What’s it like? people always want to know. What’s it like to come home from prison after serving a long sentence?
The answer depends on many things: How old you are when you walk out of those gates, how healthy you feel, how broke you are, how much support waits for you on the outside—or how little. Mostly, it depends on how much hope you have left.
I’ve been released from prison multiple times over the past 30 years, so I’ve lived through the full spectrum of what “coming home” means.
When you’re young, healthy, and full of hormones and hope, release feels like pure electricity. You’re a champion racehorse that’s been locked behind the starting gate for far too long. The moment that gate opens, you explode forward with everything you have; you’re finally free to run, to do the one thing you were born and bred to do.
But when you’re older, nearly 50, with almost no money, dwindling energy, a long list of reasons to doubt yourself, and despair at starting over again, the experience is something else entirely.
That feeling was well captured in the book, Manson: In His Own Words (as told to Nuel Emmons). I first read it as a young man in prison. Charles Manson describes his release from Terminal Island in 1967. He had spent most of his adult life locked up and had counted down the days until freedom. Yet when the moment finally came, he felt deep reluctance and trepidation at the idea of being released. He begged them to let him stay. Prison had become the only world he truly knew. He had a routine he enjoyed. People to talk to. A guitar to play in the prison yard. Freedom from the necessities of survival. Effectively, he was saying he had finally achieved a semblance of inner peace that he knew he would lose after release. At the time, I found Manson’s feelings completely alien. Who doesn’t want to get out? I remember thinking.
Two decades later, I picked up the same book again and Manson’s words hit differently. I had lived long enough inside that prison had started to feel like home for me too. Two six-year sentences living in the same place—each one longer than any stretch of time I had lived in one spot in the outside world – had affected me. The walls that once felt like punishment had quietly become the most stable environment I’d ever known. The problems I encountered were terrible, but they were limited and predictable. On the outside, I anticipated nothing but insurmountable obstacles. Uncle Sam had torn me down and failed to build me back better. It simply warehoused me and ran the clock out. I was going home less capable than before. That, I realized, was what Manson felt in 1967.
Manson was right to be disoriented and afraid. He likely knew he couldn’t trust himself any longer. I doubt he had an inkling that he would become a cult leader and an infamous murderer, but I bet he knew nothing good was in his future. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself either. After all, I thought I was done with prison the last time. Yet I went back.
So, to answer the question in a few words: Fear, anxiety and self doubt are what it’s like.
