justice Archives - We Are Not Divided

Justine Abigail Yu was sitting alone in the school yard of a Toronto public school this summer when a white woman came up to her and told her she had to leave: this was private property and Yu was trespassing. Yu was confused. This was a space she had been to many times before and seen families set up picnics and bring their kids to play on the playground. So Yu thanked the woman but decided to stay and keep reading. “I’m going to call the police on you if you don’t… I’m a teacher. There are signs here that say, ‘No Trespassing,’” Yu says the woman insisted. “Can you read or maybe you don’t speak English?… Go back to China.”

Yu was stunned. After the woman walked away, Yu decided to turn on her camera and recount what happened before she forgot the details. That’s when Yu caught the woman saying back to her, “All Chinese people should go to jail.”

Yu, a Filipina-Canadian, is one of many racialized people who have been the target of racist attacks; sometimes verbal, sometimes violent and sometimes caught on camera. After she was targeted, Yu wasn’t sure exactly how to report what happened. She asked herself, “Can I even file a police report on that? What does that count under?” While some statistics are kept by law enforcement agencies, the numbers often don’t include the everyday reality for people of color. Racialized people have a long history of being targeted by authorities and may not feel safe reporting to police. Police could be the group causing the harm, there can be language barriers and, even if reported, not all incidents will meet the threshold of a crime.

But increasingly, grassroots organizations across North America are collecting data in that gray zone. That data is now becoming a crucial part of shaping solutions, supporting advocacy, changing laws and strengthening allyship.

On a Zoom webinar with almost 1,000 people watching live, Hollaback! trainer Jorge Arteaga starts introducing himself. He’s Afro-Latino and, unsurprisingly, has a personal story of how he was wrongfully targeted by police as a teenager. After sharing, he takes a deep breath and pauses before delivering an hour-long bystander intervention training on how to stop police-sponsored violence and anti-Black harassment.

“It’s a little nerve wracking for me,” says Arteaga, who is also the director of operations at Hollaback! “But what I’m thinking in my mind is … what story can I share so that, you know, this whole experience kind of resonates with people so that when they walk out of the training, they go out on the street and they’re ready to use one of the five Ds.”

Arteaga shares how bystanders can intervene if they see someone being targeted — a technique known as the “5Ds”: directly addressing the attacker, offering a distraction, delaying and offering support, delegating by getting help from people around you or documenting the incident.

Their bystander training has evolved over time and has been influenced by stories from the community and data. In 2014, Hollaback! teamed up with researchers at Cornell University to launch a large-scale research survey on street harassment. It spanned 42 cities in 22 countries and had over 16,600 respondents, making it the largest analysis of street harassment at the time.

“One of the common denominators they found in the stories was that people wished someone was there to help them when they were experiencing harassment, or that somebody would have jumped in to do something,” says Arteaga. “So based on that Hollaback! was like, okay, bystander intervention, that’s the path that we need to be exploring.”

Today, Hollaback! continues to collect stories of people who have experienced harassment. They monitor the news and adapt the bystander training in collaboration with different communities. They’ve since adapted trainings to address harassment towards Asian-Americans and the LGBTQ community, and are developing one to address state-sponsored violence towards immigrant communities. Arteaga describes their model as a “perpetual front to harassment.”

Between April and June, 2020, in response to Covid-19 and #BlackLivesMatter, Hollaback! trained over 12,000 people on what to do if they see anti-Asian racism, and over 4,000 people on police violence and anti-Black racism. Ninety-nine percent of respondents surveyed come out of the training saying they feel equipped to do at least one thing to help if they witness a racist incident.

Yu wanted accountability and also felt like she had a responsibility to her BIPOC community to share her experience, so she posted her story and video on social media. Incidents like the one she experienced happen frequently, says Yu. “Black, Indigenous, people of color are constantly called into question for doing anything — for even just belonging here on this land.”

Her post got over 1,400 shares and likes. She was able to identify the woman (but is not publicly sharing) and people suggested she report her experience to different community organizations that track racism including the Canadian Anti-racism Network, Act2endRacism, Iamnotavirus.net and Fight Covid Racism.

With this kind of data, organizations like these are able to develop specific resources, launch targeted education campaigns, research geographic trends and advocate for legislative changes.

