"Ain’t Nobody Waiting on Nobody"
"Ain’t Nobody Waiting on Nobody"
Life in the Free World After Prison
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Last week, Matthew Leonard, 45, told The Hard Times Reviewer about his experience in Alabama prisons. He had been imprisoned for six years on nonviolent drug charges and was released on July 29th. Since his release, he has been focusing on readjusting to home life and searching for a job. This week, he discusses finding his way in the free world.
“Coming out from being incarcerated, to adjust, you’ve got to realize: Ain’t nobody going to be the same, because you ain’t been around that person, and people are going to look at you kind of weird,” says Matt.
He continues, “They say everybody don’t judge you, but people do judge you. The lies and the stuff that the TV shows them will make them look at you like that and stuff. People judge you for real. I’ve seen that through a couple of job interviews, and stuff like that, that I’ve been on. Most people, they don’t even want to be around you, for real for real, because they don’t really trust you. It’s kind of hard adjusting.”
He adds, “Things you need, you’ve got to really depend on yourself to get. If you ain’t got it to get it, you’ve got to just hold on until you get the funds to get it.”
Matt says patience, with oneself and with the world, is crucial to readjusting upon getting out of prison. Hope is often chipped away through the duration of a prison sentence, and few if any programs exist to support prisoners in re-entering society, particularly in Alabama, so focus and patience are crucial to having a chance at success, if only because they’re all you have sometimes, though they’re no guarantee of success even for the strongest willed, most supported. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people: You’ve got to have patience coming out of here,” Matt explains.
Further, Matt expresses a sentiment I’ve heard from many other prisoners preparing to be released and/or former prisoners recently released, probably also partly connected to the lack of funding and programs to support former prisoners: the feeling that, even after having done the time that society was owed for your crime, you have to prove yourself all over again when you get out. You pay your debt, prove that you are receiving a written punishment for a breach of written law, prove yourself to be a prisoner of society for all those years, and when you get out, there is another law, an unwritten one, by which you have to prove yourself as a free person. Spending years of your life in prison isn’t enough to regain trust. Having paid a debt to society through imprisonment makes one less trustworthy, not more, even though most of us aren’t imprisoned for our nonviolent crimes.
“You just can’t tell folks you’re doing right. You’ve got to let them see you do right,” Matt explains, “and then eventually, they’re like, ‘Oh, he’s trying for real.’ It’s like a trust issue with people when you come up out of there.”
He continues, “You’ve just got to stay focused, man, because you’ll lose focus out here because the world changes every day. Every day, it’s something different. That same girl you was in love with, shoot, she might be in love with somebody else. You’ve got to look past that. It’s a lot, man. You’ve got to know how to move on and stay focused. Ain’t nobody waiting on nobody.”
Matt returned to his hometown of Birmingham upon his release, and describes seeing some of the changes in his community. “The killings” in Birmingham, says Matt, “it’s a wreck, man,” referring to the increased murder rate in Birmingham and Jefferson County. “I’m talking about: empty houses, hoarders, stores crowded, the police will pull you over for anything now.”
As Carol Robinson reported in AL.com, “There were 75 homicides in Birmingham from January through June, up 10 slayings compared to the same time in 2023. That’s a more than 15% increase,” surely a sign that Alabama’s heavy policing and high imprisonment strategy is doing a crackerjack job of imposing deterrence.[1] This comes at a time when “The FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report released in June showed a 26.4% decrease in murders nationally, according to Stateline,” Robinson notes.
“Now, don’t get me wrong. There are jobs out there, but you’ve got to stay hunting for them,” says Matt about the difficult process of searching for employment after prison. “You’ve got to stay focused on what you’ve got to do, can’t pay attention to what anybody else got to do, [because] then you can’t take on other folks’ problems, and you’ve got a problem coming out into society, because you’ve got to try to adjust to society because, man, it’s horrible, for real, big boy. I ain’t even going to lie to you,” adding after a pause, “You’ve got some good people out here, especially when they know you’re a good character person, but people don’t too often really care. That’s why, when you find somebody that really shows that they care for you and stuff like that, you’ve got to stick with those people, man. You can’t let those people down no more.”
