LaTony Galloway still remembers how the cold, steel handcuffs felt on his wrists the first time he was arrested.

By the time Galloway was 22, he would be in and out of prison for the next 15 years, stuck in an endless cycle with no way to escape.

Welcome to the world of a past offender. Galloway, who is now 37, said he remembers sleeping on the floor at the Alamance County Jail for almost two months. In 15 years, he said he has seen more than his share of overcrowded jail cells and court-appointed lawyers.

Galloway is one of the many repeat offenders in North Carolina. After finding himself homeless upon his most recent release from prison three years ago, Galloway decided it was time to make a change.

“I wanted to change my life,” he said.

Galloway found job assistance through Sustainable Alamance, an organization that aims to help reintegrate past offenders into society. “I didn’t want to go back to jail. I didn’t want to do prison, because I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

Recidivism in North Carolina and United States

While his goals are admirable and certainly attainable, Galloway is fighting an uphill battle against local, statewide and national statistics. Each point to massive numbers of incarcerated individuals and unwavering statistical evidence of recidivism across the United States.

In a biennial study conducted by the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, recidivism corresponds to any past offender’s repeated criminal activity that results in a rearrest or reincarceration. The most recent survey, which evaluated recidivism following the 2008-09 fiscal year, noted that North Carolina rates have remained steady during the past 20 years.

From 1989 to 2009, rearrest rates stayed between 31 and 36 percent. The most noticeable jump occurred between the 2005-06 fiscal year and now, rising more than 3 percent.

Michael Abernethy has been the court reporter at the Burlington Times-News in North Carolina for the past three years. He believes Alamance County definitely faces issues with recidivism, and attributes it mainly to one thing.

“A lot of recidivism that I see is due to chronic substance abuse,” Abernethy said. “[Repeat offenders] commit crimes to support their habits.”

In a broader sense, issues with recidivism stem from fundamental problems within United States prisons on a national level. The U.S. Department of Justice estimated that almost 1.6 million individuals are currently incarcerated in the United States. Yet this was not always the case. The Pew Center on the States reported a 705 percent growth of the number of prison inmates between 1973 and 2009.

As U.S. prisons grow larger, the number of repeat offenders also rises. The Pew analysis observed that in 2009, 43 percent of past offenders were projected to face reincarceration within three years.

A trickle-down effect is apparent in North Carolina, as recidivism has clearly not spared the state. Keren Rivas is the Assistant Director of Alumni Communications at Elon University. After serving at the Burlington Times-News as the court reporter for five years, Rivas said she has seen a great deal into the silent world of recidivism. She recognizes the lingering effects a stint in prison can have on a person’s life.

“When you have a felony record, your world is a completely different world,” Rivas said.

Rivas thinks society should look past the convictions because recidivism is only a part of what you see. She said beyond the sentence served, reincarceration affects the job hunt, often leads to mental health issues and hinders a prior inmate’s reintegration into society. Rivas believes one of the first steps towards decreased incarceration and recidivism rates starts within the community. She views government programs as unreliable and instead turns to programs like Sustainable Alamance.

It takes community effort

Phil Bowers is the founder and executive director of Sustainable Alamance, a program that founded in 2008 that helps former inmates reintegrate into their communities. In the past five years, Bowers and his team have helped more than 40 men find full time employment upon their release from prison. The program has assisted another 50 men in obtaining day labor and temporary work.

Bowers is adamant about one thing: Sustainable Alamance focuses on rehabilitation into society through job placement and a hard work ethic, not free handouts. He said that for every 10 people referred to the program, only one will show up because they expect food stamps or free meals.

“We’re talking about putting lives together. What we’re trying to do is much bigger than a job,” Bowers said.

Bowers understands that it is the program’s developmental model that confuses many inquirers. The model works off of a two-pronged approach of evangelism and economic development. Sustainable Alamance aims to aid in job employment, job training and job placement, all in correlation with the following Bible passage from James 2:14-16:

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?  Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food.  If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?’

For Phil Bowers, Sustainable Alamance’s goal is to help those in need through hard work and motivation. While Bowers said the program’s slogan is still in the workshe shared the unofficial mantra: “To use the underutilized human resource to build a stronger and more sustainable community.”

As Bowers sees it, rebuilding a sustainable community starts with each person’s will and determination. Bowers is there to jumpstart the process. This was the case with Barney Love Jr., who started attending Sustainable Alamance meetings in 2012 when his unemployment benefits ran out.

Love, who was first arrested at 14, is familiar with both the jail and prison systems. Spending multiple stints in juvenile detention as a teenager, Love was arrested for driving without a license and possession of cocaine and marijuana during his first year of adulthood. Since then, he has spent two years in prison for fleeing arrest and five years for robbery.

It was Love’s most recent five-year sentence (he was released in 2008) that proved to be his last.

“One night I wanted some drugs and I didn’t have the money,” Love said. “So the store was right around the corner from me and I robbed the store. I didn’t get but $30. Five years and I got $30.”

New environment

It is past offenders like Galloway and Love who carry the burden of a repeat offender every day. As a past offender, it becomes increasingly difficult to escape their past environment, find a stable job and ultimately make a full reintegration into society. Bowers explained that finding a job is a past offender’s biggest obstacle. The second is finding housing.

One of the keys to combatting recidivism rates is to understand the influences behind the numbers. In terms of repeat offenders, this means looking at the penitentiary system as a whole — on local, state and national levels.

