Finding purpose:

Aaron Walling is the regional director of southern California for the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), a program that provides “...job readiness training, employment experience, cognitive-behavioral interventions, vocational certifications, assistance with all aspects of the employment application process, and retention services once employed with businesses in the community,” according to their website. 

Walling said that some of their program participants were running industries inside prison. 

“They were running self help groups and really intensive programming,” he said. “And they might come in as a program participant, but very quickly actually join our staff because they're so highly skilled in what they do, and become a full time employee of our organization.”

CEO offers highly specific programming completely focused on gaining and maintaining employment. 

“We learned from the experience of our program participants, we can see those who were in institutions that had programming and those who were highly engaged in that programming come out so much more ready to engage in the workforce and society,” Walling said. “They just are so much better equipped.” 

CEO uses Salesforce, a customer relationship management platform to track their own data. Walling said they keep exact data of how many people come into their program, how many have exited with a job and how long they’ve kept that job. 

“We're one of the few organizations, I think, that track people for a full year after they've been placed in a job,” Walling said. “... We stop tracking data after a year intentionally. People may still connect with us and pop in and say hi or whatever, but we don't invest staff time and resources to go find out: ‘Hey, a year and a half later, two years, three years later, are you still employed? Have you been reincarcerated?’ We just can't. We just don't have the funds to do that.”

Out of CEO’s participant demographics, “60% have no education beyond high school or its equivalency, 56% have no prior work experience, 55% have one or more children, 81% are people of color, 51% are between the ages of 18 and 30 and 87% are male,” according to the website.

“We would like to open up more opportunities for women to come into our program,” Walling said. “And that's kind of historically been a challenge, where we feel like women are kind of underrepresented in our program.”

While Walling said that they want to create space for women to participate, he also mentioned that there are larger factors at play that can prohibit women from taking part in the program. 

“Women, unfortunately, are almost immediately dealing with childcare issues more than men,” he said. “That's obviously sad to say, men should be equally responsible for this, but a lot of times, women are the ones trying to either regain custody of their children or immediately have custody of their children, and that's their primary concern. Rather than, they don't have children to worry about, and are just immediately out there trying to find work, which tends to be a little more true for the men.” 

This sentiment was echoed by Judith Ryder, who holds her doctorate degree in criminology from City University of New York. Ryder previously worked as a professor within the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at St. John's University where she directed The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Project, a program that puts university students and incarcerated individuals in the classroom together. 

“Women's lives are more complicated sometimes,” Ryder said. “And that's not to say there aren't men who are good fathers who want to reconnect with their families, but I think the reality is, because women have all these other gendered responsibilities, that interferes with their ability to participate in reentry programs.”

Ryder authored a 2020 research paper titled: “Enhancing Female Prisoners Access to Education,” which examines the lack of educational opportunities for women in prison and how that affects their lives after being released. 

Ryder said that the paragraphs of her paper are kind of clipped and shorter across the various countries she wrote about because there was very little data on incarcerated women.

“That's a huge, systematic problem around the world. The data is just not being collected,” Ryder said. “... It's like women didn't count.” 

Ryder said that advocacy for women often feels secondary. Many try to tackle the big picture issues first before narrowing the scope, which can make the experiences of women feel like an afterthought.

“I understand that to a point, but I also know historically that that has not worked for women, because they're always seen as: ‘We'll get to you later,’” Ryder said. “And I would argue that when women are employed and make money, they're going to take care of their family, and that is felt across generations.”

Ryder said that generally, the correctional view of providing resources is similar to buying in bulk: the large correctional systems are working for the majority, not the nuanced needs or the smaller populations.

“I also think there's a bias against women who are caught up in the justice system, because it's like they have fallen even further,” Ryder said. “If you're a woman and you're in prison, you are like, really bad. [For] Guys, that's part of the machismo male culture, perhaps. But if you're in prison, you must be really bad; you're a bad mother [and] you're a bad person. There are attitudes that permeate, and I think are amplified in correctional settings because they are so male oriented; they are so militaristic and masculine in that sense.”

Madison Turunen is a program facilitator for Restorative Justice California (RJCA) at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) San Diego. Turunen volunteers to run a six-week restorative justice reentry prep program for the women of MCC, which consists of weekly sessions centered around establishing values, learning accountability and communication, goal setting and envisioning a best possible self. Turunen said that women experiencing incarceration are often stereotyped as “absent mothers” or “junkies,” and that this narrative should be pushed back on. 