“Black, Indigenous, people of color are constantly called into question for doing anything; for even just belonging here on this land.”

“These kind of data definitely help us talk to our leaders about how these instances are continuing to happen and it needs to be addressed,” says James Woo, who oversees communications at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta. Advancing Justice is made up of five organizations across the U.S., advocating for the civil and human rights of Asian Americans.

Advancing Justice’s Stand Against Hatred website has been tracking hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islanders in the United States since 2017. It invites people to share their experiences and provides reporting forms in a variety of languages including Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. The goal, Woo says, is to provide a “much better picture” of reality.

FBI data is supposed to be the most comprehensive but it doesn’t really capture the experiences of racialized people’s daily lives, says Woo. Barriers to reporting include language, mistrust and fear of authorities, and the varying reporting procedures for hate crimes in each state.

“There are a lot of policies and rules that are really hurtful to Asian-Americans or immigrants in general,” says Woo. The state of Georgia, for example, only just signed a hate crimes bill into law this June. Wyoming, Arkansas, and South Carolina still do not have any specific laws that cover crimes motivated by a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability. And, despite having laws, more than a dozen states do not require any data collection on hate crimes.

Woo says that Advancing Justice wanted to make sure that Asian American and Pacific Islander voices were included as the bill in Georgia was developed, so they shared their data with legislatures. The data has to go beyond just being collected, says Woo. “We are trying to actively utilize the data to make actual policy changes.”

For Justine Yu, no one was around to step in or be a witness. And while she hates to admit she was scared, she thinks that having a witness or someone around could have eased her tension. “I felt really, I don’t know, just nervous about the fact that, if she does call the police, what does happen?” she said. “I started, at some point in those moments, questioning whether or not I was within my rights to be there.”

But when Yu returned to the park with her partner a few days later, she found that the neighborhood had put up signs of support. “Ms. Yu, feel free to sit anywhere you please. Racism is not welcome here!” read one sign.

“Those signs almost felt like some sort of protection,” said Yu. “If I ever did have to encounter this woman, hopefully there would be people around who would mobilize or would feel compelled to say something and to do something in that moment should anything else happen.”

This story was originally published by The Marshall Project, a We Are Not Divided collaborator.

Despite their names, state “departments of correction” in the United States aren’t known for correcting much. More than seven of every 10 prisoners, according to some studies, are arrested again less than four years after they are released. And while recent years have seen the beginning of a national decline in the number of male prisoners, the situation has not improved much for women, who remain incarcerated at stubbornly high levels.

Connecticut is trying to push back by focusing on one group that is especially likely to return to prison: young women, ages 18 to 25.

It began in the summer of 2015, when Scott Semple, who runs the Connecticut state prison system, spent a week visiting prisons in Germany. Two American nonprofit organizations have been running such trips in recent years, and they have helped to inspire a handful of prison reform experiments in both red and blue states. The goal is to promote rehabilitation by mimicking the European emphasis on personal dignity. For example, Pennsylvania is teaching corrections officers to think like therapists, while North Dakota has been giving prisoners keys so they can lock their own doors.

Correctional Officer Hastings shoots hoops with a few of the residents at York Correctional Institution. Credit: Karsten Moran for The Marshall Project

Semple was especially struck by a German prison for young adults, in which men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 were housed in a verdant compound that resembled a liberal arts college. They were given intensive therapy and training in trades like welding and farming.

Neuroscience studies have shown that our brains keep developing well into our third decade, meaning people in their early twenties can still exhibit the impulsiveness and poor decision-making we associate with teenagers — ask any parent or insurance company about this — but are also especially receptive to help. With this in mind, Washington State has raised to 25 the age of considering an offender a juvenile for some crimes, while Chicago and San Francisco have created specialized young adult courts.

Since his trip to Germany, Semple has put Connecticut at the forefront of efforts to bring such ideas into prisons. Last year, the state started a program for young men called TRUE, at the Cheshire Correctional Institution. Officials from South Carolina and Massachusetts have visited and started young adult programs of their own.

