A Way Up: Economic Development Post Incarceration

By Patrick M. Young

The first thought after any arrest is usually, how long will it take to get out? Whether in jail or prison, your sole focus is getting out. Recent statistics shows that three out of every four persons incarcerated always end up returning behind bars within the first three years of release. A large percentage of these people are from low-income communities where access to financial capital, education, and job opportunities are limited, and family ends up getting stuck in a deep cycle of poverty that they found extremely difficult to break out from. Arrested for crimes often sponsored by poverty and the dire economic conditions that defined them, they are taken through a criminal justice system that is far more interested in keeping them in the poverty-incarceration cycle than rehabilitating them and giving them a better chance at life. With no income and criminal history after release, they are unable to pay for food, housing, and health needs.

And what happens eventually? They slip back into a life of crime, and the cycle continues.

It is high time we nullified this poverty-incarceration two-feeder system. How? By dealing with the root, which is poverty. So how do you break the cycle of poverty? You may want to get out of jail or prison but are you ready to get out of poverty. How?

The answers are found here in learning how to experience your own economic development post-incarceration.

Do you feel stuck? Are you tired of going in and out of jail? Or are you an ex-offender who have found it difficult to progress because of barriers associated with your criminal history? This book is the clear road map to creating generational wealth and living the kind of life you deserve. This book is the guide to finding a way up not just a way out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662433023

Book preview

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Is Success after Prison Possible?

Is post-incarceration success possible?

Jeff Henderson, born in South Central Los Angeles, grew up in an inner-city neighborhood marred by incessant poverty, abandoned homes, and hard-core drug dealers on every corner. After being arrested for theft at fifteen years old, he soon started selling marijuana and crack cocaine. By the time he was twenty-one years of age, he was one of the biggest drug dealers in town, making up to $35,000 a week. In 1987, federal agents raided his home. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to nineteen years for drug trafficking and conspiracy.

A few decades later, this same man had gone from being a drug-dealing felon to nationally renowned chef. He had gone to build a fine culinary career for himself and became the first African American named chef de cuisine at Caesars Palace and the first African American executive chef at the Bellagio. He became a celebrity chef on his own television shows and also wrote a best-selling autobiography.

This story began in incarceration, according to Henderson. The path he took in becoming a nationally renowned culinary sensation was anything but smooth sailing. As revealed during an Oprah Winfrey show back in 2007, Henderson said, From a young child, I always wanted to be somebody. In prison, I was being praised for my food. That was the driving force for me. I said to myself that I want to be a chef someday. While in prison, he learned how to cook, read his first book, and earned his GED. Where many others in prisons got overwhelmed by the ugly circumstances that drove them behind bars and failed to see a light at the end of the tunnel or create a picture of a compelling post-incarceration future in their minds, Henderson used the situation he found himself in to change the trajectory of his life and map out his entire future. He used prison as a catalyst for change. He found a passion that he could bury himself completely in and come out at the other end a success story and a living legend. In his words, according to a follow-up interview for Oprah, he said, The power of food became that vehicle for me to be who I naturally am.

He has settled with destiny before the gates finally opened for him back into the real world. He has decided who and what he is going to become, and nothing whatsoever was going to stand in the way of his passion, dreams, and the expression of his potentials. He was convinced of his ability to create a prosperous future for himself in a world where the reality of recidivism hangs in the air like a black sinister raven waiting to prey. He was certain of his place in a modern America where class and skin color still plays a yeoman’s role in determining your place in life’s lot. In a place where many dreams die and many forget themselves, Henderson reinvented himself. He may have lost freedom to hold a woman after a glass of wine on a Sunday evening, hug friends and family over good news, walk into Starbucks and get his fill, or visit the mountains of Hawaii, but he hasn’t lost the most important thing in life—belief and confidence in his ability to change his own life, most importantly, by himself, if he decided to and committed to see it happen.

Henderson’s passion was so fiery that even the gates could no longer hold all that he has become and have for the world beyond the bars. Upon release, after serving nine years of his sentence, he wasted no time trying to break into the food industry as, at that time, the top Black chefs in the country were Marcus Samuelsson, Patrick Clark, and Robert Gadsby. Once he got out, he made his way to Gadsby’s in Beverly Hills. At that point, he never used a sauté pan in his life, never used knives, and didn’t know any culinary terminology—until Robert Gadsby allowed him in his restaurant. After working for Gadsby, Henderson made his foray into the hotel business. From there, his ambition brought him to Vegas where he made a name for himself and found great culinary success. Later, he would start the pop-up reentry school called Felon University where he takes his message and boot camp all across the country and the world to help train formerly incarcerated individuals. He remembers back in the days when he was young and the younger Black boys looked up to him as a successful drug dealer for inspiration. Now, as a true role model, he goes around inspiring them with a far different message, saying, I’m living the American dream and so can you.

