Opinion | Donate this holiday season: ex-convicts need your help

This column is part of Times Opinion’s 2024 Giving Guide. Read more about the guide in a note from Times Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury.

On April 4, 2017, Damon Christian Watson walked out of the Los Angeles County Jail after serving nine months for identity theft, burglary and other convictions. Alone, ashamed and addicted to drugs, he eventually returned to the life he had before his arrest.

“I was a dead man,” Watson told me. “I was a homeless drug user on Skid Row. I was unrecognizable.”

If you believe that people are free when they are released from prison, remember Watson’s story. Like many ex-convicts, Watson left the criminal justice system with no resources to change direction, which is one reason most people coming out of prison quickly re-enter the system. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 68 percent of people released from state prisons are rearrested within three years; 83 percent within nine years.

“Prisons break people down and make it impossible for them to rebuild,” Watson told me, now senior director of legal services and business development at the New Jersey Re-entry Corporation, a nonprofit that supports former prisoners. “You come out and you have no hope, no resources. And if you don’t have these things? You’re not much different than the person who originally went to prison.”

This is the ugly end of America’s mass incarceration disaster, a system focused far more on retribution than on rehabilitation or redemption. And Watson himself is a striking example of what we lose when, as a society, we continue to punish people who have already served their sentence.