“There's such an array of men who are offenders, but then they don't really look at an array of women,” Turunen said. “They kind of all just put them in a box.” 

In one of the classes that Turnuen taught, there was one woman that many participants referred to as their nurse. If they were sick, she would make them tea. 

“[She] pretty much tucked them into bed with a lullaby at night,” Turunen said. 

Another woman who was a participant in Turnuen’s class always had tissues in her pocket to share. 

“The second somebody cried, she had it [tissues] in front of them,” Turunen said. “That was unprompted. That was her way of thinking, of knowing, like, we're going to be vulnerable in this space. And so let's have what we need.”

In little ways like these, Turneun described witnessing the communal and nurturing environment that the women almost naturally created while incarcerated. Turunen said she hasn’t had a lot of experience in men’s facilities, but that when she has, that’s not something she notices as much. 

“It's more that they [men] are like acquaintances, whereas you can see the networks of community among women because they so easily fall into those roles that they have outside of being incarcerated,” Turunen said. 

While MCC San Diego is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, RJCA is a nonprofit and “non-governmental organization that works in partnership with local justice sector agencies and other nonprofit organizations in Southern California to provide programs and training that promote the values of respect, responsibility, and relationships.” according to their website.

“It's really focused on the immediate [needs] of: Once you've been reentered into society, how are you going to put your goals first and your desires of what you want so [that] you don't get stuck back into that system and cycle,” Turunen said. “A lot of that comes out of making sure that everyone is comfortable with addressing their emotions and mapping out what that looks like.”

MCC San Diego holds both people who have been convicted of federal crimes and serving short sentences, and people who have been accused of federal crimes, but not yet convicted. Participants of the class are either awaiting sentencing or awaiting release. For women awaiting sentencing, the class serves to demonstrate their initiative in efforts to better themselves and prepare for reentry. 

She said that a shifting point she notices among the women happens on week five of the program, where participants share a part of their life story homework assignment, in which they are asked to write a narrative of their life, which she said helps provide perspective about their time served. 

“I don't really know what happens beyond the scope of the class with their time either incarcerated or released subsequently, but I do know that we did a study a couple years ago for the organization, and it was found that [for] participants within the coursework that we offer, 80% of them do not reoffend,” Turunen said. “They end up making something of their lives that’s beyond the justice system, and they are unlikely to be reoffending if they have these skills.”

When women first start the program, Turunen said that there’s a tendency for them to be a bit resistant, especially when some don’t necessarily want to be there, and are only participating to get time served. She said that the women she’s worked with are often motivated, not by simply reclaiming autonomy, but by reclaiming their familial role. 

“I've noticed a lot that, because I work in the women's population, they're always centering their identity around being a mother, being a daughter, being a caregiver in any way,” Turunen said. “And so to me, it doesn't seem like many of them are focused on regaining their agency, but rather entering back into that role in a way that's going to be productive and not cause harm.”

At MCC San Diego, the program runs within a specific class cycle. In a previous run, Turunen facilitated a class from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Fridays in a church. However, because the church began at 12:30 p.m. her class would get interrupted 15 minutes early. She said overbooking was an issue. 

Turunen also said that they needed an escort, a volunteer coordinator, to take them all to the classroom at the church. But if a coordinator calls out, or if MCC is understaffed and no one can escort the group, the class is canceled. According to Turunen, no one informs the women if a class gets canceled, the correctional officers just don’t come to collect them. 

She said that once, the second class of the program cycle was canceled because the volunteer coordinator wanted to take Valentine’s Day off. 

“I understand, like, for personal reasons, but you promised these women that they would be getting the class every Friday for six weeks, and that was week two,” Turunen said. “It just has a lack of stability when they're already in a space that is really unstable to begin with.”

She said that participants are allowed to miss up to two classes, a measure put in place in case of sickness or health concerns and in the case a participant’s lawyer visits. The women will still receive a certification and time served if they reach the required amount of hours accumulated over four weeks. So, when classes get cancelled, Turunen said that she has to be the one advocating for the women to receive their promised class time. 

“Making sure that they'll tack on the class that we missed to the end so we still get the full six weeks can be difficult, because they might have another class that's going to take that time slot as soon as we wrap up.” Turunen said. “And so it becomes like a domino effect: Will we have the time? Will they be able to squeeze us in?”

