Photo courtesy of Sharmain Harris
Sharmain Harris
Sharmain Harris
As a newly released prisoner, when you first step outside prison walls, the world doesn’t feel like freedom. More like an assault. In prison, your life is small and gray, decisions made for you. Then suddenly, you are dropped into a place where everything moves too fast. The air smells different. and the noise drops in from everywhere. Even a trip to the store can make your nerves electric. There are too many choices, colors and faces, too many doors that open without a guard’s key. At night, when you lie in bed, the silence is disquieting. You find yourself missing the clanging of the iron gates and the steady hum of the cellblock, predictable sounds.
Out here, the people you knew have aged or moved on, and the world has learned a digital way of communicating you struggle to use. You have entered a world of sensory overload.
The hardest part is learning what to do with 24 hours of unstructured time. In the yard, you survive by keeping your head down and never showing weakness. Now, to make it on the outside, you’re asked to drop your guard and trust people again. But peeling off too many years of armor doesn’t happen overnight, and sometimes you feel alone.
Sharmain Harris knows these odds firsthand because he lived them. After returning home from prison, he faced the same reentry barriers millions of justice-impacted people encounter every day. But instead of allowing obstacles to define his future, Harris decided to rise above them.
When we talked, I could sense his confidence and purpose. A big man at 6’3” and with a big voice, Harris commands attention.
Tell me about where you grew up, your parents, schools, neighborhoods.
I grew up in Racine. I come from a single parent background. It's kind of tough growing up the northside, police sirens every day, gunshots, a rough neighborhood. My mom had five kids by four different dads. But my mom did everything she could. When I was about 11 or 12, I went through a tough custody battle between my mom and my dad. Eventually, I moved to Kenosha to live with my dad, and it was a difficult transition because he hadn’t been around, but now he was around. I was a little rebellious, but he kept a tight rope on me. The rope wasn't tight enough because I still ended up getting in trouble. But I graduated from Kenosha Tremper High School.
So what happened after high school? Is that when you started getting into some trouble?
When I was 12 years old on my birthday, I ran around my neighborhood asking for dollars. One guy gave me some advice. He said, “Take these two bags of crack cocaine and stop begging people for money. That's how real men make money.” Around the time I was finishing high school, I got introduced to that lifestyle of people making good money selling drugs. After high school, I went to Stout University to play basketball. I didn't really understand how to navigate the college lifestyle. Then, I made the poor choice to come back to Kenosha.
Were you dealing drugs at that point when you came back?
Yeah, that's how I made my money. I’d work a job for two weeks, get my paycheck and use the money to go buy drugs to sell.
Well, how long did that go on then, selling drugs?
That went on until about 2008 to 2009 when I was convicted of possession of cocaine, manufacturing and delivering, and I went to jail. I sat in jail for about two months before my father took a loan on the house and bonded me out. Within a month, I was back in trouble. I’d had charges pending from a beef situation with some people, and we met up and had a brawl, and I sat in jail for a while, and then I was eventually sentenced on all my charges.
Sentenced to prison?
No, sentenced to a year in the county jail and four years of probation. If I was to mess up, I would face up to 10 years in prison. So I did my year in jail, and I got released in 2010. I told myself I was gonna do the right thing, but I got back involved in the same lifestyle. Then, I ended up having a domestic situation with a girlfriend at a time where drugs were involved. I violated my probation, sat in jail for a year. On November 11, 2011, I was sent to Dodge Correctional for intake, but I ended up in the Fox Lake Correctional facility
How long were you there for?
I had been sentenced to five years with a year credit for jail time. I spent seven months in Fox Lake Correctional before I was granted access to the military base Boot Camp program in Black River Falls, and that’s where my life shifted.
How did your life change at Boot Camp?
I knew I was going to Boot Camp so I started walking the track and running and playing basketball, getting my weight down. I often talk about some tough parts of being in prison like violence, the staff, the correctional officers and things like that. But the toughest part for me was laying in that bed at three in the morning, knowing I can't run away from the thoughts of shame, thinking about the people who told me not to do something like my dad, the football and basketball coaches. So my mind was kind of starting to shift when I was in prison,
How did Boot Camp help you?
We had physical training, mental, psychological, emotional and educational courses. You couldn't watch TV, all you could do is read books, and you had to work a job. I really never had this kind of structure in my life. I got stronger physically and mentally.
When I was in a course called Criminal and Rational Thinking, one of our assignments was to stand up front and talk about the traumatic experiences in your life. I sat there and wrote down all my traumatic experiences. Then I stood up and shared the stories about how when I was 10 years old, my mom was almost killed by her boyfriend when she was cut from her ear down to her neck, and blood was everywhere. I talked about how my parents went through that messy custody battle for me and the effect. I told about when my mom was suffering depression because she lost our baby boy, and I got there and the lights were off. I went to the refrigerator and said “Mom. where the food at?” but the food wasn't there. I asked when was the last time she ate, and she said, “It's been a couple days, Son,” and I went to Burger King for a hamburger, came back and gave a piece to my mom and she said the words I'll never forget: “Oh thank you, Son, I can feel the food going down my stomach.”