According to the Sentencing Project in 2017, one in three Black men in the US will be arrested during their lifetime. After completing their sentence, many of these Black men will commit another crime and return to prison, and the reason, oftentimes, isn’t because of the crimes they committed but the inability to break the barriers in the criminal justice system, employment, and society as a whole. The modern American society is a two-tiered society where you get a much better deal if you’re wealthy and connected than if you’re poor.

Lawrence Carpenter was an example of this two-tiered society. He grew up poor, and selling drugs was all that he knew. At eleven years old, Carpenter, a North Carolina native, fell into the street life and began selling drugs as a means of survival. By the age of seventeen, Carpenter was arrested for dealing and sentenced to six years. After being released, Carpenter started selling drugs again, only this time, he was better than before. Nearly seven years later, he found himself behind bars for a second time. Alas, he couldn’t navigate himself through and transcend above the system that was designed to send him right back to where he was coming from. Incarceration had sent him back straight into poverty, and it was only a matter of time before he finds himself behind bars again. Living in poverty wasn’t an option for him and his family, so he found himself making the same mistakes again, doing something stupid, and was caught.

The second time he got incarcerated, he just felt stupid, like really. He didn’t even want people to know that he was gone. Now having a family, the thought train was like, I never want to bring kids into the world for someone else to raise. So after serving eleven months, Carpenter decided that he wanted to turn his life around not just for him but for his family. Knowing that poverty played a yeoman’s role in his second incarceration, he decided that the only way to not live in poverty and control his destiny was entrepreneurship and starting his own business.

Today, Carpenter is the proud owner of Superclean Professional Janitorial Services where he has provided nineteen years of commercial cleaning in the states of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Carpenter is also the co-owner of ZBS Trucking Company. Aside from owning two businesses, Carpenter is a community activist and participates in prison ministry through his church. He is also the director of the organization Inmates to Entrepreneurs, which creates sustainable career opportunities for former inmates through mentorship and by assisting them with launching their very own businesses.

Both Jeff Henderson and Lawrence Carpenter are doing all they can to put an end to the revolving door of prisons and reverse the societal harms of recidivism. They represent, among many others, a group of ex-offenders who are refusing to let their criminal records interfere with their dreams! They are among thousands of examples of ordinary people all over America who have put their criminal histories behind them and do something meaningful with their lives post-incarceration. They are the ones showing others with a criminal background how to rise above the stigma associated with their convictions and create a path to economic opportunity.

After the Gavel Slams

Can you remember back to the single worst event of your life? Did it defeat you and create a spiral effect of depression and loss? Or did you use it to your advantage, leverage your experience, and turn it into the greatest moment that ever happened to you?

The United States of America makes up 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. Out of 100,000 people, 734 individuals are behind bars in the US—far and away the highest number in the world. America houses more inmates than the top 35 European countries combined. Within three years of release, 4 in 10 prisoners return to state prisons according to Pew Center on the States. Also, 1 in 30 men between ages 20 and 34 is behind bars—and up to 1 in 13 in Georgia.

The question is, why do we have inmates more than 35 European countries combined and a quarter the number of all prisoners in the whole wide world?

Why do 4 out of every 10 always return back to the prison after being released? Is it something about them, about the prison, or the new world they just got released into?

For many in America today, especially the poor ones, one of the worst moments for them is when the gavel slams right in their faces. The judge speaks and they get sentenced to prison for one reason or the other. There are two outcomes we have seen in recent years. The slamming either brings out the better version of themselves or sets them on a downward spiral into a life of hopelessness and self-sabotage.

For every Jeff Henderson and Lawrence Carpenter that shows us that individuals who are reentering the community from prison can make the most out of their lives and achieve their dreams, there are host of others who became more hardened along the way and ended up as serial offenders. The slamming of the gavel seems to be the launching pad for some to reinvent their lives and achieve great things with it, but for some others, it crushed them under.

Can we now say success is possible post-incarceration? Yes, it is, and many ex-offenders have proven it, like Henderson and Carpenter, among others.

Is it easy to pull off? Not at all. It’s as difficult as climbing Mount Everest for the first time. But it’s very possible.

Is the criminal justice system and society to be blamed that we have a good fraction of people finding their way back to the prison a few years after being released? Yes, it is. The system is designed to keep you poor, and poverty naturally feeds incarceration. The government can really do a lot in this regard in many ways. You’ll understand this more in the next chapter.