Not only is this a potential issue for participants banking on receiving the certificate or time served, but it is also simply an interruption in an already limited curriculum. Turunen said that it can be difficult for students to remember what was covered, and there’s a higher potential that they lose the physical worksheets that get handed out each week as homework. 

“They don't have much room to keep stuff to begin with, and so our worksheets are not going to be their priority,” Turunen said. “It's going to be the photos and the letters that they have from their loved ones in that little space.”

Turunen said that as a facilitator, she isn’t allowed to have contact with participants outside of the class. If someone wants an extra worksheet after losing one, they can’t just call Turunen and ask for one. She said there are many rules that become challenges in what is supposed to be a safe and resourceful space. One of these rules is that facilitators cannot speak Spanish to the participants because the guard present for every class must be able to understand everything the facilitators are telling participants. She said the volunteer training that’s required to become a facilitator emphasized that all communication should be in English.

“We're not allowed to teach in Spanish, and almost half of the inmates only speak Spanish and so we'll have to ask one to translate for us,” Turunen said. 

They are allowed to distribute worksheets in Spanish, but the time it takes to have another participant translate the group discussion often eats away at the time allotted to work through the curriculum. On top of that, Turunen said that while participants are allowed to translate for each other, she can’t let them speak to the group for long periods of time. She has to maintain the correctional space, which she said doesn’t exactly line up with the nature of restorative communication. 

Other rules don’t allow physical contact and ensure that everyone sits far enough apart from each other. It’s rules like these that Turunen said can shape the room unconsciously. 

“We can't even provide them [with] the pencils, the guards have to,” Turunen said. “There's just a lot of rules around the ways of being that don't necessarily align with restorative justice, which is so communal, and so spontaneous and in the moment.”

Turunen described the conflicting situation that is creating a space for restorative justice within a space of retributive justice. 

“It's definitely like working within an existing system that's causing harm, to try to minimize harm,” Turunen said. 

Just over a year ago Federal Correctional Institution Dublin was permanently closed by the Bureau of Prisons. It had become known as "the rape club" after reports by the women incarcerated there detailed rampant assault from correctional officers and prison administration. Kendra Drysdale is one of the women who reported her abuse and was retaliated against. 

Drysdale struggled with a heroin addiction on and off since she was 21 years old. She spent a total of five years clean in her 20s and 10 years clean in her 30s. She would get clean and be doing well, but when something big would happen in her life, she would relapse. In the span of one year, her father, her fiance and her daughter’s dad all died. 

“I went right back to what I knew and how to be numb. I had a lot of childhood trauma, and that was my way of dealing with it, just to be numb [and] find some way to not have to feel,” Drysdale said. 

In her late 30s she started dealing drugs to keep her addiction going. She spent a couple years in and out of jails, but in 2018 she was indicted by the FBI for mass distribution of drugs. She spent almost three years in the Otay Mesa Detention Center waiting to be sentenced. She was eventually sentenced to six years and was moved to Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Texas, and moved again landing in FCI Dublin. 

While there, she experienced sexual assault at the hands of a prison staff member. 

“It was called the rape club for a reason. It was horrific,” Drysdale said. 

She said that there were supposed to be safe reporting measures in place, which she followed by directly emailing the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington D.C. – an option in place to protect against retaliation. 

“I sent that email, and within an hour I was seen by the prison staff. They gave me what's called an incident report and said that I was lying,” Drysdale said. 

The prison staff told her that they reviewed the cameras, but that Drysdale was not telling the truth and made her see a disciplinary hearing officer. 

“They took me in the office of the person that actually did the assault that's not ever supposed to know that you reported them,” Drysdale said. 

After that, the prison staff retaliated by taking away her access to a phone, the commissary, email, video and in-person visits, as well as took away her job and reassigned her to work for her abuser. Drysdale was a month away from her release date, but the staff told her that she would be punished for seven months. 

The prison staff falsely recalculated her credits, taking away her ability to go home. At that point Drysdale had been incarcerated nearly five years. 

“They're supposed to protect you in something like this, and if they did watch the cameras, they knew it happened,” Drysdale said. “To be treating me like this was just so painful, and [it was] just [a] level of betrayal that I can't even begin to explain.”

News of what happened to Drysdale traveled fast among the community of incarcerated women. She said that the abuse of power not only broke her own spirits, but it caused mass fear within the prison walls.

