The Real Reentry Risk Isn't Relapse - It's Isolation

I want you to imagine a woman not too dissimilar from your mother, your sister, your aunt. Let’s call her “Kim”. The lights flutter on, harsh and incandescent, before flooding the hall. She sits up and sees the guard at her cell, demanding that she grab her belongings and follow him. Walking this hall feels no different than it has any other day, same scuffed floors, same fluorescent hum of the lights. On autopilot, and in lockstep, her mind turns inward and she starts to recall being arrested and sitting in intake for what felt like a week. It’s only been a few years, so she still remembers the withdrawals in the medical unit at the county jail before she was transferred here to serve her sentence. They walk, briskly, through the nondescript corridors with peeling, neutral paint and decades-old mechanical fixtures on the walls before arriving at the end of the hallway. Intake. He turns and says, “you’re being released.”

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