The newest program, called Women Overcoming Recidivism Through Hard Work, or WORTH for short, began in June at the York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in eastern Connecticut. There are currently 14 women who live with 10 older mentors, who are also serving time. Together, they are given wide latitude to develop the program themselves. The days are packed for the younger women with counseling, classes and addiction help, giving them a version of parenting they may have lacked.

Officers are trained to talk to the women about their traumas and vulnerabilities. There is an emphasis on planning for a crime-free life after release: everyone has a job inside, and they apply for a new one every two weeks, meaning they get frequent opportunities to interview and write resumes.

The Vera Institute of Justice, which has been helping prisons set up programs like these, pushes the administrators to ask the prisoners what kinds of assistance they need. The organization creates surveys for the staff and prisoners, and then holds meetings to unpack the results and design classes and routines. Even giving the prisoners a tiny bit of control can influence the way they think about themselves. When they were setting up WORTH, “there was a heated debate about how they’d do laundry,” says Alex Frank, a project director at Vera. “Does everyone do their own? Do we assign two people? It was very much self-governance.” Inspirational quotes adorn walls covered in chalkboard paint, paper flowers sit atop meal tables, and in the big outside yard, the women often play basketball with the officers, which is rare in other prisons.

Vanessa Alvarado presents information about alcohol during a Tier II Addiction Services Group meeting on Friday afternoon. Credit: Karsten Moran for The Marshall Project

“I’m the president of the health and wellness committee here,” Lauren Karpisz, 24, says. “We’re starting to have exercise classes a few times a week and will post healthy recipes using food items from the commissary.” She wants to organize a prison version of the cooking competition show Chopped.

Karpisz is serving three years for her role in an assault on a 53-year-old man during a home invasion and attempted robbery in Waterbury. “I’m a drug addict,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I was on drugs, and seeking more drugs, and somebody was hurt.” In the WORTH program she began to explore how she’d gotten there. She now explained that she had been prescribed medication for chronic pain from a young age, and had drifted toward heroin.

It wasn’t an excuse, but an explanation that could serve as the basis for change. All of the young women here are encouraged to articulate how circumstances and their own decisions combined to produce their crimes. They are given guidance on how to handle their emotions without reacting impulsively.

“We don’t have to hide behind our attitudes here,” says Jazmine Ortiz, 20, who is in prison for a probation violation stemming from more serious crimes committed as a juvenile. “We have the opportunity to open up to the mentors. They know what to look for when we seem shy or isolated.” When there is a disagreement, the women sit in a circle and “work through it like a family would.”

“We don’t have to hide behind our attitudes here. We have the opportunity to open up to the mentors.”

This hasn’t necessarily been comfortable for the officers, many of whom are used to an environment in which rules are ironclad and nobody is encouraged to share feelings or life histories. But a few have taken to their new role as quasi-therapists and social workers. When Lt. Russell Hanes learned that one young woman would get nervous when men were behind her — owing to earlier abuse in a relationship — he encouraged other officers to tell her when they were approaching. “Staff had to give inmates a chance, but inmates had to give staff a chance, too,” Jeffrey Zegarzewski, a deputy warden, says.

Plenty of staff members and prisoners think the program is too permissive and unlikely to change the behavior of the young women. The corresponding program for young men has been in place for a year. It is credited for a reported drop in prison violence, but not enough people have been released from any of these programs to indicate whether they will reduce recidivism. One study found that less than half of Germans released from prison are convicted again within three years, though not for crimes serious enough to bring them back to prison. In the same time frame, more than two-thirds of Americans are arrested again. But scholars caution against direct comparisons, because the countries differ radically not only in prison conditions but also in sentencing practices and definitions of what constitutes crime.

These new programs are expensive, too. At its current capacity, WORTH will involve roughly six officers overseeing 60 women, while in other parts of the prison two officers may oversee 90. The department originally wanted to convert an entire prison for young male adults, but couldn’t afford it. Connecticut officials have not issued a comparison of the cost per resident between the new and old approaches.

Lieutenant Russell Hanes, left, and counselor Colleen McClay, in bright red at center, chat with residents. Credit: Karsten Moran for The Marshall Project

What’s most striking about this program is hearing prison officials talk about a newfound sense of purpose. They no longer reduce success to statistics about arrests or disciplinary infractions. They tell stories of individuals gaining control of their lives and reconnecting with estranged family members.

