We Can't Just Release Somebody From Prison And Expect Them To Be Functional
But that's exactly what we do -- which often sends the person on a path right back to prison or debilitates them in other ways.

An example is the case of two brothers chronicled in a New York Times piece by Joseph Neff:

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. -- The state of North Carolina paid $750,000 to Henry McCollum in 2015 to compensate him for the 30 years that he, an innocent man, spent on death row.

Seven months later, he was broke. Mr. McCollum, who is intellectually disabled, then began borrowing money at 38 percent interest. He kept his financial plight hidden from friends and supporters from his death row years.

But last fall, he briefly and wearily opened up when he was handed documents showing he owed $130,000 on $65,000 in recent loans.

"Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't be out here," he said.

Mr. McCollum and his half brother, Leon Brown, who is also intellectually disabled, were demonized and convicted in one of the state's most notorious rape and murder cases. Their decades in prison and their disabilities would have made for a difficult return to society under the best circumstances.

What happened to them after their release proved even more problematic. As exonerees, they emerged with big dollar signs on their backs. Most states compensate the wrongfully imprisoned in amounts that can reach millions of dollars, and exonerees can also win settlements from police agencies -- awards that can attract predators.

Mr. McCollum, 54, and Mr. Brown, 50, proved virtually helpless as hundreds of thousands of dollars of state compensation were siphoned off by their supposed protectors: a sister back home; a lawyer from Orlando, Fla.; a self-proclaimed advocate from Atlanta, and her so-called business partner, a college instructor from Brooklyn, according to documents and interviews by The Marshall Project.

By the time a federal judge intervened in the spring of 2017, no trust had been set up for the brothers and money intended for their care had been spent on predatory loans, exorbitant legal fees, multiple cars, women's jewelry and children's toys.

A man named Jeffrey Deskovic, also an exoneree, created a foundation to help the wrongfully convicted. He told Neff that he had advised about 60 other exonerees on managing compensation and the attention from those trying to get a piece of it.

He deemed McCollum and Brown's experience extreme, but said the underlying dynamics are common: "All were hit up for money by family and friends or were targets of scammers."

This story was especially resonant for me because, last week, at the professional non-fiction authors group I'm a part of, three of us with books out recently did a reading.

Cari Lynn went just before me, and read from "Becoming Mrs. Burton," which she co-authored with Susan Burton, a former felon who started halfway houses for other women released from prison.

The subtitle: "From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women"

This is, as the jacket copy on Amazon puts it, "the life story of Susan Burton, whose organization A New Way of Life has transformed the lives of more than one thousand formerly incarcerated women in Los Angeles." She did this through halfway houses she created to provide a landing pad and structure for women just released from prison so they wouldn't go back.

A bit from the book that Cari allowed me to print here:

There's also no logical reason why federal prisons offer halfway houses to those newly released, but state prisons provide nothing. Four thousand newly released women arrive in Los Angeles County every year to nothing. No re-entry programs, no counseling, no services, no assistance. You have no house key, no credit card, no check-book, no driver's license, no Social Security card, no identification of any sort because anything you were carrying when you were arrested has been destroyed by the state. You're just one woman in the crowd of mostly black and brown faces, one number in the recidivism stats that are decidedly not in your favor.

Like vultures, the pimps circle, eyeing you, assessing you. The drug dealers circle. You know them from the old neighborhood, and they call you by name, offering their brand of a welcome home party. You have little incentive to say no.

Ego tells you you're gonna make it by any means necessary. Ego tells you you're a grown woman. But you're scared. How do you calm yourself? How do you connect with something healthy and hopeful when you're surrounded by Skid Row? When you haven't been allowed to make a decision in five, ten, twenty years? When all you want to do is wash prison off you, but you can't, because it's in you. It's seeped into your psyche and into your soul.