and surveillance, which vast majority of offenders continues to experience after release. Combination of these experiences and freedom-related impressions creates the wide-spread vision of in-between status of new releasees.
Living in society is closely interconnected with the need to meet one’s personal needs, including education, employment and money. Parolees tend to face really serious personal needs, when reentering community due to the fact that incarceration most often prevents people from at once being able to apply their education and vocational skills to specific job and is strongly related to unemployment. Moreover, some of paroles tend to lack money and require financial support to be able to reestablish their lives in community. Many of them experience significant burden, related to the long history of alcohol and drug abuse, and being HIV positive. Lack of education, vocational training, finances, along with sufferings, caused by different types of diseases and addictions may create a vicious circle of challenges, preventing parolees from successfully reentering community.
Last, but not least challenging dimension of after-the-release life dwells on barriers to success, which arise from the fact of the person’s having been incarcerated. The barriers to success, faced by new releasees, may be classified into several major groups, namely the ones, related to civil disabilities and employment. By-turn, most wide-spread civil disabilities relate to the limitations of the right to hold public office and to vote. Different states across the USA have different rules on returning these rights after some period after incarceration. General rule is that civil disabilities are being applied to those offenders, who have been convicted for felony. State-by-state analysis of other barriers to successful reentry revealed barriers, related to getting public assistance and food stamps; applying for public housing, getting driver’s license, adoptions and foster care, as well as students’ loans.
The barriers to employment can be both formal and informal. Emergence of informal barriers is called forth by the fact that employers tend to consider conviction as an indicator of applicant’s untrustworthiness. Legal barriers also constitute the wall between the offender and job opportunities. These bans are applicable in cases, when the work has an apparent connection to the criminal conduct of the offender. For instance, it is lawful for states to forbid employment of convicted child molesters in daycare centers for children, kindergartnes and schools. Some states prevent offenders from serving as barbers, beauticians and nurses, independently on the kind of offence he/she had committed. In some cases even a prior arrest without future conviction can lead to rejection of the candidate for a job. The situation may be escalated by the fact that some offenders may have unrealistic vision of their job perspectives. Combination of these factors often prevents former convicts from revealing their criminal records, if they have a hope that employer may not check the records.
Combination of different social services (e.g., drug\alcohol abuse counseling, job training and job placement) is being viewed as a good multifaceted approach to help former offenders overcome employment-related barriers. Long-term solutions to almost all challengers, being experienced by releasees, include expungement of criminal records and pardon. Both expungement and pardon include removal of a conviction from official records. Nevertheless, the information regarding criminal records can still be accessed thereafter on inquiry, thus, they cannot be considered a universal relief for offenders.