Photo by Tom Jenz
Shannon Ross - The Community
Shannon Ross
Thirty-seven-year-old Shannon Ross has lived nearly half of his young life in prison. He spent most of those 17 years behind the wall learning to be a productive citizen. Just over a year ago, he was released. We talked about his renaissance and his organization helping people whose lives had taken a wrong turn like his. I found him honest, articulate and engaging. Charisma seems to follow him.
Ross is now executive director of The Community whose charter is to foster the full potential of people with criminal records through “pre-entry” and showcasing their successes, humanity and agency through what he calls “Correcting the Narrative.”
The Community focuses on the Correcting the Narrative Campaign, which employs a combination of storytelling, in-person and virtual events to promote acceptance of people with criminal records as not just taxpayers, employees and neighbors, but also as equal citizens, employers and potential family. The Community has some prestigious sponsors including the Kohler Foundation, Medical College of Wisconsin, and Concordia University. There are also a number of volunteers.
Let’s begin at the beginning. You grew up in the troubled central city, mostly Black residents. What was your neighborhood like? And tell me about your home life, your parents.
I’m racially ambiguous, mixed Black and white. I’m about 25% Black. My dad is about 50% Black but looks Black, and my mom is Irish white. I’m an only child and lucky to have parents who stayed together. But my father spent five years at Waupun Correctional when he was young.
I guess I was never really accepted socially in my heavily Black neighborhood, 47th and North Avenue. I went to Lloyd Street Grade School, then to Wilbur Wright, the Milwaukee School of Languages, until I was a junior. Then, I transferred to Bay View High School on the South Side, and took the city bus. Bay View had an ethnic mix of kids, Black, white, Hispanic and Asian. I liked that because I am of mixed race myself. But I was working at Playmakers clothing store, and I wanted to travel to school and work less. Senior year, I transferred to Washington High School and graduated there. After that, I did my freshman year of college at UWM.
Tell me about your neighborhood on 47th and North. Tough area. Was there a gang culture, a criminal element, drugs?
Milwaukee isn’t a strong gang culture. We had cliques broken down into sort of neighborhood blocks. But I was never affiliated. Because of my skin color, I didn’t really fit into any group. I had friends from different races, but they didn’t come from gangs or cliques.
You committed homicide when you were 19. You shot and killed a guy. Your punishment was 17 years in prison. Can you tell me about that incident?
I have an uncommon stance towards this question that organizations like Opportunity Agenda are working to make the norm. Stories about those of us who did time in prison often turns to why we went to prison. But answering that question actually gets us further from addressing the problem of crime and reform because it promotes the idea that some crimes are more worthy of a second chance or respect than others.
It’s also an ineffective way of asking a deeper question: am I reformed, can I be trusted based on the fact I committed a violent crime, can people safely accept me into their communities and lives? And to answer that question it doesn’t matter what I did or what I say about my crime and how I feel about it. That incentivizes me to lie because I know what people want to hear to feel safe and comfortable around me.
The way to answer that deeper question is this: Am I still the reckless, lost child I was when I committed my crime? The answer is to look at my work, to look at those that trust and respect me, to meet and get to know me. This is the only way to know if we can trust anyone whose background we don’t know. We don’t ask everyone we meet to talk about the worst thing they have done in their lives. We should never let a label keep us from truly seeing a person for who they are in front of us now.
Here is how I look at it. You made a bad mistake as teenager, committed homicide. I’m thinking your dramatic story of coming back from that mistake, overcoming the odds, and giving back to your community can be inspirational for some readers. But it all starts with that tragic mistake.
I absolutely agree with you. But none of that is helped by commenting on the specific crime I went to prison for. The story that led to my crime is quite relevant, however.
I was selling drugs at the time I was 19. Somebody robbed me, and I felt I needed to retaliate based on the miseducation of manhood, as I call it, that I acquired from my peers and especially the music I listened to. Music was a huge part of our culture. I also had a chip on my shoulder because I was picked on for being a so-called white kid in a Black neighborhood. I was the “pretty boy” type.
So I was out to prove something to myself more than anything. I was 19 when I got arrested, spent six months in jail and entered the prison system at 20. But I don’t want to talk about parts of my story that are more of a distraction from the lessons and usefulness it may offer society and those who present the same type of risk I did when I was younger.
I understand, but this is what I’m trying to do. I want readers, mainly white people, to understand what life is really like for inner city Black people, the social pressures, the culture, the challenges, the criminal element. But let me move on. Now take me through the process of your prison life, how you began to heal and how you got involved with helping currently and formerly incarcerated people.
I spent the first six years in the Dodge Correctional Institution, maximum security facility. I had finished a year of college and was deemed low risk, so I could move around out of my cell, have some free time. I had a job in food service and another job being a custodian, and I read a lot. I built up my vocabulary by reading and memorizing words from the dictionary, made a long list of words. This helped me become a writer. After three years inside, I also started classes toward my college degree. My aunt and uncle paid for courses and eventually my grandma and some friends.