Asked if he has some good people like that in his life now, “Yes, yes, yes,” Matt answers, “for real. And I ain’t fitting to let them down no more, because it’d not only let them down, but it’d let me down. If I don’t do right, shoot… Man, forget all that, man. I just want to go on and do right.”
He adds after a pause, “There’s one thing I know: It’s better being out here than being incarcerated, man, where it’s crowded at, because you can get away from everybody. In there, you can’t get away from everybody.”
Some of the hardest parts of finding a job, he says, for example, are, “If you ain’t got no vehicle, okay, you’ve got people who’ll take you there your first couple of days out, but they’re going to get tired of it. And if you ain’t got no funds, how are you going to catch you an Uber or something? So, you’ve got to just do your research on your job, and sometimes you’ve got to take a job that you don’t want, to get on your feet, because…. people are talking about, ‘They took the box off it.’ Man, I told the folks [in the job interview] the truth. They say, ‘Since you were honest with us, I’m going to hire you.’ I start working Monday.”
Matt got the news he was hired in the days between our last phone call and the interview for this story. He is excited to start his new job Monday, working in a plastics factory.
“When you’re doing good, people want you to do bad,” he tells me. “That’s why you’ve got to keep striving better, because they’re betting on you. ‘Oh, he’ll be back. Trust me.’ Once you’ve got that AIS [prisoner ID] number, them folks are betting on you. ‘Oh, he’ll be back. He’ll be back.’ That’s why you’ve got to prove them wrong. When you prove them wrong, all the sudden, they don’t like that.”
Matt believes that, “Once a man gets older, you’ve got to make a change with your inner self. And once you make a change with your inner self, [others] will see the change with your outer self.”
Further, Matt describes readjusting from the prisons to life at home in the free world. “Well, you’ve got people that fuss a lot. They walk in at night and then – you know – with being at different [prison] camps and stuff, you be like a shell shock type. You know what I’m saying? For real, people don’t understand that.”
American imprisonment is associated with high levels of PTSD, as Alabama reporter William Thornton writes:
The long-term effects of incarceration on the mental health of inmates has been the subject of some research in recent years. Shawn Cahill, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, published a 2015 study finding that Americans who spend time in prison are nearly twice as likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder than those who don’t…. That’s just for starters. Using data collected from 5,000 black Americans through the National Survey of American Life, Cahill and a group of researchers found that those surveyed who had been incarcerated were more likely to have had car accidents, been beaten by another person, or mugged, or raped. The survey was unable to show the severity of PTSD in those surveyed, and Cahill said it’s unclear whether those who responded had mental health issues before prison. ‘We couldn’t determine what is cause and what’s effect,’ he said. But the findings were hardly surprising.[2]
Symptoms of PTSD “can range from nightmares to flashbacks, to physical and emotional responses triggered by memories. Some who deal with PTSD have trouble sleeping, are easily startled, have outbursts of anger or irritability, feel emotionally numb or the need to be ‘on guard’ for no reason.”
The article also notes that, “The feeling of alienation is common” among those released from prison in our society.
Research also shows that prison employees have “post-traumatic stress disorder on par with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.”[3] (Prisoners and former prisoners have described the experience of prison as similar to that of a war zone in interviews with me.) Furthermore, first, people who suffer from mental health issues to begin with (particularly those who are poor) are more likely to be imprisoned in America than those who don’t. Second, being imprisoned in America is also likely to create mental health issues for those who didn’t have them before prison, PTSD being the most obvious one. And third, our prisons exacerbate and add to the mental health issues of those who already had them before their imprisonment.[4]
“You become, like, jail shell shocked or something” when returning to the free world from prison, Matt explains. “People touch your stuff. You have to catch yourself, because, like, when people touch your stuff in prison, you might have to fight them…. At home, you have to think about certain things,” or, if “you have dudes bump into you” by accident in the free world, “you have to say ‘excuse me,’ because in prison, if you bump into somebody, they’re smacking you upside your head. You really have to adapt. You really have to think for these people out here [in the free world], because there’s a lot of disrespectful stuff going on out here, but [free world people] don’t think it’s disrespectful. It’s where you come from, if you’ve been trained this way, so you’ve got to untrain that [after prison] and realize they don’t mean no harm, or they don’t understand, or they don’t know.”
