Tammy Ingram

Living Under The Shadow Of A Criminal Record!

Living under the suffocation of Prison.

Statistics show one out of every four people in the United States has a criminal record.

For those of us who don’t have a criminal record, it can be hard to empathize and identify with, much less encourage a returning citizen, but what might seem like a minor detail like robbery or defending one’s person in self-defense and getting into a fight, what could their records contain that would keep them from starting over and becoming a productive member of society not a suicide mission supporting their lives are over?

What is just a theft to us, just a drug conviction, to our returning citizens…

Skipping meals…

A lost job, missing housing payments, losing family, not being able to walk your daughter into her first day of kindergarten, much less volunteering, going on field trips…

Loss of friendships…

Is door after door after door being slammed in their face.

Loss of family…

Loss of worth and value, sense of self…

Loss of respect…

Loss of hope…

Second chances?

Third chance or even fifth?

All they hear is “Once a criminal, always a criminal.”

Suffering under the stigma of being caught and incarcerated, doing time for your crime, and then reentry in society only to have your world rocked and shook so violently beyond repair, crime just to survive and/or homelessness was the only life that would embrace you, leading the way back to State Prison.

That’s your norm that accepts you just as you are, no rehabilitation needed nor dealing with the issues that brought you there to begin with. Just wide open good ole-criminal conduct embracing doors of embrace.

What would life be like to forget the deep lasting effects of being incarcerated?

Mass incarceration is not the answer.

Being locked out, slowly being drowned with minimal air left to inhale is a tsunami of humanity ready to suck the very life out of you, causing a sinkhole rippling effect to those in society still standing.

Prisons have become warehouses of trauma. Saddling people with records only to return leaving us in a vicious cycle of mass incarceration.

Second chances, fifth chance, three strikes.

Crime is an event in a life course, not a static characteristic of one’s being.

What mistakes are under your veil of Shame that you hide from exposure at all cost?

Until next time…