Prisoners Turned Missionaries Describe Societal Barriers They Faced After Serving Their Time.
A former drug dealer who racked up hundreds of thousand of dollars dealing illegal narcotics all across the state of Colorado, Dennis Avila now knows what it is like to repeatedly beg people for a second chance after he was released from prison.
Having spent 10 years from his late teens to late 20s getting more and more immersed into the drug trafficking culture, Avila received a true a wake-up call in 2003 when he got caught in a small mountain town with cocaine, methamphetamines and a firearm.
Authorities pushed for a sentence of up to 48 years for his crimes. But thanks to the help of a lawyer, he only served two years with a mandatory three-year parole.
Although Avila has been successful in his return to society as a businessman who now helps minister and council young men who are just now getting out of prisons, he faced some of the 48,000 legal barriers that create an essential "second prison" for ex-inmates in their life after release.
In a sense, these barriers incentivize in the minds of ex-criminals the will to return to prison and ultimately help lead to higher recidivism rates, Avila recently told The Christian Post.
Bureau of Justice Statistics studies have found that about two-thirds of released prisoners in the U.S. were rearrested within three years after release.
"There are going to be days where you think it isn't worth it and it would be easier to just go back to prison and sit down,'" Avila explained. "Some people get used to that life."
As President Donald Trump has deemed April as Second Chance Month, a bipartisan effort led by leading Christian prison ministry Prison Fellowship is underway to help raise awareness of the roadblocks that prisoners face once they get out of prison, and even when they are still in prison.
In addition to the external barriers like being turned down for jobs and housing, many inmates face a disadvantage before they are even released because they will be serving their prison sentences without receiving an education, training, rehabilitation or preparation for how to handle their individual problems once they released.
In many cases, criminal justice systems will only expose low-level non-violent offenders to more dangerous and hardened criminals without really helping them deal with the core problems that caused them to resort to criminal behavior in the first place.
"Before I went to prison, I got into a little bit of trouble that kind of pushed me further into selling drugs," Avila recently recalled during a recent Prison Fellowship Second Chance Month panel discussion in Washington, D.C. Christian Post.
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