"You Just Got Out of Prison. Now What?"

"Hammock was sent away in 1994, at a time when stiff sentencing reforms around the country were piling more people into prison for longer amounts of time. These included California’s ‘‘three-strikes law,’’ which took effect just months before Hammock was arrested. The law imposed life sentences for almost any crime if the offender had two previous ‘‘serious’’ or ‘‘violent’’ convictions. (The definitions of ‘‘serious’’ and ‘‘violent’’ in California’s penal code are broad; attempting to steal a bicycle from someone’s garage is ‘‘serious.’’) Similar laws proliferated in other states and in the 1994 federal crime bill, becoming signatures of that decade’s tough-on-crime policies and helping to catapult the country into the modern era of mass incarceration. But as the criminologist Jeremy Travis, then head of the Justice Department’s research agency, later pointed out, America had failed to recognize the ‘‘iron law of imprisonment’’: Each of the 2.4 million people we’ve locked up, if he or she doesn’t die in prison, will one day come out...

Many spill out of prison in no condition to take advantage of the helpful bureaucracies the re-entry movement has been busily putting in place... Unlike typical parolees, third-strikers are often notified of their release just before it happens, sometimes only a day in advance. (It can take months for a judge to rule after papers are filed.) They’re usually sent out the door with $200, a not-insubstantial share of which they often pay back to the prison for a lift to the nearest Greyhound station: An inmate might be released from a prison outside Sacramento and expected to find his way to a parole officer in San Diego, 500 miles away, within 48 hours. Stanford’s Three Strikes Project was setting up transitional housing for its clients, but initially, a lot of the third-strikers weren’t making it there — they were just blowing away in the wind. Then, Carlos and Roby started driving around the state and waiting outside to catch them...

It was a short drive through downtown from Target to their final destination. Everyone seemed drained. Carlos said almost nothing, while Roby crammed a few last bits of acclimating information into the conversation, seemingly as they occurred to him. (Some parking spots downtown cost $192 a month. ‘‘There’s this thing called a Keurig.’’) He turned to Hammock and asked, ‘‘How you feel so far?’’
Hammock didn’t know what to say, so Roby rephrased the question: ‘‘Are you free yet?’’
‘‘I’m getting there,’’ Hammock told him."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/magazine/you-just-got-out-of-prison-now-what.html?smid=tw-share&_r=2

This is a great article, I totally want to hang out with Carlos. There were so many little moments of insight into what the criminal justice system does to people. Like this -
"Lying there, it hit them how unusual this was: They were both still on parole at the time, but here they were, welcomed into this white lawyer’s home in the middle of the night, while his wife and two little children slept upstairs. ‘‘That really changed everything,’’ Carlos remembers. ‘‘It changed our perspective of how people actually viewed us.’’ He and Roby had been locked up so young that they’d never lived as regular, trustworthy adults. This, they told each other before falling asleep, must be what it feels like."