And they use the word “dignity” a lot, much like their counterparts in Europe. They take pride in the idea that they are truly a department of correction.

“Sometimes when I’m having a bad day, I hop in the car and visit one of these units,” Semple said. “Can you measure that? No, but you can feel it.”

This story was contributed by our partners at Next City.

Marilynn Winn, who was born and raised in Atlanta, got to know the Atlanta City Detention Center at an early age. She was incarcerated at the facility when it was still a small jail. As she spent ensuing years in and out of prison, the jail grew in both size and population.

“I went in and out of the system for a little over 40 years of my life,” she says. She came to understand how the jail — which houses people detained for matters like traffic violations, failures to pay a ticket, disorderly conduct, sex work and shoplifting — could “lead to a life sentence.” And so she set out to close it.

Winn is the co-founder and executive director of Women on the Rise, a grassroots organization led by formerly incarcerated women of color that has worked six years to shutter the jail. A major victory arrived in 2019, when Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms sponsored legislation and signed into law a bill to form the Task Force to Reimagine the Atlanta City Detention Center. The goal of the task force, which Winn joined as co-chair, was to provide recommendations to transform the jail into a Center for Equity alongside policy proposals to decrease criminalization and increase public safety.

Winn didn’t join a task force in which everyone was on the same page. Alongside community organizers there were government officials that included Atlanta’s chief judge, the chief of police and chief of Atlanta’s Department of Corrections, Patrick Labat.

Labat oversaw the Atlanta City Detention Center. “I am a firm believer that Atlanta, a city this size, needs a place for detention,” he tells Next City.

“Chief Labat and I did not see eye to eye, because I kept saying I want to close your jail and he kept saying you’re not going to close my jail,” Winn recalls. “He and I went back and forth a lot.”

Despite opposing viewpoints, Winn and Labat stayed on as members of the task force during a one-year collaborative reimagining and engagement meant to transform a symbolic piece of city infrastructure. Winn is still an abolitionist organizer and Labat remains in law enforcement. But over the course of the year, they worked together and with broader communities — including those formerly incarcerated at the jail, people who work at the jail and survivors of violence — to reimagine the future of the detention center. The results are four different proposals to transform the jail into a holistic community hub.

atlanta center for equity — Redesigning the jail would mean re-imagining a hulking, 471,000-square-foot carceral facility. Courtesy of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces

To those who believe it’s impossible to close a city jail, “I’m a person that does not believe in the impossible,” Winn states. But she knew from the get-go that engagement around it would be challenging.

Winn led the launch of the campaign to close Atlanta’s jail two years ago. The ambitious proposal was bolstered by years of advocacy that pushed Mayor Bottoms’ administration to adopt new policies and programs to decriminalize low-level offenses, expand a pre-arrest diversion initiative, eliminate municipal cash bail and end a long-term contract with ICE. Winn calls this work “starving the beast,” meaning it all reduced the population of the jail.

The campaign met with Mayor Bottoms last spring to discuss what they’d like to happen with the jail and demand a community-led design process. Later that year the mayor launched the task force. Women on the Rise and the Racial Justice Action Center hired Oakland-based firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) to lead designing of the architectural structure of the detention center.

The design process got off to a tense start. Hundreds of people alongside the full task force attended the first city-wide meeting about the project, where community activists expressed exhaustion, law enforcement stated their opposition and correctional officers feared losing their jobs.

Crushed by negative news?

“The campaign had been going on for six years and organizers were already at odds with the police chief,” remembers Shelley Davis Roberts, architectural associate with DJDS. “The community really didn’t believe the city had any intention of closing the jail.”

It would be a monumental task for the firm, which specializes in design to end mass incarceration: They would have to create space for productive dialogue, encourage buy-in from the community, then harness that energy to re-imagine a hulking, 471,000-square-foot carceral facility.

“We went in wanting to shift the thinking around this, change the energy and gain the trust of the community by really demonstrating, through our process, that we care what the community thinks and we’re looking to them as the experts,” explains Davis Roberts.

The community had plenty of insight, as well as experience navigating criminal justice conversations between community organizers and law enforcement.