Do individuals who finds themselves back behind bars have any blame? Yes, they do have their own share. The last time you depended on the government for any major changes in your life, weren’t you disappointed?

Understanding the Harsh Reality

Is success possible post-incarceration?

Yes.

The problem, I think, with most inmates is that they seem to forget that the system of the world they left behind and coming back to is not designed to make their lives better in any way. Many criminals come from poor neighborhoods, and the only thing they grow up to see is the drug economy. When they get caught and sentenced to prison and released, what do you think they would naturally return to? Selling drugs, of course! And when they return to it, what happens again in most cases? They get caught.

Poverty is the singular, most potent driver of crime and incarceration all over the world, most predominantly in the United States of America. The system is designed to keep the cycle of poverty ongoing from generations to generations, and this is why we keep having more people resort to crimes to keep heart and soul together. As obvious as this seems to be in recent years and has received widespread coverage, it also gives us a clear insight into the solution and the only chance of post-incarceration success for first time and serial offenders. Understanding the harsh reality of the system and preparing to take personal responsibility to achieve your dreams in spite of it through adequate preparation is the only way out.

This is probably the crux of this book. Inmates that focus on just getting out of jail will likely end up joining the four out of ten who get rearrested and sentenced again. The focus should be on getting up and not just getting out. The focus should be on how you can take charge of your life, break the poverty cycle by developing yourself economically, and create value. I’m talking about doing something with your life that you and your family and friends will be proud. I’m talking about becoming the best version of yourself and achieving success with the gifts, skills, and abilities you have or developed and creating economic value out of it. I’m talking about taking personal responsibility for your life and all that happened to you and telling yourself that you’re the only person, not the government, to create the best version of your life.

You owe it to yourself, to your kids (if you have some), to your community, and to those who will thrive on your story as the inspiration and needed strength to become all they can ever be in their personal lives and endeavors.

I’m not talking about just making money here. I can understand the tendency to think that’s what I’m trying to say. Having some more money to throw around hardly qualifies you as a financially stable person who has risen above the cycle of poverty. Many people make money, but they are still very poor in America today. If making and having money is all that it is, then you can as well get out of jail and start selling crack and taking some overdose of banned substances, raking some hundreds of dollars daily. You can as well plan with some others criminal-minded individuals right there in the prison (you’ll always find them if you care to know and mingle) to execute the biggest bank robbery that America has ever witnessed, leaving in your bank account perhaps a million dollars or so.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is a focus on improving the quality of your life and making the best out of it. This is the most important mindset that every prisoner in America should and must have. It is not about just escaping prison. It’s about escaping the cycle of poverty that is waiting to push you back into the system in no distant time. You don’t want to get out and go back to that same neighborhood where selling drugs is still the order of the day. You don’t want to get out with the same anger problems, fueled by deep resentment for yourself and your economic conditions, and have to spend jail time again. I love the way Lawrence Carpenter puts it across. He said, The only people you are selling out when you aren’t doing what you need to do to move forward is you and your family. We go all out for a lot of foolish things, and it doesn’t better our lives. So the same energy and effort we put into those things, we should put into the things that can build a career for ourselves so that we can take care of our families. I love that!

The mindset is one that should be focused on a personal economic development plan to break the cycle of poverty. When this becomes the focus, you start feeling the responsibility. Every plan needs action points, and for those behind bars, those action points are preparation steps that set you on a trajectory to improve the quality of your personal life, create a value-driven mentality, develop economically, and ultimately break the cycle of poverty.

This is how you can refuse to play the role designed for you by the two-faced American criminal justice system to further her poverty-to-crime-incarceration pipeline agenda and go on to write your own post-incarceration success narratives.

This is how some mates turned prison as a preparatory ground and stepping stone to actually becoming who they want to be and live the kind of life they’ve always imagined for themselves while others allowed it to be a weight on their shoulders.

This is why some consider having to go to prison the turning point for their lives because it gave them the opportunity for deep introspection never made possible before by the daily distraction of this modern world, brought them to know themselves better, and finally unearthed a part of them they never knew existed.

This is how some, understanding this mindset, go back regularly to the prison as honorable men and women visionary and entrepreneurs to see how they can help hundreds of others trapped in the same system.

You can decide to make your prison term a potential setback to set up your future. This is how people become successful post-incarceration. It’s about understanding how America’s criminal justice system works, having the right mindset, having a plan to develop economically right from the prison, and doing something about it instantly. You don’t want to get out and slip right back into poverty.

