Guest post: “When the punishment doesn’t fit the crime”

Mindy Harrison is a former co-worker of mine from my time spent working at Amistad Peer Support and Recovery Center in Portland.

Mindy

Mindy Harrison of Woolwich.

At Amistad, she is the Co-Director of Peer Services, and at her home in Woolwich, she is a wife and mother of three great kids.

Based on the life that she’s lived, she has a unique perspective on the world for many reasons, which includes an interesting and moving story that she asked me to share about her husband and how his past mistakes have affected their family, many years later.

Here’s what she had to say:

“There is research suggesting the part of our brain that regulates impulse and emotion is not fully developed until between twenty-five and twenty-eight years old.

This is the first reason why I have come to question the current way our correction and justice system handles teenagers and young adults when they have committed a crime.

The second reason is based on firsthand experience.

The other day, my husband received a letter in the mail from General Dynamics Company, or Bath Iron Works.

He had applied for several positions within the company in recent months. He finally was called in for an interview and then he waited to hear back. This job would have been great for him, and our family of five. He has worked for his Uncle’s company doing carpentry for almost two years, before that he worked as a roofer and exterior repairman four years.

During the winter and when there is bad weather, carpentry is not necessarily the best occupation to have.  There are some weeks when the hours he has worked are not sufficient to get our family by. The option making the most sense to the blue-collar workers in our community is BIW. Full-time, decent pay, benefits and overtime options.

The letter was to let him know he was unable to work for BIW, because of his criminal background.

I was so sure that he would be hired. How can they hold things you did before the age twenty-two against you for the rest of your life when it wasn’t even some heinous crime?

My husband is now thirty-three. There is more to the story, of course, but we’ve all heard similar I’m sure. That young person with an early diagnosis of behavioral issues, parents who divorced when he was a teenager which impacted his well being and stability dramatically. Bouncing between parent’s homes where the environments were less than family friendly and left to roam the streets with friends.

His father struggled with drug addiction off and on his whole life and drank beer in the evenings like it could have been his second job. He was consistently between jobs, bouncing around the country with his family in tow, from Dallas, to Florida and to Maine (and back a couple of times too). My future husband was left to his own devices and was able to find trouble.

At just eighteen he and a friend stole his friend’s parent’s check book, writing and cashing a few checks to get money for drugs.

Following this was a break-in to his current employer’s business with another friend, stealing money from the safe. This topped off this first round of charges, from which he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

Eighteen years old is quite an impressionable age to be sent off to Windham, to be housed with criminals much more advanced. When he was released to no job, housing or support, it didn’t take very long for him to jump right back in to where he left off.

He and two friends, wrapped up in the drug scene, decided it would be a great idea to rob an acquaintance who happened to be dealing cocaine. He was caught, his friends got away. At twenty-one, it was a seemingly honorable not to throw your friends “under the bus”. Because he refused to do just that, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, at twenty-one years old, for robbing a drug dealer.

Those “friends” didn’t as much as write or visit while he was in prison, and the irony of this story is that one of them now works at BIW, where my husband was just refused a job based on, well, getting caught really.

Of course these were all really, really poor choices.

He was released from prison in 2007, I met him in 2008. Ashamed and worried his choices would sway my feelings for him, I did not know about his experience until we had been together for some time.

We have been together for eight years now, he has worked hard, stayed honest, separated himself from the people he was once surrounded with and changed his life for the better. When he became a father, he wanted nothing more than to do the best by them, always.

This is not a rarity either.

I work in the mental health field, for an agency called Amistad in the Portland area. Every day I see people discouraged because of a scenario just like this. Sometimes it is a job, sometimes an apartment.

If we have judgements running through our head when we drive by the person panhandling in the median, maybe we could stop saying they should get a job and question if they are actually able to.

There are plenty of people out there that cannot find work because of a criminal history, and if my husband couldn’t after so much time has passed, providing great references, imagine what it must be like as that twenty-three year old who did something really foolish at nineteen, did two years in prison and was released to the streets with no direction, prospects, or belief in themself.

My office is located at Amistad’s Peer Support and Recovery Center in Portland, so out of curiosity I took some time to walk around and survey some of the people who come here to grab a lunch or have a safe spot to go.

I spoke with twenty-nine people. Of the twenty-nine, fifteen had no criminal history, three had a criminal history and had no issues finding work, but struggled to find housing, and eleven people could not find work because of a criminal conviction in the past. Some of those eleven have resorted to collecting disability or other support, including panhandling, to get by. Obviously this isn’t hard data, regardless it demonstrates that this is a real issue here in Maine.

How are people who have made poor choices resulting in criminal convictions during their younger years supposed to ever become productive members of society if they are unable to get the chance?

Our correctional system does not offer rehabilitation. Our correctional system offers punishment and educates our children, young women and men, with a world of criminal activities they knew nothing about when they first went in and then dumps them back onto the same streets expecting a different outcome.

We do not offer an alternative or any real support for the populations that need us the most.

The children coming from troubled and broken homes are expected to know right from wrong when it was never taught. The people who become young parents themselves and continue within the same cycle they were raised in are chastised and scolded for their choices, refused medical coverage and food assistance and expected to “pull themselves up by the boot-straps” to reach that elusive American Dream.

Our Eighth Amendment is supposed to protect us from cruel and unusual punishment and punishment in excess of the crime committed, but it is clear that in our justice system the punishments follow those convicted long after their time has been served.”

Chris Shorr

About Chris Shorr

Chris is a sixth generation Portlander who loves all things Maine. He has worked with mentally ill and marginalized adults at a Portland non-profit, on a lobster boat in Casco Bay, at several high-end Portland restaurants, and at a local meat packing plant. He also ran for Portland City Council in 2013, wrote a weekly column in the now defunct Portland Daily Sun, and currently writes a weekly column in The Portland Phoenix.