One aftereffect Matt has not struggled with so far since his release, he says with joy, is trouble sleeping. The first time he laid down on a bed in the free world on the night of his release from prison, “I ain’t going to lie, I slept good,” he recalls, “because the mattress felt so good. I slept on a real mattress. That mattress did the job. Yes it did.”
Being out of prison, he elaborates, “It seems like it ain’t nothing for me to go to sleep, because you have peace. You ain’t got to watch your back like [in prison].”
One painful aspect of learning to take care of oneself and stay focused when returning to the free world is, Matt says, “Sometimes, you’ve got to cut people off that don’t mean you no good coming out of prison, even family members sometimes. And man, you’ll be surprised at the folks that will help you and will hurt you at the same time.”
Matt is lucky to have a good support system around him, he says. He has some good friends in the community, who are “real, who I could call and talk to if I have a problem.”
He’s been enjoying fishing since he’s been out, and recently watched the Dragon Boat race at East Lake with his loved ones. “It’s better to be out here fishing than out there trying to get into trouble or something,” he says.
He elaborates, “When I’m fishing, it keeps me focused. Even if I don’t catch nothing, guess what: It’s the thoughts, the thinking about something good, my ideas that I need to put together and do.”
Matt is grateful to be staying with his mom as he starts his new job and rebuilds a life in the free world, and is close with his family. He has three kids, 19, 22, and 25, who are also living not too far, and “I see them all the time,” he says, “good relationship with them.”
For parents coming out of prison, Matt says, “You need that. That’s a lot of what [former prisoners] need to focus on coming out of prison, instead of trying to build a relationship with a woman: Build a relationship with your children, because that’s your foundation.”
He continues, “Some of them kids want answers, man. That daughter you didn’t see get dressed for the prom, that son you have who you didn’t go to his football game, their graduation, them kids want answers, for real. You’ve got to be able to give them the real deal answers, no lies, because that puts a scar on their life when you ain’t around. That’s what I was trying to explain to a lot of dudes in prison, about rehabilitation. The kids have got to play a big part. You’ve got to make amends to your kids, man. You owe them that, because they didn’t ask to be here. That’s what I was trying to tell people in [prison].”
He adds, “I ain’t expecting no women. It’s going to come. There’s plenty of women out here for a man. Guess what: My kids are my kids. Even though they’re grown, give them the answers that they want. They’ll see you wasn’t no liar. You owe them that, coming out.”
Over the past couple of days, Matt was able to tell all three of his kids that he just got a job. “They were proud and happy for me,” he says. “They were happy for me, for real.”
And “I’m going to do a good job,” Matt says, “because not only am I representing myself, but I’m representing the next man that was incarcerated, coming out, trying to rehabilitate himself.”
[1] Carol Robinson, “Birmingham Homicides up 15% Six Months Into 2024: ‘It’s Destroying Family After Family,’” 7/2/2024, AL.com.
[2] William Thornton, “Trauma From Alabama’s ‘Dog-Eat-Dog’ Prisons Continues Long After Sentence Ends,” 4/29/2019, AL.com
[3] For a summary of the studies, see: Addy Hatch, “PTSD Rate Among Prison Workers Equals That of War Veterans,” 7/11/2019, Washington State University College of Nursing.” And see the study itself: Lois James, Natalie Todak, “Prison Employment and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Risk and Protective Factors,” 6/12/2018, American Journal of Industrial Medicine
[4] For a comprehensive guide to information on the relationship between people with mental health struggles and the prison system, see: Elizabeth Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, Penguin Press, 2020
Man, he has a lot of wisdom to share. Thanks for voicing his story.