To close out a tumultuous year that kept us painfully separate, we’re pausing to report and reflect on all that’s drawn us together. In part to share some dispatches from RCND’s work of Vigil, Reentry, and Restorative Justice during Covid. But even more so, as a way to recall and renew our 28-year path toward all-of-us. This second of three installments lifts up the story of neighbors tending space for justice-involved neighbors who came home to Durham in a stay-home season.
As state and local stay-home orders fell into place this spring, we kept thinking of words from our friend Charles. Speaking at a public gathering some time back, he closed his remarks by inviting the hundreds gathered to imagine ourselves sitting in a prison cell after years locked away, waiting to be released the next day. Drawing from his too-familiar experience, Charles settled us down into the anxious predicament of neighbors poised between a punishing system and a grueling road home. What kind of welcome—what kind of community—could we expect to find waiting for us?
On any given day, the likely answers to that question are reason enough to mourn. But 2020 layered on a global pandemic: neighbors with the privilege to do so tucked safely at home, public services dramatically reduced, an aura of tense uncertainty surrounding every human encounter. So as welcome efforts to secure early release for vulnerable incarcerated folks picked up steam, our reentry ministry leadership held them in tension with other realities. That beyond all our best intentions, every kind of social distance lands heaviest on neighbors whose choices are few. And that even sitting in a crowded prison which threatens your breath, you might still have good reason to believe there’s nothing better waiting outside.
And yet somehow, tending to that raw space between us in this grievous year fostered community beyond all our expectations. Combined with a generous flow of Covid Relief donations, grant support from the NC Justice Center made RCND a conduit for food, housing, and other tangible support to over 70 neighbors returning from prison during Covid. Our non-profit partners at Jubilee Home made a quick April pivot toward two-week quarantine housing, assuring that coming home meant home rather than hotel. Subtly competing public partners at Durham County (Local Reentry Council) and City (Welcome Home) worked as one, lining paths into much-needed peer support for Durham neighbors releasing early from prisons across the state. In a season framed by distance and scarcity, we witnessed the loose threads of Durham’s reentry community unite into a thick, collaborative fabric.
Traversing that community these nine months as a Coalition bent on belonging, we kept catching glimpses of an all-of-us that might yet meet our imagination for a beloved Durham. In focus, it was most interested in the most affected, curious about their needs and eager for their co-creation. In leadership, it was backed by institutions but anchored in people, neighbors whose positions loose them into work no title could capture. In collaboration, it was creative and generous, reluctant about accolades and welcoming all who would serve. In vision, it was shrewd about systems but attentive to souls, holding hard truths and good news as parts of a beautiful, broken whole. In love, it was spacious, converging all of what is toward the hope of who we still might be together.
Across 16 congregations and 22 reentry ‘faith teams’—among some 150 reentry ministry folks in 2020—this Coalition empowered neighbors as full participants in that surprising reentry community. Volunteers and their partners learned how to use Zoom together. Home-cooked meals showed up at quarantine housing. Vulnerable neighbors-stuck-at-home called vulnerable-neighbors-just-arrived-home to offer mutual support and a listening ear. Unlikely new friendships formed on church lawns and back decks, around fire pits and long walks. In a thousand small gestures and unexpected insights, neighbors caught their own glimpses across the ‘other side’ of pandemic and incarceration, apathy and despair. While Covid laid bare our prison system’s inability to protect prisoners from itself, we found a new sense of what systems are really for. Reckoning with the community we’ve so long failed to be to our most vulnerable neighbors, we found new cause to believe that the best of all-of-us might yet hold hope for the worst in each of us. May it be so.
Ben Haas (Director, RCND)
12/2020