I understand that according to the criminal justice system, as many as two-thirds of the more than 650,000 ex-offenders released from US prisons and jails each year will be arrested for a new crime within three years. It’s general knowledge that ex-cons find it nearly impossible to get a job, and with no income and few work options, they return to crime. I understand that, for many after decades of incarceration, the world would have changed immensely in so many ways since they left, with the evolution of technology being the biggest difference. You can imagine not really knowing who Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are.

But why this problem persist and statistics back it up, we also have a growing number of former inmates who are addressing the problem by launching start-ups, and some specifically are creating jobs for other ex-cons.

Launching Pads, Stepping Stones

Coss Marte grew up poor in New York City, the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, and started selling marijuana at age eleven. By his twenties, he diversified his drug offerings and led a twenty-person operation that earned $2 million a year. Within fourteen years, he had been arrested a whopping ten times. Eventually, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for possession and sale of a controlled substance (term later reduced to four years). The 5-feet-8-inched, 230-pound Marte was told by a prison staff physician he had to lose weight. He definitely wasn’t the only one told something like that, but he took that advice at heart and created a workout regimen in his nine-by-six-foot cell, no equipment necessary. Within six months, he had shed 70 pounds and started teaching his personally developed workout regimen and techniques to other inmates.

By the time he was released, he left with a dream of turning his effective exercise routines into building a successful fitness company. He tried some work and exercised alongside with friends in a nearby park. One day, a passerby asked to join. Marte agreed—for a fee. In no time, more people began paying him to lead their workouts. In no time, despite challenges in getting financial support because of his criminal records, he had built a very successful fitness company, ConBody, serving over two hundred students a day with what he calls a prison-style boot camp and with former inmates teaching almost all the classes as physical and virtual trainers.

While others were probably reeling over their fate, a certain Frederick Hutson saw an opportunity that plunged him to success while in prison. Hutson was raised in south St. Petersburg, Florida, where the only economy he saw was a drug economy. After high school, he developed a mail-order marijuana business. Then he got caught and ended up with a fifty-one-month sentence. During the four years he spent incarcerated, he discovered that it was hard to stay in touch with loved ones. It was impossible for friends and families to send digital photos from a smartphone to someone in prison. Instead, images had to be printed and mailed. It was also difficult for families to track inmates because phone calls to and from a correctional facility were wildly expensive, and inmates could be moved from one prison to another without notice.

Seeing this problem, the entrepreneur in him took him over, and he started looking at the economic value he could create from it. Right from inside the prison, shut out of the world, he was able to see a huge population and a market no one was paying attention to. He knew that connection really matters to humans. More so, it’s been proven by the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University’s School of Law that the ability to stay in touch with family correlates with lower recidivism.

In 2011, after Hutson was released, he immediately created an online searchable database called Haystac to help families keep track of prisoners in more than 17,000 facilities nationwide. That technology formed the backbone of Pigeonly, the company Hutson cofounded. In 2013, despite his criminal history, he raised $1 million by emphasizing the market need. He had mailed promotional postcards to 500 inmates and got a 25 percent response rate, compared with the 1 to 2 percent return common for marketing mailings. In 2016, the company processed about 12 million phone minutes and effectively shipped more than 1.3 million photos. Same year, annual revenue grew beyond $2 million, with over 22 people employed, more than 40 percent of whom are former inmates.

Seth Sundberg was a professional basketball player who grew up in middle-class San Francisco. After four years mostly spent playing in Europe, he retired at the age of twenty-eight and became a mortgage broker. Using what he calls gray areas of interpretation in tax law, he finagled a $5 million refund from the IRS. He was convicted of tax fraud in 2009 and sentenced to five years in federal prison. In 2013, as Sundberg opened the boxes of chicken at his prison job in the kitchen of the Federal Correctional Institution, La Tuna, in Anthony, Texas, an idea hit him! He and a fellow mate had combed through the shelves of the prison commissary to make healthy foods, and they finally came up with a recipe for a granola bar, something which became a hit with their fellow prisoners. When he was released seven months later, he left with some of the granola bars in his pocket, hoping to sell them on the outside. With little success, he applied for a business program by New York-based Defy Ventures that just expanded their operations to San Francisco. After paying the $125 fee, he was left with mere $8 in his wallet. Through the thirteen-month program, Sundberg learned business and life skills and became so entrepreneurially astute that he won three investor-pitch competitions worth $22,800 to help launch his company, Prison Bars.

I started this chapter with the examples of Jeff Henderson and Lawrence Carpenter’s turnaround. Now you’ve always seen Coss Marte, Fredrick Hutson, and Seth Sundberg. These are just selected examples out of thousands of post-incarceration success story all over America. Naturally, we all think and are wired to see life in stories, so I feel it’s best to start this journey with you using lots of real-life stories. The fact that someone has done something is a great indication that it can be done! Beyond using their stories as an inspiration and to motivate others who are presently in prison or just got out, it is also to see a trend and an insight into some principles we can deduce from their experiences—principles that are true regardless of race, creed, or personality.

