DOC points to difficulty of reentry from incarceration in Helena event

HELENA — For a little over an hour last week, Carson Woodland, a Realtor, was thrown into a different profession — pawn broker and short-term loan shark.

Woodland and a number of other participants associated with Helena’s Chamber of Commerce and Leadership Montana went through an incarcerated person reentry exercise hosted by Katie Weston, who is the Montana Women’s Prison warden.

The exercise involved playing the part of a person recently released from prison and having to navigate different appointments, such as treatment, probation, buying food, figuring out transportation and checking in for vocational rehabilitation. Participants were asked to navigate four weeks in the shoes of a person recently incarcerated and wait in line to get paperwork filled out.

Woodland ran one of the tables, a pawn shop and short-term loan business. Along with a biography, participants were given random amounts of “bus tickets,” as well as money and things they could pawn. Money was in short supply, so trying to make it stretch far was a priority in the exercise, but it became difficult, especially in the latter stages.

Woodland spent a fair bit of his time during the event trying to get people to pay him back.

He added the exercise opened his eyes and reminded him a bit of the game Clue. But as entertaining as it was, a deeper message also stuck with him.

“Living in privilege, you have absolutely no idea how it is,” Woodland said.

Some participants ended up homeless, others ended up back in jail. Recidivism rates are about one-third, Weston said during the exercise. Formerly incarcerated people are about 10 times more likely to be homeless than someone who did not serve time in a secure facility.

“I like to do these things to try and educate the public about what it is really like for individuals to come out, because I think that we can do so much,” Weston said after the event. “But I need somebody to take a chance and hire them.”

Weston said she had done about 50 of the events during her career, and remarked how often she saw participants trying to cut corners, or break the law. The exercise replicated parts of human nature and helped showcase how difficult some of the decisions and circumstances a person leaving prison can find themselves in.

One of the first steps participants undertook was simply getting approved identification cards, which were necessary for all other steps. Each “week” was 20 minutes, and much of that was spent standing in line and trying to map out the things that absolutely had to be done in order to complete the week’s tasks.

Each stop also involved giving the person running the booth a bus ticket, which were in short supply for some people. Transportation challenges also stood out as an issue, especially in a place like Helena without the benefits of a large-scale mass transit system.

Helena has also seen an increase in homelessness, and Sarah Roope, a Leadership Helena steering committee member who helped organize the event, said it could also help increase some understanding there.

“You understand their struggle and where they’re coming from better,” Roope said. “I think having businesses from around town here is a piece of it, and then we go back and talk to our partners and colleagues about it.”

Weston said there are several misconceptions surrounding people returning from incarceration and returning to the workforce, one of them being that everyone around them knows they have a background, which she said wasn’t true. Additionally, there can be trust issues, she said, such as a business that hired someone with a criminal background in the past and were burned by it.

Few people managed to complete the full exercise and a “prison” was full at the end of the exercise, illustrating another issue the state is spending around $700 million to address. And Weston said she operates under the philosophy every single person is one decision from becoming incarcerated.

“And this illustrates that, and if it’s this easy for individuals who are highly functioning to fail in a simulation, imagine what it’s like in reality,” Weston said.