Aaron Peeks is an assistant professor of sociology at Elon. During his seven-year tenure, Peeks has taught several classes in the criminal justice realm, including Drugs and Society and an intro-level criminology class. Peeks believes a person’s background and current environment play a huge role in the likelihood of repeat offenses.

“I think a lot of the reasons we have this recidivism rate is that we are not necessarily changing the conditions that these individuals are coming from that leads to their criminal offending in the first place,” Peeks said.

Simply changing a repeat offender’s environment – and subsequently their behavior – is easier said than done. Love, of all people, knows it’s true. After circulating through the system for almost 15 years, it might be difficult to blame his past on his inability to get up and change his surroundings.

“If I’d had a different path to go through, but like I said you are born into the environment you’re meant to be born into,” Love said. “Sometimes you’re just an example to other people. It’s never too late.”

During his final stint in prison, Love realized he was done. After transferring from eight different prisons during his five-year sentence, he was ready to break free of the system that held him down for so many years.

“Some people don’t want to get out and do right. Some people ain't looking for that, to get out and do right,” Love said. “You can tell people where a job is and where it’s going to hire them, and they don’t want to work because from my experience, work is time.”

Taking leap, making change

With a 2010 inmate population of 56,656, New York is no stranger to the penitentiary system. After receiving convictions of assault in the first degree, weapon possession and use of a weapon, Marlon Peterson was welcomed into prison with a 12-year sentence.

Peterson explained spending that amount of time in prison takes a serious psychological and emotional toll. He said people who are able to rise above the system are constantly fighting an upstream battle.

“You have to fight for your own sanity in there,” Peterson said. “You have to convince yourself that you are a human being.”

And fight he did. During his sentence, Peterson was contacted by a seventh grade teacher whose students were having difficulty with decision-making. It was here that Peterson decided to create the Young Scholars Program. Every other week Peterson created a lesson plan that was then presented to the class on Friday afternoons.

For over a year, the class wrote letters to Peterson every two weeks and he would respond with personalized letters to each student.

“In prison I realized early on what got me to prison,” Peterson said. “Even though I came from the same inner city hood — the ghetto — I was blessed to have a half decent education. I was able to use this education that I had to empower other folks who are going through similar things that I went through.”

The program ended when the teacher changed schools, so Peterson moved on and formed HOLLA: How Our Lives Link Altogether, with some of his fellow inmates.

In 2009, Peterson was released from prison two years early. He took with him HOLLA’s ideals, and the program was implemented in Brownsville Middle School.

The program resembled the Young Scholars and met each Friday to encourage positive decision-making skills. Eventually Peterson left the program to pursue work at SOS: Save Our Streets, which is an anti-violence program. After working as a violence interrupter, Peterson became a founding coordinator at YO SOS: Youth Organizing to Save Our Streets.

Peterson exemplifies a past offender’s ability to reintegrate into society post- prison. Today he serves as the director of community relations at the Fortune Society. The organization, which is in its 46th year, aims to help individuals make smooth transitions back into society.

Peterson has chosen to give back to the community that helped make his transition so successful. He said he owes the majority of this to his family, who provided financial support to help Peterson run his programs after his release.

Ultimately, Peterson reflects on his prison experience as an extremely difficult challenge, one that he does not want to revisit.

“It was hell,” he said.

Breaking free

While Bowers said obtaining a job is the primary step, Peek disagrees. He said he doesn’t think job placement is necessarily a good indication of decreased criminal activity.

“Just because somebody gets a job doesn’t mean they stop committing crime,” Peeks said. “In fact, what I would argue is, we focus on street crime right? And we say ‘oh well look at these criminals, they’re not committing crimes anymore because they haven’t been rearrested.’ Well, you engage in a lot of criminal activity before you’re arrested in the first place, right? So you didn’t just commit one crime and that’s why you’re arrested; you’re actually engaged in a whole bunch of crime and then you got unlucky one time.”

Peeks said he believes education is key, yet realizes it is a controversial topic. The dilemma quickly becomes going to prison and receiving free education versus not committing a crime and paying for education.

Looking at it as a long-term investment, Peeks said to compare the cost of housing an inmate versus providing them with schooling.

According to the N.C. Department of Public Safety, as of 2012 the average annual cost of prison incarceration per inmate was $27,572. According to the College Board, the average annual cost of a public four-year college per instate student is $8,655.

“The thing about the system is that it is not set up to be necessarily fair to individuals,” Peeks said. “But if you didn’t spend all that money on the criminal justice system, maybe you could provide free college for everybody.”

Bowers said he believes Sustainable Alamance has the power to not only rebuild the community but simultaneously combat repeat offender rates in the county. He has the numbers to prove it, too.

Of the 40 men who found full-time employment through the help of Sustainable Alamance, less than 10 percent have gone back into the jail or prison system.

The 10 percent returning to the system are a fraction of the majority who would otherwise find themselves behind bars, without the benefit of the program.

Galloway said he has Bowers to thank for his success after prison. He has been employed now for almost eight months at TS Design, working in the dye factory. While he was hesitant to join Sustainable Alamance at first, Galloway is thankful for the group.

“I’d rather do it myself, really,” Galloway said. “But if I can get someone to help me along the way, that’s great.”

While reports indicate prison statistics are slowly declining on both national and state levels, local community members like Bowers and Rivas believe more can be done. Today, North Carolina currently houses almost 38,000 prison inmates. And according to Galloway, Love and Peterson, that is not a place where you want to go.

“Prison is not a good place to be,” Peterson said. “It in no way encourages productivity, self-development or empowerment."