After serving 24 years in prison, Pamela Thompson was freed with no money, no cellphone, and no awareness of how to navigate the new world she’d just been released into.
Without the necessary resources and tools to succeed, newly released prisoners such as Thompson are set up to fail. Without support, many of them find themselves back in prison - or worse. Recently released prisoners have the highest recidivism and mortality rates of U.S. prisoners.
A study from 2014 found nearly 80% of newly released prisoners were arrested for a new crime within five years of their release, more than half of them by the end of their first year out. Within the first two weeks of being released, returning citizens are 12.7 times more likely to die than people of the same age, sex, and race who have never been incarcerated, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study theorizes that most of those deaths can be attributed to drug overdose. Fortunately for Thompson, she had a Ride Home.
