Sex offender registry makes reentry a balancing act of restrictions without resources
As the leader of Healing Transitions, a peer-based recovery-oriented service for homeless and uninsured people located in Raleigh, Budnick is left scrambling if someone with a sex offense comes to him for housing.
Some of society’s most vulnerable people come to Budnick, asking for help. He has to turn them away due to the location of Healing Transition’s men’s campus on the edge of the new Dorothea Dix Park.
“I’ve heard people say you have a better chance if you murdered somebody with like, moving on in your life after you’ve done your time,” Budnick said.
Some 98 percent of people currently incarcerated will eventually reenter society, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, most of those people will face barriers upon reentry. Sometimes people who have been incarcerated for years don’t know how to use now-familiar technology such as computers and cell phones. Others have difficulty rebuilding relationships with family, or struggle to find work and housing.
For people exiting prison with sex crimes on their record, it can feel like a life sentence, said Coleman, who was formerly incarcerated for a sex crime and asked to go by a different name.
The Challenges for Those Re-Entering Society are So Overwhelming!
I can remember teaching fellow inmates how to Type; How to Use a Computer in Prison in Classes I taught; Conducting classes on the World as We know it; Most of these inmates had been down for over 15 years plus; some even in for 25 years and none of them had a clue about The Modern Computerized Society in which we Reside!
Many older inmates, really didn’t want to leave prison; they were ‘comfortable’; Hell NOT ME! But, I began to understand their plight: No Money, Most with No Family, and of course, no where to live as well as other conundrums they may have to deal with if you are a ‘Person Forced to Register’, In order to re-enter the world!
…And Now, it will be even tougher to find housing because of Inflation and scarcity of housing even for a person who is not a former felon!
So, therefore, the Burden is even greater!
By not being equitable toward all people, government is projecting a bad image of itself.
Definitely a case of the book actually matching the cover.
I reached out to a local ministry who claimed to help people getting out. But then they asked what I had been in for. When I told them (due to the wonderful laws requiring us to indemnify ourselves), they said “we can’t help you.” So much for Matthew 25…
The writer Philip Yancey wrote something along the lines of “sometimes, you find more compassion at a church at the Tuesday night AA meeting than at the Sunday morning service.”
Yancy is correct in that statement.