Eddie Ellis and the Second Chance

By Colman McCarthy

It’s been two years since Eddie Ellis, a 32-year-old African American from Washington D.C., was released from prison at the end of a 15 year stretch. Confinement in the final six years was in the super-max prison in Florence, Colorado. Various times before that he was caged in Virginia’s Red Onion super-max, a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a for-profit privatized pen in Ohio, and two more on the East Coast. He was shipped around because Washington, with no prison of its own, rents cell space wherever it’s available.

By the odds, as toted by a recidivism rate of an estimated 66 percent, Eddie Ellis should have been back in prison by now: because he was cast into the penal culture at 16, an age to be learning life skills, not survival skills; because the longer the time, the harder the re-entry.

‘When you return to the world after 15 years,” he says, “you are really playing catch up. I had to learn how to ride the Metro, go on a job interview. It’s still hard to be around a lot of people. Trusting anyone is difficult. I had to learn how to deal with my family. In a lot of ways, I’m still learning how to be free.”

So why is Eddie Ellis moving forward and not recidivating, either through another crime or a parole violation? It appears to be a combination of help from within and without. While in prison, he became a reader--one who found satisfaction in opening his mind to ideas that energized him to further explorations of the spirit. He had a mother who never gave up on him. On leaving prison, he found probation officers who were both professionally skilled and personally caring. He speaks also of having a Higher Power in his life, one that has “allowed me to make it through my situation.”

These past months, Eddie Ellis has been working with a company that contracts to cleaning office buildings at night, Washington being--if nothing else--a building-rich city. By day, he mentors boys and girls, speaks in high schools and colleges, and works on creating a non-profit that will help ex-offenders ease back into society. He has written a pre-release handbook for prisoners on the way out.

The moment is right. In April President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, legislation that took five years to pass through Congress. Authorized at $165 million a year, it would offer grants for state and local governments, as well as non-profits, to start programs for newly released prisoners. It’s too early to claim this as a victory. The funding is small when compared to the enormity of the prison and jail population: an all-time high of 2.3 million, a sum that translates to more than one adult in 100 stashed away. No other country is as prison-happy as the United States, nor could anyone be more pleased by the excess than profit-hungry companies like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group that build and run prisons. With four percent of the world’s population, the United States has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

As something of a tourist in the world of incarceration, Eddie Ellis saw up close the large numbers of men and women who are mentally ill, drug addicted, functionally illiterate and with no skills other than enduring. When vote-seeking politicians cry out “Get the criminals off the streets,” they rarely add that everyday an estimated 480 ex-criminals are coming back to the streets--and less likely than ever to find footing.

Little is heard from Barack Obama orJohn McCain about the national shame of mass imprisonment. An exception to the silence is Sen. James Webb of Virginia. In hearings he convened last October, he said: “the United States has embarked on one of the largest public policy experiments in our history, yet this experiment remains shockingly absent from public debate.”

Had Eddie Ellis not been sent to prison at 16, he was headed to one of the high schools where I teach. I would likely have had him as one of my students. But that is in the past. So is the crime he committed. I purposely didn’t mentioned above exactly what crime he did commit, on the ground that I try to avoid defining anyone--caged or free--by the worst mistake of their life. Right now, Eddie Ellis is a person of character, generosity and energy. I’m betting he’ll stay that way.