Out of step, out of time

I met Belinda for the first time toward the end of her twenty-two-year stretch in prison. Back when she was eighteen she had been convicted of stabbing her pimp. She hadn’t meant to kill him, just hurt him. She’d been on the streets since she was fourteen, when her mother stopped the car and told her to get out, and she had learned to take care of herself. Or at least stay alive.

I saw her again the day she was released. It was raining that morning. She was wearing sweat pants a size too large and a cheap nylon jacket, clothes brought in by a friend the day before. She was lit up, like a girl rushing out to meet her prom date.

A month later, Belinda and I sat in a booth at a chain steakhouse where she ordered the most expensive item on the menu plus three extra sides. The food on the plates in front of her could have feed a family of four. Belinda hardly touched it. She had not looked up from her phone since we sat down. A month ago, she had never texted. A month ago she had never held a smartphone in her hand.  Now she was nonstop-texting with her thumbs. She had gotten the phone three weeks before. She had acquired a boyfriend a week later. She was in the throes of what sociologists call “asynchronicity.”

While Belinda was in prison, her age cohort moved on. Inside, time was frozen. Outside, other young women acquired (and dumped) boyfriends or girlfriends, went to concerts, got (and lost) jobs, maybe went to college. On the outside, other young women moved to new apartments, new towns, new countries, had adventures, changed their look, had career aspirations that worked out or didn’t. On the outside, other young women grew into their thirties, found their place, lost it, reinvented themselves, settled in. They had children. Inside, Belinda had experienced a lot, but none of this. At forty, she was still in many ways a teenager. She was a teenager with a new phone texting a new boyfriend.

When we think about those being released from prison—that’s more than 600,000 men and women a year–we might wonder: Where will they live? Who will employ them? Will their families welcome them back? Will they end up back behind bars? But for those who have been away from the world for decades like Belinda, the questions are more nuanced. They are, in fact, existential: How will they recalibrate? How will they—out of step, out of time, out of place—find their footing, rejoin their cohort, make sense of their asynchronous lives?

In my new book, Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home, I ask these questions (and so many others) as I chronicle the reentry paths of six formerly incarcerated people, men and women, Black, brown and white, as young as thirty, as old as sixty. They allowed me into their complicated lives, alternately joyful and anxious, frenzied and stagnant—and for some, deeply asynchronous.

While Catherine was in prison—the youngest person to be tried as an adult for murder (she was thirteen)—she missed her adolescence, her teens, and her twenties. That may have fueled her marriage inside to a man she never was able to date; her quick connection, once released, to another man; her back-to-back pregnancies; her divorce. There was much catching up to do. She fast-tracked herself.

Trevor and Sterling went inside as teens, emerged as men. Vicki came back to children who had grown up without her. I hope you will want to read about their journeys, not only about the tough challenges and the uphill battles, but also and most especially about the extraordinary resilience that fueled (and continues to fuel) their journeys. I hope it makes you believe in second acts, in second chances.

(fyi: For every copy of Free sold between now and May 27 my publisher, Sourcebooks, will donate a book from their extensive catalog to Chicago Books for Women in Prison, a nonprofit that distributes books to prisons across the country. Purchase from anywhere.