“It really affected everyone in there, because they're like: ‘We're not safe, no one is safe.’ And they [prison staff] made me out to be an example of: ‘This is what happens to you if you report one of us, we will take everything from you, including your ability to go home,’” Drysdale said. 

So the women stopped reporting the abuse. 

Ray J. Garcia, who was employed as associate warden and later warden of FCI Dublin, was convicted of three counts of sexual abuse and four counts of abusive sexual contact against three females who were incarcerated, as well as one count of making false statements to a government agency in 2022. The evidence presented in his trial demonstrated his efforts to deter his victims from speaking out. While five other FCI Dublin prison staff members at the time were charged with abusing incarcerated women, Garcia’s was the first to go to trial. 

A total of eight FCI Dublin correctional officers, including the former warden, have been charged with crimes related to the sexual abuse of the female prisoners. The most current case against Darrel Smith, otherwise known as  “Dirty Dick Smith” resulted in a mistrial on April 14, 2025. He was being charged with 15 counts of sexual misconduct against five incarcerated women. 

Drysdale said that because so many prison staff members were abusive, and they had been for such a long time, the corruption left the women feeling hopeless. If they did report abuse, they would be put in segregated housing, a term refering to solitary confinement, which has been found to violate the United Nations Convention against Torture.

 

“You start to even question your own sanity,” Drysdale said. 

The prison was permanently closed in April, 2024. During the process of transferring the women still serving time to various prisons across the country, Drysdale’s sentencing was recalculated and she was released. 

“I had this major survivor’s guilt, of all the people that were still going through it, [and] are still going through it, that are all over the country. I felt like I can't just leave them and do nothing.”

Drysdale started volunteering with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) quickly after being released. She said she had multiple meetings the same week she left FCI Dublin with prosecutors, the FBI, DOJ and OIG to talk about her experiences and advocate for the women that remain in the carceral system.

She got hired by the coalition and works as their advocacy coordinator, one of her main jobs being monitoring the consent decree that CCWP negotiated with the BOP. A federal judge granted approval of the final decree, protecting incarcerated individuals who have experienced sexual abuse, retaliation and medical neglect by staff while in BOP custody. The decree went into effect March 31, 2025. 

Drysdale is also co-founder and co-executive director of Sisu Freedom Foundation, a non-profit centered around providing programming and resources to system-impacted individuals in an effort to aid in reentry. 

“Our mission is to facilitate lasting reintegration by addressing systemic barriers, cultivating purpose, and promoting self-worth,” according to the foundation’s website. 

Drysdale said that it’s all about helping people find purpose. 

“I know the way that I've healed from everything I've been through is by giving back [and] helping other people,” she said. 

Drysale said that many recidivism reduction programs and reentry programs are geared toward men. 

“There's very few, like, I've been researching all kinds of re entry programs, and it's like that same thing,” she said. “They’re like, 80-90% men, and then they have a few women, and the women mainly work for the program to help run it.”

Drysdale said that it's one thing to be released from prison and have a reentry program that finds someone a job with a company that hires felons, which are often minimum wage jobs, but it’s another to really set someone up for success that lasts. 

“What are the chances of that being sustainable when life happens and when things go really bad?” Drysdale said. “Or you're just not making enough money, because San Diego is so hard to live in? It's a lot easier to go, ‘Oh, I could just do this crime,’ or ‘I could just rob this person,’ because that's what they know, that's what their past is. Or I could just deal drugs again, and I could make so much more money dealing drugs, like I didn't have to worry about anything when I did that.” 

She said that especially for people that have spent a lot of time incarcerated, it’s more common to feel hopeless. 

“Because everything is the same there [in prison] every single day, and you don't make any choices or any decisions,” Drysdale said. “When you get out, it is so overwhelming.” 

Upon reentry, people often feel stuck in the overwhelm of everything they need to make right and all the tasks that they must complete to reintegrate into society, like getting or renewing a driver's license or applying to have social security benefits reinstated.

Writing a resume is a task Drysdale said was largely triggering for many previously incarcerated people. 

“It's like an emotional breakdown, because you have this huge gap,” she said. 

When Drysdale left prison, taking regular drug tests was a condition of her parole. At the time, her housing was two hours away from the testing site and she had to rely on public transportation to get there. Drysdale remembers crying while on Facetime with her daughter because she didn’t know how to ride a bus. She had never been on a bus before, and since cell phones had changed significantly over the five years she had been incarcerated, she didn’t know how everyone was paying for their ticket with their phone. Apple Pay wasn’t as big when she entered the carceral system. 

