PBS NewsHour documentary spotlights the struggles facing the formerly incarcerated

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• Geoff Bennett:

  For the past few years, the NewsHour has been reporting on the issues facing the formerly incarcerated, like finding a job, housing and health care. Next week, those issues are front and center in a PBS NewsHour documentary called Searching for Justice: Life After Lockup. Let's take a look.

• Michael Cevallo:

  I never planned to go back. So every time it's been extremely devastating, this time when I went to jail this time, I must have anguished. I'm talking about anguished for days. I could not I could not believe it. I just knew that this is not. This is not right. This is not where I want to be. This is not what I want for my life. There's so much more to this life, then, you know, sitting in a cell, and which ruined, you know, I lost, you know, just the normal things that people lose when they go to jail. It's part of the process, I guess.

• Amna Nawaz:

  What are those normal things for people who don't know?

• Michael Cevallo:

  Everything. Everything. The normal things that you lose when you go to jail is everything. I mean, your whole life. So, whether it be a marriage, family, kids, finances, you know, people can say, you know, money, you know, don't make you happy? Well, not having money doesn't make you happy, either. And that's what's scary, you know, saying, because now I'm out here. And I don't know, I'm just not set up for anything. I'm not set up for any financial situation.

• Geoff Bennett:

  This past week, I spoke with NewsHour's chief correspondent and host of the documentary Amna Nawaz.

  So Amna, tell us more about this documentary, what were the questions that you and your team were trying to answer?

• Amna Nawaz, NewsHour’s Chief Correspondent:

  So Geoff, I think most people know I've heard before that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, right? Something like 70 million Americans now have an arrest or criminal record. And so there's a lot of stories about life inside prison.

  But you should also know that 600,000 people get out every year, and what happens to them. So our colleagues of producers, Mike Fritz, and Frank Carlson spent about two years looking into just that, following the lives of four people, including Michael Cevallo, the man who just — we just heard from there, to see for those tens of millions of Americans, What is life like after you've served your time.

  And what we found was that that time in prison or jail for most of these people, really haunts them for long, long, long after their free. The rules and the regulations that greet them on the outside limit where they can work and how they can live and how they compare. And so we spent a lot of time with them, not just trying to understand who they are today and how they're living today. But what led to their incarceration in the first place.

• Geoff Bennett:

  You mentioned Michael Cevallo. So we saw in the clip, who else did you follow? Tell us more about who else we'll meet in this documentary.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Yes, so a bit more about Michael. He is 53 years old, and we should know he has now spent most of his life behind bars and with no support or trading inside. So basically, every time he gets out, he really struggles to build a life and to reconnect with family and to find work and get his footing.

  You'll also meet a woman named Rachel Schuyler. She is 32 years old. She is now fighting to get her daughter back. She lost custody after her last conviction. Rachel really struggled with addiction and had massive childhood trauma early in life. She was never, never really able to get any kind of help for and this system just keeps putting her back behind bars.

  You'll meet a man in Michael Plummer, who was convicted of murder when he was 17. He was just released in 2020. And now he's trying to reconnect with his now adult daughter and a granddaughter he's met for the first time and he's working two jobs and trying to make ends meet and trying to build a life at the age of 42.

  And you'll also meet a woman named Renee Wyatt. Now, Renee struggled with addiction and with homelessness. She has been in and out of jails and prisons for much of her life. And she became kind of the exception to the rule. You know, she beat the odds, she got out and she stayed out. And she's now using her experience in prison to try to counsel and support women who have similar stories too.

  So every single person we met though, Geoff, we should note, every single person had a history of trauma or instability. Every single one of them had a parent who either struggled with addiction or had been previously incarcerated. Studies show these are patterns, right, and these are patterns that our system freely does more to reinforce than it does to break.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Wow. What do you hope that people will take away from this documentary after they watch it?

• Amna Nawaz:

  You know, watching these folk stories, you're not just going to meet them, you're going to really get to know them, you're going to get to understand them, you're going to see the whole picture of their lives, not just — not just their time behind bars, you know, these people are so much more than their criminal records. But really, oftentimes society sees just that. And only that even after they're out.

  So we now know, tens of millions of people, more than any other nation are basically written off because of their crimes, right, they're not able to participate, let alone integrate into the world around them after they've done their time, after they have paid their debt to society. That's because our system is just continue to punish them long after they're free.

  So, we hope that people will watch we hope they'll get to know these folks, and we hope that maybe they'll stop and wonder, can we do better? Can we be better?

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, I will tell you, I will be among those watching this documentary. Amna Nawaz, thanks so much for your time. It's great to have you.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Thanks, Geoff.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Searching for Justice: Life after Lockup airs Wednesday night at 10 Eastern nine Central right here on PBS.