Community organizers advocating for closure of the Atlanta jail had already spearheaded a design team advocating for what would become the Atlanta/Fulton County Pre-Arrest Diversion Initiative. “Even though it seems painful to bring people from so many perspectives together, it’s like the only thing that gets us to the final agreement,” says Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center, an organization engaged in both processes. “If you don’t have the head of the Department of Corrections and police alongside the homeless person who has just been arrested, or the trans woman who has cycled in and out of that jail, you’re not gonna get to where you need to go.”

That process also emphasized alternatives to the policing and incarceration cycle, particularly for people experiencing homelessness, mental illness and extreme poverty. The organizers presented data-driven evaluations from other cities with diversion programs that reduced recidivism and invited law enforcement officials from those cities to talk with Atlanta officials. “It was peer to peer,” according to Che Johnson-Long, a co-coordinator of the pre-arrest diversion design team who also facilitated engagement for the ACDC design process. “We were showing what worked to service providers, law enforcement and community members.”

That design team served as the model for the Reimagining ACDC process, only this time city leadership was more involved and partnered with community organizations and DJDS to facilitate community engagement and use the feedback to design alternatives for the jail.

From the get-go DJDS got creative on engagement. For the first citywide meeting the firm distributed its “Peace and Justice Cards” in which the participants are asked to pick a card that makes them feel peaceful. “Just asking that question causes a shift,” explains Davis Roberts. “We’re engaging people visually with images, we’re giving them a choice.”

The next 12 months included small focus groups as well as larger community gatherings that engaged a total of around 600 people. Groups included formerly incarcerated people, immigrant communities, homeless communities, survivors of violence, harm reduction experts, justice experts, homelessness experts, mental health experts, neighborhood planning units, youth, the LGBTQ community and business owners surrounding the jail.

Courtesy of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces

“For abolitionists and people on the ground who have been fighting, we’ve all been focused for a long time on what is wrong with the system. It was awesome to dream and envision something different than what Atlanta has ever seen.”

With each group, the vision for the Equity Center richened. People receiving victims’ services, for example, spoke about traveling long distances across the city to access various benefits. It was suggested the Center for Equity could serve as a “one-stop-shop” for victim services. Engaging surrounding businesses helped participants re-imagine not only the jail, but the entire district as a potential engine for new economic opportunities.

Not everyone was engaged, Johnson-Long admits. “The workers inside the jail did not receive good communication about how the jail was closing,” she notes. “These employees are mostly Black and mostly live in South Atlanta, and we wanted to make sure they also got a say in how the building got redesigned. Unfortunately we didn’t get to do that and it caused a lot of tension.” Johnson-Long says there should have been better frameworks to engage their concerns, like loss of jobs and pensions, and ways to envision new job paths within the Center for Equity.

Atlanta Jail — The Atlanta City Detention Center as it stands today in the city. Credit: Google Data SIO

At larger community meetings, which were open to the public, DJDS used games, like “Seat at the Table,” which presented participants with a 3D model of the city and menu cards, which they used to devise a menu of uses for the buildings.

The “Space Planning and Finance” game was designed to give participants a basic understanding of how spaces in a building are planned and how a project like this would be paid for. “A lot of time there’s a disconnect between what people want to have happen and how you actually fund it,” explains Davis Roberts. “But there’s creative ways to program a building and combine funding sources … it sounds complex, but once you get people playing it can be relatable and fun.”

“For abolitionists and people on the ground who have been fighting, we’ve all been focused for a long time on what is wrong with the system,” says Bervera. “Sometimes our visioning muscles are a bit weaker. It was awesome to dream — even to dream inside the realities of money — and envision something different than what Atlanta has ever seen.”

Johnson-Long found the design games presented by DJDS could take the focus off political tension and instead allow activists, politicians and law enforcement alike to focus on design-based solutions. “We had the chief advisor to the mayor, police chief [Ericka] Shields, district attorney Paul Howard playing these design games and they’re laughing and sitting with community members,” she recalls. “There’s a life that comes to people when you take them out of their heads and have them create an alternative.”

Courtesy of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces

“We have an obligation as law enforcement not just to sit at the table, but to have meaningful conversations about putting our community first.”