She described other barriers, especially prevalent for people who have been incarcerated for a long period including not knowing what a QR code is or how it works, and the general confusion that can happen when faced with new technology while having little to no technological literacy. She said knowing how to get to the DMV, how to use apps, how to get food stamps on a website, how to verify an email address, are all examples of confusing situations that many people face for the first time after being released from prison. 

Drysdale’s first living situation after prison was in a studio at a family member’s home. She said there would be times when she had to tell herself that the door was unlocked. 

“You have to literally remind yourself that it's okay to go outside,” she said. “... And I still do that a lot, but not nearly as much.”

Many previously incarcerated individuals return to a life where they are not welcomed home by family members and their mistakes are held against them. Drysdale said that her own mom does not speak to her. Even after taking care of Drysdale’s daughter while she was imprisoned, her mom cut off communication with her daughter because of their reconciliation. 

“Those are all these roadblocks that people hit that they just literally go: ‘Never mind. These are barriers I can't get past going back to my old life,’” Drysdale said. 

Drysdale said that she was amazed that her daughter was willing to forgive her. 

“It's sometimes a very difficult and traumatic experience just doing that reunification with your children, because a lot of times they reject you,” she said. “They [women] expect to come out and be a family again.”

Drysdale said she remembered relapsing and beginning to go in and out of jail when her daughter was 12. Now, her daughter is 23 and they host a podcast together called Breaking Jaded, which explores recovery, incarceration and healing through the lense of their relationship. 

Now a little over a year after being released, Drysdale has the space to reflect on her own experiences even more deeply. She said she can hardly believe everything she’s been able to do in the last year, but that there is still more to be done. 

“The survivors' guilt is so strong because I still miss them and they're some of the most special people I've ever met in my life,” she said. “You get scared to go to prison. You think they're going to be all these evil people. And no, they're all just a lot of very broken people that need to be lifted up.” 

Drysdale said her closest friend at FCI Dublin was an 82-year-old woman whom she called one of the most special people she had ever met. She was known by the way she helped all the women, as a grandmother would. 

“The sisterhood in there is so strong,” Drysdale said. 

Deep conversations, she said, is a key part of how relationships form within prison walls.

 

“You help each other through everything because it's so painful,” she said.

Andrew Blum is the executive director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at University of San Diego. He holds a doctorate degree in international relations and has previously worked as vice president for planning, learning and evaluation on the senior leadership team at the United States Institute of Peace. 

Blum co-authored a 2023 report titled, “Addressing the Recidivism Challenge in San Diego County: Learning from Lived Experience Approaches.” According to the executive summary, the report “identifies strengths of lived experience approaches to amplify, challenges of lived experience approaches to mitigate, and lessons from lived experience approaches that can be applied more broadly.” 

Within his report, Blum quotes a 2018 review of research on recidivism by the National Institute of Justice that states, “We don’t have a strong understanding of what works and what doesn’t.”

He said not much had changed since that review.

“It's both that we don't know and that we don't have good programs that are able to help,” he said. “I’ve never researched a kind of set of social innovations where the research was as negative and pessimistic in terms of [the list of] this doesn't work and this doesn't work.”

Blum said that a large problem with understanding what works within recidivism reduction is that the nature of research only allows an examination of one part of a complex whole. 

“Researchers tend to do the rigorous research on one intervention, but that doesn't really paint the whole story,” Blum said. 

Upon reentry, people have to figure everything out all at once, Blum described.

“You have somebody coming out of prison with all of the stigma, both informal and formal,” he said. “They've been sort of ripped out of their community. They're plopped back in their community. And one of the things we find is they have to solve all the problems at one time.”

For example, Blum said that if someone were to be offered job training, they also have to think about transportation and any logistical conflicts that might make someone choose between attending the reentry training or going to work. These types of situational issues are what make social science research difficult – life is too complex to be tracked so linearly. 

“The real challenge is not any one program, but it's helping these individuals navigate to all these programs,” Blum said. 

For this reason, Blum’s research pointed toward the benefit of lived-experience mentorship. His findings showed positive results in how having someone who has had to ask the same questions, be in the same rooms, encounter the same situational complications helped previously incarcerated individuals be successful upon reentry.

Not only did Blum’s research demonstrate positive outcomes, but also pointed to the overall benefit of getting people out of incarceration. 

