About 25 people bustle around a large conference room lined with staffed tables at Towards Employment, a Cleveland-based nonprofit that helps people find jobs.
The event is a reentry simulator, meant to give local government workers and community members insight into the challenges formerly incarcerated people face as they鈥檙e released from prison.
Each participant at the event is given a character to play with tasks they might need to do to stay out of prison and join mainstream society 鈥� including get a job and stay employed.
"When they come home, they have so many barriers and obstacles that they have to try to get through," says Marcus Bell, the reentry administrator for Cuyahoga County鈥檚 Office of Reentry. "Family requirements, court requirements, probation or parole."
Stations in this reentry version of the classic Life board game include a fake Bureau of Motor Vehicles and various social service offices. Aside from getting a job, "players" also must stay out of a homeless shelter and stay out of jail.
In Ohio, about a 鈥� often, Bell says, due to the challenges being approximated today.
Attendee Lisa Laditka of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank looks flustered as she leaves a grocery store station where she needed to buy cigarettes for her character.
"It's tough," she said. "My level of stress is pretty high right now."
The all-important ID
Bell says it鈥檚 hard for those who may have been incarcerated for decades to get something as basic as a government-issued ID.
"When they walk out, they don't have a valid Ohio ID," says Bell. "But how the system is set up, in order to get the state ID, I need a social security card. In order to get a social security card, I need a state ID. So the simulation is showing them how to navigate that."
Cost can also be a barrier in obtaining an ID, says volunteer Mike Cosgrove of the Center for Employment Opportunities.
"They're paying for their ID, they're paying for their birth certificate," says Cosgrove. "(The) Social Security card's free, thank goodness, but you know, sometimes they lose their ID for some reason so they got to come back. And ID is like a doorway to everything else."
The difficulty of getting an ID was the biggest surprise for Denise Manning of Cleveland.
She attended the simulator for her son Walter, who's currently incarcerated on a 35-year sentence but up for parole next year.
"If you run out of transportation, you can't get to the other places that you need, right?" Manning says. "Like food and drug testing and probation and court and you gotta have transportation (to get) back home.鈥�
She hopes that by attending this event, she can help her son navigate the obstacles that may lay before him.
Between sessions, Chamomile Ware-Hendricks of the Cuyahoga County Office of Reentry asks attendees about their thoughts.
"People were saying, 'This is impossible, the system is made to want you to fail,'" Ware-Hendricks says. "And that's not necessarily true but that's how they were feeling in the simulation. And that is exactly how individuals that are living this every single day are feeling."