Labat — recently elected as Fulton County Sheriff — stresses the process didn’t push him to radically change his mind about the criminal justice system. “I’m law enforcement through and through,” he states. Still, he says, “the community broke through on understanding how we were going to communicate, that’s the biggest takeaway from me.” He will take the lessons into his new role. “We have a new responsibility, given all the civil unrest and the conversations communities want to have,” he says. “We have an obligation as law enforcement not just to sit at the table, but to have meaningful conversations about putting our community first.”

As Labat takes on his new role, Winn will continue her own as an abolitionist: “I’ll be back and forth at it again [with Labat] as he just won the election to be sheriff of Fulton County Jail, which is overcrowded and some of it needs to be closed up.”

Other divisions remain in place. Bervera points out the mayor’s administration has since cut off community dialogue in regards to the four proposals released by DJDS. “The task force has been dissolved, the planning team has been dissolved, the mayor’s office is not forthcoming,” she notes. “It’s clear that they have eliminated any real community power in this phase.”

“Community and government partnerships mean shared power — you need structures and systems, not just collecting input from the community and creating a glossy report,” Bervera continues. She believes the engagement around the task force — a process she calls “exhilarating, frustrating, inspiring and exhausting” — was a good first step.

Until the city closes the facility and makes a decision around the ACDC proposals, “community organizers and leaders will keep up the fight to end criminalization in their communities and transform the jail into a center for wellness, equity and freedom,” Bervera states. “We believe we have not won the campaign,” Winn says, “unless we put something in its place.”

It was weeks until my release, and I couldn’t believe how fast time was flying by. I had spent close to 13 years in prison, and I was actually about to go home. It just didn’t feel real. I had so many plans and aspirations. I was convinced that I was going to succeed. But for this success to mean what I thought it should, I was clear about one thing: I was going to redefine myself, independent from my past.

You see, once you’ve been to prison, society has a way of deciding how you’ll be perceived. But I wasn’t just worried about discrimination; I was worried about being undervalued. I didn’t want to brand myself as a “formerly incarcerated person.” No offense intended to those who do, but I wanted people to value me for my talent, not use my incarceration as an entry point.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that in redefining myself so adamantly apart from my past, I would cut myself off from a portion of my life that played a significant role in the person who I have become. It would leave a significant void. Sure, I would encounter discrimination by connecting with my past, but I also stumbled upon a world of empathy, understanding, support and amazement.

I got my first hint of this the day after my release when I stopped by a Capital One bank branch to open a checking account. I went into the bank with all of the necessary documentation, including a temporary learner’s permit from the DMV I had gotten an hour earlier, and my New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision “Released” ID card.

Uncertain of the reaction I’d get as I handed over the ID to the banker, I said, “I know this might be strange, but…” Before I could get any further she responded, “It’s not strange at all. My brother is upstate right now.” Upstate meaning one of the prisons in upstate New York. “I’m hoping he’ll be like you and do something different when he comes back this time.” Because of that connection, she went above and beyond to be helpful to me that day.

Crushed by negative news?

Sometimes we forget about the sheer number of Americans whose lives have been touched by mass incarceration. Casual interactions like this point to a sobering fact: In the U.S., incarceration is no longer strange, especially in Black and brown communities. Some 44 percent of Black women and 32 percent of Black men have a family member who has been in prison, and that doesn’t even include friends, neighbors and acquaintances.

But knowing this, and even having had experiences like the one at the bank, did not convince me that I needed to rethink my mission to break with my past. Within a month of being home, I took an exam I had studied for while I was in prison to become a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist. I thought this “higher level” certification would make me stand out, even though the truth is that strength coaching was a craft that I had learned and refined while in prison. But I was on a mission. So I went to every gym I could find, I mentored, I worked, and after less than a year, I found my way into one of the top strength gyms in New York City, JDI Barbell.

I developed close relationships with members and lifters, but I didn’t tell them about my past. In fact the owner of JDI Barbell asked me not to. I had no issue with it, and obviously neither did he — he had hired me, after all — but he thought that members didn’t necessarily need to know. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to be a good formerly incarcerated coach, remember. I just wanted to be a good coach.