After six years in Dodge County Correctional, you were transferred, right?
I was moved to the Stanley Correctional Facility near Eau Claire. My parents used to visit me every weekend in Dodge, but I saw a lot less of them in Stanley, maybe once a year. I was at Stanley Correctional for five years. Stanley had educational programs, computer labs, a school, a library. They had sports leagues. I did all right there. The remaining six years of my sentence I spent in six different facilities. In 2014, still in prison, I started my non-profit, The Community.
Besides The Community, I was also doing college course work. In 2017, I got my college degree in business administration from Adams State in Colorado. I’ve been out of prison for just over a year.
And you are helping people with criminal records who are in or out of prison.
That’s right, through our work at The Community. Our Pre-entry efforts help people inside prison, to prepare them to come back outside as successfully as possible. We send them a newsletter through a prison emailing type of system. Soon, there will also be a Prison Wiki, like Wikipedia, hopefully made available by the Department of Corrections where incarcerated folks can get unprecedentedly comprehensive information about any topic that will help them to re-enter society. Anyone interested in The Community can contact us through email or snail mail, or social media for those outside the prison walls. Right now, we are focused primarily only on Wisconsin.
Are there other people involved in helping with The Community?
Besides myself, there is my formerly incarcerated polymath friend Jim Kaufman from Eau Claire and my mother. The three of us are all volunteers. Our regular all-text newsletter and updated information is issued as an email to the those incarcerated. Our newsletter comes out about once every six weeks. When I think of how much we’ve accomplished in a short time, I’m pleased with our progress. You know, I was inside for 17 years, but I never allowed myself to feel comfortable in that environment. When I finally got back into normal society, I still had that feeling of being comfortable out here and that allowed me to proceed with my goals and ambitions from the second I was released.
You once wrote, “The criminal legal system is destructive to everyone in society.” Why do you believe that?
I think the way the legal system operates is destructive to everyone who does not profit from it. Our prison system does not provide protection, does not rehabilitate people inside. It largely warehouses problems until they come back again. 95% of people sent to prison get out and society pays a large amount for each one during that time and beyond. But society is not at all getting a good return on that environment. If an incarcerated person wants to rehabilitate, you almost have to do it on your own.
Yes, there are some programs, but their effectiveness is limited by a variety of things, primarily the fact a person has to overcome the dehumanizing and chaotic environment of prison to able to learn from them—if that person is even allowed to participate given a variety of counterproductive restrictions. However, Wisconsin does have one of the better prison systems for vocational programming I have discovered.
See if you agree this concept? Isn’t punishment the main reason for incarceration? I could compare it to a parent raising a child. “You did something very bad, and you have to be punished.” Or, better stated—actions have consequences.
Yes, punishment is part of it. But does punishment work?
Let’s say a man kills his wife through domestic violence. Consequently, he becomes responsible for taking the life of someone he loved and also tragically affecting the wife’s family members, not to mention her friends. He is sent to prison for the punishment, for taking a life, for inflicting misery and heartbreak on the lives of others.
But punishment has been shown to not be effective in making people better. Are we focusing more on what we feel that prisoner should experience, or what his outcome could be? We need to address what happened. I would say that accountability is more important than punishment. You want the person to feel accountable, to feel the pain of his crime. For example, one technique is for violent criminals to talk with the victims of violent crimes. This helps the person understand why he committed his own violent crime.
OK, then what would be the accountability for a hardcore criminal in prison for murder?
Accountability for that criminal is by facing what he did, not being able to run away from it. You are forced to do the dirty work for what you did. Talking to victims’ relatives who suffered because of your crime is part of that process, not necessarily your own victims but other victims who will tell you how they have suffered.
For example, I met with a woman whose son had been murdered, and her story aligned with what I did for my crime. I’ve seen young men who commit violent crimes become beautiful human beings after they get out when they are much older. When you face accountability, that is a powerful motivator for you to treat people with empathy and to give back to your community because of mistakes you’ve done in the past.
Let’s focus on your own life. You have now almost completed your master’s degree, right? What is your field?
Next summer I’ll finish my masters. My field is sustainable peacebuilding. It’s actually under the School of Nursing at UWM because peacebuilding is a health field. I also have a trucking business. My childhood friend, Brian Adams, and I own two box trucks. He drives. His wife and I handle other aspects. We move products from one city to another. And I have a new-born son. You could say I’m pretty busy.
After I left Shannon, I found something he wrote about The Community: “We hope to foster stronger communities all over through innovative, widely collaborative, human-centered efforts to access the untapped talent of people with criminal records and the untapped empathy and understanding of society towards system-impacted people.”
You can find out more about Shannon Ross and The Community at thecommunitynow.us.
