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Life After Life
Why parole in America is just another prison
Publisher: Harper's Magazine
Year Published: 2019
Resource Type: Article
On the ineffectiveness of the US criminal-justice system's parole arm for paroled people who have been sentenced to life in prison.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
Bustamante's story is all too common. It's a growing pattern in the criminal-justice system's parole arm - transitional housing, often set up by private-sector organizations, that is not well suited to the needs of paroled lifers. At the program to which I was assigned after my parole, one of the facilitators told me that my twenty-eight years of sobriety meant nothing because I had been incarcerated during all of that time. My life inside was deemed not real at all. The program focused on the amorphous and indefinable concept of "criminal thinking" as the locus of all problems experienced by parolees. This was pounded to us often, with such inflexible sealotry, that in several of the classes I had to attend there were revolts from the lifers in attendance. All of us had been taking rehabilitation classes for years; many of us had been facilitators ourselves. We knew that our experiences inside had been real and that they mattered.
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