Then, I got an Instagram notification. A member had messaged me. I clicked the message open and my heart skipped a beat. She had sent me a link to the first article I wrote for Reasons to be Cheerful, an article about getting my college degree while serving my time in prison.

“I thought this was you,” she had written. I wrote back and confirmed that it was me without hesitation — I wasn’t living a lie — but still, my stomach was knotty while I awaited her response. Finally, I got the alert: a new message. “I think this is amazing!!” she wrote.

I began to wonder if I was so preoccupied with not letting my incarceration define me professionally that I was letting it control me personally.

Despite trying to redefine myself in a professional space, my past wasn’t a secret — I was open about it whenever it came up, clear about my mistakes, my role, who I was and who I am. Yet it was clear that I was living a sort of paradox, and I began to wonder if I was so preoccupied with not letting my incarceration define me professionally that I was letting it control me personally. My member’s response made me rethink my approach to talking about my past. It made me think that I should embrace my story more — not the story of my crime, but the story of my journey.

By doing so, I found warm receptions in unexpected places. Along with my work as a strength coach, I entered another professional setting. I was hired by the directors of an education company called Velocity Career Start who sought me out specifically for my experience in prison — not to flaunt it, but because the directors believed deeply that my experience made me the right fit for this program. While inside, I had studied education, tutored my peers and earned a bachelor’s degree through the Bard Prison Initiative. My experience fit the bill uniquely. I didn’t need to sing and dance my way around my past.

While I share these stories of positivity, I don’t want you to think it was all peachy. My past has surely brought discrimination, the type that comes as a package deal with a felony. When I went looking for my first apartment, I made the mistake of telling the management company why I didn’t have two years of tax returns to show. Do you think I got a call back? Let’s just say I never made that mistake again.

Another defining moment for me is when a woman I was seeing — one who was deeply embedded in the social justice space — didn’t want to see me anymore after finding out about my past. As connected to the idea of humanity as I thought she was, she never wanted to know what happened, never cared to ask me a thing. Her mind was made up at the thought of a crime I had committed nearly 15 years ago. Experiences like these almost led me down another road. They made me fearful of sharing my experiences because I could still be punished for things I could not change.

But it became clear to me that I had to overcome this fear. A significant enough portion of my life occurred in prison that omitting it complicated my responses to even the most innocent questions: Where did you go to college? Where did you start lifting weights? Do you remember where you were when this song came out? The answer to all of these seemingly innocent questions is the same: “I was in prison.” There was no way I would be satisfied with a pure omission of some of my proudest moments merely because they happened in an unconventional setting.

So my dissatisfaction led me toward what I consider a middle way. When omitting my past feels disingenuous, I don’t do it. I share my story, and I believe deeply that the people I lose in the process simply weren’t meant to be there. I’m content with that.

Ever since I have taken this approach, the acceptance that I have felt has been nearly unimaginable. People are often surprised: I never would have guessed. You don’t fit my idea about what a person who has spent time in prison looks like. Everyone has a cloud over their head in some way. We all have a story. Some of these statements may seem short-sighted. What does a formerly incarcerated person look, feel, or smell like? Not like me? Well, great! Thanks! But all jokes aside, I feel like I have broken stereotypes, opened people’s minds and helped to start conversations that we should be having. Even more, I have established deep and lasting connections with people who share my experience in some way.

For example, I was talking to a person who I recently hired to do some plumbing work. I asked him where he picked up the trade and it turned into a conversation about him being a knucklehead and spending some time in prison. “I did some time myself,” I told him. It was an instant connection. Now he is my go-to guy for construction. If either of us had been scared to have that conversation, that never would have happened.

But not every conversation is that easy, and it doesn’t mean I am an open book. I constantly make choices. Recently, I was talking to a group of members and friends at JDI Barbell. We started talking about where we were the moment we realized Trump would win the 2016 election. I chose not to contribute. It was an organic omission, and no one thought it was odd, but I made the choice. If I’d spoken up, it would have turned a session of jokes into a moment of surprise and uncertainty. I wasn’t in the mood, so I let that one go. But I’ll tell you guys where I was: in the basement of my cellblock at Eastern Correctional Facility watching the TV, just as shocked as each of you were.

We all have choices. I have found a way to be content with mine.