Imagine meeting a time traveler who ended up 24 years in the future, arriving in 2016. He doesn’t know how to use a cell phone, an electronic gas pump, a debit card. He has never sent an email, never used Google, never ordered a coffee at Starbucks. He feels pretty helpless.
Would you try to teach him how life works in 2016?
Now imagine that the time traveler ended up in the future not because he was experimenting with some HG Wells-style contraption, but because he had spent the last two-plus decades in prison, locked up with few links to the outside world and left to fend in the wild Serengeti, a jungle where physically fighting off other prisoners was part of the culture of survival.
Would you help him learn to live constructively in the present?
“It’s amazing to go through the arduous trek of prison and get out and realize that I’ve just entered the promised land of freedom and there are giants and armies and battles to be fought that most of the people coming out of prison are not prepared for,” said Bryan Kelley, who was paroled in 2014 after serving 22 years of a life sentence for murdering a dealer during a drug deal gone bad.
Kelley, who recently spoke at the AEI Vision Talks in Washington, D.C., is now an executive relations manager at the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, a program that attracts successful entrepreneurs to help inmates who aspire to rebuild their lives after prison. PEP has helped 1,500 former inmates graduate from a nine-month “refining fire” where they learn to build character as well as how to lead their families, father their children, be good employees, and even build prosperous businesses.
Last year, PEP graduates started 200 businesses, the top six of which had revenues of more than a million dollars each.
A byproduct of their street life is that many prisoners “know a lot about business. They just don’t know that they know it,” Kelley said. “They know things about profit margins, they know about supply chains, they know about risk management, they know about marketing. … They have natural talents. They have got hustle and they are not afraid to use it.”
But, he added, PEP is “not trying to make better dope dealers. We are trying to forge better men.”
Life after prison isn’t easy, even with successful programs like PEP, which boasts a recidivism rate for graduates of only 7 percent — compared to the historical recidivism rate for felons of more than 50 percent.
One of the biggest challenges ex-inmates face, Kelley said, is that hardened criminals are shunned by society.
“The jobs available to me are laughable. The jobs I’m barred from are immense. My application gets thrown in the trash because I have checked the box that says I have a felony on my record. Housing is impossible. … Apartment complexes will not lease to me unless they are something really akin to a chemical redistribution zone,” he said.
“There are so many policies out there that encumber us and hold us down. I’ll tell you what, me and my guys that I work with, we feel like everywhere we go you’re looking at us like, ‘We don’t want you here.'”
Such an instinct may be natural, especially after Kelley confirmed that prison life is something akin to how it’s portrayed in the movies. Living in prison is a constant fight, he said, whether over what TV show to watch, how much food to eat, even whether someone can beat someone else in a fight. Race riots and tear gas and lockdowns are all part of the experience.
“If you won’t fight, it’s ugly. You become property to be used, a resource to be used and traded. I have counseled many young men who came to prison, and I told them, ‘Go down to that day room and meet this head on, and you fight like there’s no tomorrow, and if you do, the members of your own race are going to back you and they’re going to make sure that you don’t get beat down too badly. But if you don’t fight, nobody else will either. You’ll be on your own. That is a lonely place to be in prison.”
That may sound like incendiary advice, but Kelley has had a long time to think about how to help hurting people heal. And PEP has helped by showing prisoners that they are not “what we’ve done, but who we could be.”
But the truth is, Kelley said, inmates and ex-prisoners can’t do it alone.
“If a man is going to change in prison, there are precious few handholds and even fewer hands reaching down to help pull him up. I was blessed to find some of those hands,” he said. “There are literally thousands of people that are languishing in prison, broken, don’t know the way out. If they knew the way out, they wouldn’t have been there. They need help.”