You are telling these stories as you stand in front of the members of your class?
Yes, and I felt a great sense of relief come off my shoulders because when I was younger, I never had an opportunity to express myself. After class, the facilitator came said to me, “What you just did was a true display of leadership.” Eventually, all the other guys who said they wouldn't share their stories ended up in front of class, sharing their stories, and we had a breakthrough. We started out with 24 people but only 12 of us graduated, and those 12 people are people I still consider my brothers until this day. I came back home to Kenosha in February 2013.
I understand that was when you started rebuilding your life. You adopted faith, you became a father, and then you went on to earn college degrees. So take me through that period of time, 'The Rebuilding of Sharmaine Harris,’ I'll call it
I always had faith. My dad has been a pastor for a while, but my faith grew while I was in prison. We had time to study the Bible and learn more about Jesus Christ. When I came home in 2013, I slipped and fell a couple times, but one of the things that really helped me change was my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, she was a big advocate for me. She became pregnant within the month of my release. I worked a series of jobs, but eventually landed a role at Red Robin restaurants, and that was my first full-time job. I worked second shift there for a while and then my son was born in January 2014.
One day, I went into the WIC office for an appointment and found out about this fatherhood program they were trying to build into a workshop. But I was the only father who showed up. The supervisor asked if I could help get more fathers there. I know a lot of people. My dad knows a lot of people. I started volunteering at the WIC office. Eventually, I had over 25 fathers appear, a big turnout. Then, I was hired part time and then about a month later, I got on full-time at 40 hours a week.
Within my first year, I had over 100 fathers go through the program, and that kind of catapulted my career into making connections with political figures. The district attorney, Mike Graveley, reached out. He got me taken off parole four years early. He asked if I ever thought about going to college, and I said I didn’t have the money. He helped me get a full ride scholarship to Carthage College, and I got my degree in Business Management and Marketing. Then, I turned back around and got my master’s degree.
I read that you were granted a full pardon by Governor Tony Evers.
Yes, that happened in December of 2022. The most notable thing of my career, a full pardon. Now I travel the country speaking.
I understand you encourage your audiences with the mindset and strategies needed to break cycles and rebuild identity. Who generally are your audiences?
Generally, my audiences are professional groups, so when I was running the fatherhood program, I made partnerships with organizations like child support services at the local level and then eventually developed contracts between myself, Milwaukee County and the state of Wisconsin. I was still providing direct services to fathers, but eventually I started training child support agents around the state, and that turned into speaking to child support associations around the country. Generally, my audiences are child support services, probation, and parole, these types of professional conferences. I speak inside of prisons as well, talking directly to the people who come from where I come from and then speaking to professionals who also work with the people who have similar backgrounds as myself.
The father program you spoke of earlier, what are you teaching these fathers?
I was trained in many different curriculums but ended up falling in love with the Nurturing Fathers Curriculum. It’s the evidence-based model that emphasizes the power of fathers. Many guys my age, I’ll soon be 38, we grew up at the time where our fathers’ kind of got caught up in the system. Many of us suffer trauma from living life out by ourselves, having been raised by our neighborhoods. What I'm trying to emphasize is the power of being involved, the power of doing things differently than what our fathers did. The more you hold onto the resentment towards your father, the worse you'll be. I encourage releasing yourselves from that bondage of resentment so that your own kids can have a better life than you had
You wrote a book called Rising Above the Odds detailing your story. What is that about?
There will always be some kind of obstacle. Every year, over 600,000 people are released from incarceration with little support, and studies show that over 70% return within three years. I urge men to identify the ways to overcome those odds. You also need to focus on your environment so that once you get yourself together, make sure you don't forget where you came from. Then you go back and empower people and bring up somebody else. We call it “Each one teach one.” Currently, I’m celebrating the one-year anniversary of my book being released, and I've sold over 1000 copies.
You do a lot of work in Milwaukee, right?
I'm contracted with Milwaukee County. I go into the new Milwaukee County Youth Detention Center (Milwaukee County Center for Youth) about three or four times a month, and I speak to the youth between the ages of 10 and 17. The worst thing I hear from a kid might be, “My neighborhood is all I know,” and I'll just be thinking there’s so much more to life if you can just make it past your teen years. I got a lot of other business going in Milwaukee as well.
Harris will be the keynote speaker at the Milwaukee Fatherhood Coalition Conference on September 18. For more, visit sharmainharris.com.