Your life, wherever you are, is what you make of it, and it is your absolute responsibility. While all of us need the kind of help that can only come from another at different points in our lives, the decisions and energy to drive toward achieving our dreams and living the best versions of our lives ultimately rest on ourselves. At the end of your life, what would you say stopped you from achieving your dreams and living out your best life? Prison? Poverty? The criminal justice system? Crime? The government?

What do you really think it would be?

There are people who used prison as a launching pad and stepping stone to becoming really, really successful in America today. They recognized opportunity in the darkest of places and circumstances. Being of poor background, you would expect that most of them stood a chance to be rearrested and jailed once again in the near future. But having the understanding that poverty and crime work hand in hand, they reinvented themselves, recognized opportunities, and built a post-incarceration economic plan they’ll run with after release, something that’ll completely transform their lives and others. They were prepared. They won’t have poverty again. It’s break the cycle of poverty and create wealth with their skills, ideas, plans, etc., or nothing!

Jeff Henderson recognized the power of mastering a skill, created great economic value out of it, and made quite a name for himself. Lawrence Carpenter resolved to entrepreneurship, built businesses, and broke the cycle of poverty in his family. Coss Marte saw his personal weight problems as an avenue to help out other inmates with same issues, and after release, created value out of it that people paid for handsomely. Growing up, all Fredrick Hutson knew was the drug economy, but he was determined never to return there after release, knowing that it’s a straight way back into prison sooner or later and will eventually crush his dreams. So when others merely recognize the problem of effective communication between inmates and their families, he saw an opportunity and took action to serve a market and became wealthy for it after release. And Sundberg, like many people today, turned a mere hobby in the prison to a very successful business venture.

There are many parallels between these guys. They all came from a poor background where crime is the order of the day. All that many of them knew was the drug economy and nothing else. While they take the responsibility for their wrong actions that led them to prisons, they were smart enough to know that returning to the same poor environment after release will only further the crime tendencies and eventually get them rearrested.

From their stories, I’ll love to describe what they did as going for poverty’s head. They knew poverty was the root cause and went straight for it by creating a plan that helps them break its cycle. The plan was beyond just making money. It was about breaking a generational trend. It was about changing the game and taking a complete about-turn. It was about new mindsets, new habits, new goals, and a different attitude. It was about living life to the very best version of it and making an impact. It was about understanding the money game. It was about creating wealth and opportunities for others. It was about ending the poverty cycle. It was about leaving the 96 percent behind and joining the 1 percent who controls the world’s wealth.

Lawrence Carpenter does not want another man to raise the daughters he brought into this world and wanted to give them the best. Jeff Henderson, Coss Marte, and Fredrick Hutson would never have the drug economy and marijuana business as their source of livelihood no more. They had a plan, and driving the core of the plan, apart from raw passion, were skills, hobbies, abilities, and business ideas, recognized as great opportunities to create wealth.

For anyone in prison today, these men are great examples of what happens when a man would have what he has imagined and planned or nothing else.

It’s a do-or-die affair.

The root is poverty, and ultimately, the solution is something far beyond release from the prison. It’s something about creating an economic plan that ensures a total escape from the cycle of poverty besetting millions of Americans today.

Riding on the Parallels

The story of Henderson, Carpenter, Marte, Hutson, and Sundberg, among thousands others who have gone on to recreate themselves and become successful post-incarceration, shows us some parallels that individuals presently incarcerated can apply to their own personal lives too. No two individuals are the same and what works for Mr. A may never work for Mr. B, but alas, success has core principles, and it works whether you’re from some slums in Mogadishu or a Portuguese household in Rio de Janeiro. These parallels hold whether you’re in San Quentin State Prison or Attica Correctional Facility. They are not exit strategies. They are not just about getting out of jail because if that’s all it is, you might as well get rearrested and serve multiple jail times. These parallels are about moving up the income ladder when you get out. It’s about moving up and breaking the cycle of poverty that has plagued many Americans for generations and kept them a firewood in the criminal justice system’s fire.

These parallels are about totally revolutionizing your life to create a sense of destiny and contribution, to see your whole life play out in plain view before you, to imagine the kind of life you want to live, to see the end from the beginning, and to decide on how you want to be remembered when you are finally gone. You are in prison, yes, but it’s not the end of the world. You are very poor, yes, but it’s not the end of the world. These are not permanent situations.