“It's very easy for recidivism programs to be cost effective, because it costs so much to have people in jail or in prison,” Blum said. “If people were just looking at the money, I think we'd have more programs. I think the problem is the stigma around formerly incarcerated individuals makes it very difficult for them to get  sustained and holistic support.” 

In terms of funding and providing assistance, Blum said it’s not just about helping people facing reentry, as well as not just about helping people still incarcerated, but that there is a gray area within programs like halfway houses that help people who are still serving time begin to reintegrate into their communities. There are also diversion programs that Blum said are especially effective within youth populations. 

“There's been a real push to reduce the youth population in prison,” Blum said. “... And I mean, that's the ideal, because once you're in prison, you spend five, 10, 20 years in this brutal environment, like, of course, it's going to be hard to reenter. The ideal is to not incarcerate so many individuals for so long, right?”

Blum said that lived experience mentoring and the many types of programs that lived experience individuals do, belongs within a broader context of de-securitized criminal justice strategies. 

“Some of those strategies are on recidivism, some of them are on violence prevention, but they're all part of that same [sentiment of]: It doesn't help to bring more men with guns into the community. It doesn't help to surveil our community, like our community has the answers to these challenges.”

While writing his report, Blum visited a halfway house in Oceanside with Jackie Reed, CEO of  Women Initiating Success Envisioned (WISE) and the director of reentry at Urban League San Diego County. 

He said from speaking to many women there, he gathered that women are often returning home to children and sometimes, toxic relationships.

“It's very easy for those women to go back into abusive relationships, because at least there's a place to stay, at least there's food on the table,” Blum said. “So they end up being back with either abusive men or men that pull them back into what got him in trouble in the first place. So there's a lot of overlapping challenges, but there's definitely unique challenges as well.”

Reed said she was addicted to crack cocaine for 20 years and ended up serving three years in prison. In her bio on the WISE website, she said, “My incarceration was a rescue for me.” 

Now, she’s 19 years clean. 

“I don't have no big, fancy title in here,” Reed said. “It's all about helping my ladies.”

“'I’m proud of where I've come from and where I've evolved to,” Reed said. “During that time my kids were little, and they saw the addiction, they saw the ins and outs and the things I did for the dope. Today they're grown and got their own kids, and I'm glad that none of my grandkids saw me like that. They see grandma as Grandma.”

Reed serves as a motherly figure to the women she helps. She recalls how one particular woman would sometimes call her crying at 11 p.m. saying: “Miss Jackie, I’m having a bad day.”

“Just being there to support is what a lot of women need,” Reed said. “And so I focus on holding their hands.” 

In tangible ways, Reed also assists women by making sure they have access to basic needs like underwear, bras and socks. She gives out Walmart gift cards, Ulta gift cards and bus passes. 

“I give them a 30-day bus pass instead of a one-day bus pass, and so those types of things help the women just to get over the hump,” Reed said. “I don't have housing or nothing like that. I'm working on that.” 

One woman waiting to meet one-one-one with Reed said she came to get an Ulta gift card. She said she was excited to have the option after not wearing makeup for a long time.

“I try to make sure these women have the necessities met,” Reed said. “And so that's kind of what Miss Jackie does around here in the community, and I'm well known for that.”

Reed said that she focuses on helping women be successful, wherever they want to be. One way she guides them is by reframing the way they think about their own skills and abilities. 

“If she went to prison for selling drugs, she ran a business,” Reed said. “And so I take that part of the positive stuff that you did, so you know how to budget, you know how to measure weight. They don't realize that that's an experience. They just think, ‘Okay, I'm just out there.’ No, that's a gift. Let's use that gift, and that's what I do with them.”

Reed said that the women she sees are often stuck in toxic relationships; it’s an aspect of reentry assistance that she finds can be difficult to help with. 

“It has been a little challenging with some of these ladies, because they protect their men,” Reed said. 

While she encourages them to focus on protecting themselves, not all women feel like they have the power to create that boundary. 

“I got a girl right now living in a park with a man, because she rather be with her man,” Reed said. 

Reed’s repeated motto is: “When you heal that woman, the whole family is healed.” She views women as the core leaders within a traditional home and explained how she believes a healed woman has the power to be an example to her kids, keep her family together and maintain a well-functioning home. Women are at the center of what Reed said was her calling. 

“I tell everybody, it lays me down at night and wakes me up in the morning,” Reed said.