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Input: Shaka Senghor  attends the Tribeca TV Festival series premiere of "Released" at Cinepolis Chelsea in September. (Photo: Nicholas Hunt  Getty Images for Tribeca TV Festival)
 New York Times bestselling author Shaka Senghor  remembers  his  first night in prison.
It was fall. And it was cold. The windows were busted. Two scruffy wool blankets covered a three-inch plastic mattress.  He  had to use both blankets â one to cover  his  feet  the other for  his  upper torso. But it was  so cold Senghor  eventually got up and put one of the blankets in the broken window. As  he  looked out   he  saw a couple of young men  his  age playing around a garbage can.  He  envied their freedom.
âIt just was ... dark and lonely sitting in that cell and realizing that this was the next however many years of my life  if not the rest of my life â says  Senghor   author of Writing My Wrongs: Life  Death and Redemption in an American Prison.
 Senghor   who was sentenced to 17 to 40 years for second-degree murder  served 19 years in prison  spending seven years in solitary confinement. He was released from prison on June 22  2010. He walked in at the age of 19  and didn't walk out until he was 38.
 Senghor  is now 45  and the past seven years have been a mixed bag. It was hard to find a job. For a couple of years   he  said   his  job applications were dismissed almost immediately because of  his  felony conviction.
As difficult as starting over was for  Senghor    he  had it better than others.  He  lived in Michigan  a state with one of the lowest employment restrictions for former felons in the country â 94. The state with the highest number  Louisiana  has 389 employment restrictions. Nationwide 6 392 of the 48 000 restrictions on former felons are on employment.
Beyond employment challenges  strict rules regarding parole and probation make successful re-entry challenging for men  says  Senghor . Any encounter with police   he  notes  can get an inmate sent back to prison. As an African American man returning to a low-income neighborhood  itâs difficult to avoid law enforcement   Senghor  points out. Something as small as jaywalking can get black men detained in communities where stop-and-frisk measures are disproportionately employed.
And  Senghor  remembers growing up in such a community in Detroit. At 17  he  was shot while standing on a street corner. And  he  developed a paranoia that turned into hyper-violence   he  explained during a TED talk.
That defensive posture â is what caused  him  to pick up a gun  and what eventually led to  his  arrest and incarceration.
It took a long time for  Senghor  to drop that way of thinking. And some men never do as they rack up more serious criminal infractions and technical violations while they are on parole.
âWe should be figuring out waysâ¦to do away with a lot of these technical parole violations which aren't crimes  " Senghor  says  "but you're punishing the person as if they've committed a new crime and you're creating the stigma that anybody who's going back just can't get it together when in reality a technical violation really isn't something worthy of a person being incarcerated for.â
 Senghor  is working on that issue as the director of strategy and innovation for #cut50  an organization co-founded by Van Jones that works on criminal justice reform policies including re-entry initiatives and reducing the restrictive nature of probation and parole.  He  is also an executive producer of the show âReleased â on the OWN network. It shows the challenges of people recently released from prison.
 Senghor  describes Americaâs justice system as âdysfunctional  broken  outdated  and not designed to foster rehabilitation efforts or to keep communities safe.â  He  says systemic racism  a failed mental health system  poverty  drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder contributes to mass incarceration more than anything else.
âWe have a system that fails "  Senghor  says. "And we still dump money into the system to further support the things that are proven not to work.â

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