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Joe Houston Jr. arrived at the D.C. Jail after 1 a.m. He passed rows and rows of cell doors until he reached his own. At 16, this was his first real taste of incarceration. As he walked to his assigned cell, other juveniles taunted, fueling the aggression that landed him there in the first place. When he stepped inside and the door slammed shut, Houston noticed that there was no mattress, but that didn’t bother him. Rather than go to sleep, Houston started doing push-ups.
“I was preparing to fight and defend myself,” he tells three other men sitting with him around a table in the basement of a row house in Northeast. Each of them replies with knowing nods.
Michael Dickerson-El, Charles Hopkins, and Dietrich Trent are with Houston at a house on Massachusetts Avenue NE, the headquarters for the nonprofit Voices for a Second Chance. Collectively, they’ve spent about 100 years behind bars.
On this September evening, they’re sitting behind microphones and sharing pieces of themselves that they hope will create understanding among those who haven’t been locked up and solutions for those who have. When they’re done, Jim Watkins, a retired general manager for WHUR-FM, will turn the recording into an episode of the podcast Solutions from the Yard, a new project produced by VSC. Dickerson-El, Hopkins, and Trent are all now employees there and take turns hosting the show.
They’ve invited Houston as their guest this week to talk about entrepreneurship and rebuilding a life after incarceration. They each take turns asking him questions about his upbringing, his life, and his business.
Houston says he was 14 when his mother died from health complications after struggling with drug addiction and mental health issues. His father wasn’t in the picture, so his sister gained custody of him when he was about 6 or 7 years old. He says he was involved in gun violence from a young age, and that’s what landed him in the D.C. Jail at 16.
Houston served five years in prison (where he met Dickerson-El) and was released at age 21. He says he carried that youthful aggression with him in prison until he ran into a guy he calls “Mousey” (real name John Beale), who helped change his way of thinking and introduced him to books such as The New Jim Crow and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Hopkins asks about the role that Mousey has played in Houston’s life, alluding to the importance of uncles, grandfathers, and “Big Homies” as role models.
“He didn’t ask anything from me,” Houston says. “I can’t explain why, but I was able to just open my mind up to him.”
When he was released, Houston spent some time as a sales agent, a guide, and a bus driver giving tours of D.C. before he earned his certification as a personal trainer. Mousey encouraged him to pursue that credential.
When the pandemic hit, and gyms closed down, Houston was laid off. He recalls riding around Southeast D.C., where he grew up, and trying to think of what he could do to help. He was aware of the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on his community and knew preexisting health conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease contributed to the high death rate among his neighbors.
That’s how WeFitDC was born.
Houston enlisted Mousey and three other friends—all returning citizens who were also into physical fitness—to start offering free outdoor fitness classes. He recalls the first meeting where the group came up with the idea: They met near the basketball courts in the Benning Terrace community. As they were talking, a shoot-out erupted a short distance away.
The men stayed and finished their meeting, Houston says on the podcast. “One of us was like, ‘See, this is why we gotta do the work,’” he recalls.
Since that meeting in 2020, Houston has grown the business and just cut the ribbon on his new gym at Sycamore & Oak in Ward 8. He also started a nonprofit that provides health and wellness programming for kids and sponsors youth sports teams. He’s hoping to get his own football team together by the spring.
About a month after the podcast recording, Houston finalized the incorporation for another business, Ida Sight Media, where he hopes to explore photography and short films. The company is named after his mother, Ida.
He says he never imagined that he would open his own gym, and learning to run a business took time and tough decisions. Given his success, Hopkins asks what advice he has for kids growing up in a situation similar to Houston’s childhood.
“Surround yourself with positive people,” he says. He acknowledges that’s easier said than done, which is why he tries to be that positive presence for the kids he works with.
***
VSC has existed since 1969, when it was called Visitors’ Services Center and helped incarcerated people stay connected with their family and friends who waited in the visitors’ line at the D.C. Jail. Over the years, the organization’s mission has expanded to helping people start to rebuild their lives when they’re released from jail and prisons. The name changed to Voices for a Second Chance in 2015.
In 2021 and 2022, the organization, led by executive director Paula Thompson, served more than 1,100 individuals who came from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, D.C. Department of Corrections, halfway houses located in Baltimore and Delaware, and D.C.’s Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, according to VCS’s annual report. They started releasing episodes of the podcast in January.
Dickerson-El, Hopkins, and Trent are all graduates of VCS’s Train Our Voices program, a 33-week course that teaches individuals how to be advocates for themselves and others leaving carceral facilities, especially in light of D.C.’s unique criminal justice system. Each man takes turns hosting and scheduling guests. The episodes have touched on reentry, prison food, homelessness and juvenile delinquency, discrimination, and the 13th Amendment.
“People need to understand what incarceration is and what it does,” Thompson says. “It’s important that these men lead this project because lots of people speak for them and don’t get it right.”
Throughout the episodes they’ve released so far, the men peel back the curtain on life inside prison and lay bare the traumatic impacts it’s had on them individually and as members of larger communities. In one particularly powerful episode, the men open up about that trauma, how it shows up, and how they each deal with it.
For Trent, the incident was particularly fresh: Just last night, he says, he was startled awake after his fiancee accidentally touched him. The otherwise innocuous act caused him to snap, he tells his co-hosts. After sleeping in a prison cell for 25 years, where disturbing someone from their sleep can often lead to an act of violence, Trent says he didn’t realize how much trauma he was still carrying.
To get back to sleep, Trent said he laid down in the corner of his basement by a closet—the coldest place in his house. It reminds him of the conditions in a prison cell.
“It’s hard for me to explain to people,” he says on the podcast. “Don’t touch me when I’m asleep. I experienced it last night, and it was ugly. It was real ugly. And I wasn’t happy until I went to go sleep in that corner, wrapped up with no blanket, no mattress, no pillow. But I was in a safe space over there, to me.”
Dickerson-El thanks him for sharing, and offers some of his own experience: The first time he saw a murder was in prison. A group of prisoners stabbed a man 65 times. Dickerson-El says he watched as the guards stood by and did nothing.
“That really leaves a deep stain in your mind,” he says. “It’s survival of the fittest.”
Then he nudges Trent to elaborate. Trent recalls that as a child, he could never remember seeing his mother cry.
“Now as I’m educated and older, [I realize] she was desensitizing herself,” he says. “I was only being taught from my mother how to desensitize myself … I didn’t know the effect of it until I got home.
“These are things I’m still learning,” he adds.
Hopkins, who spent nearly 50 years in prison, including time in a supermax facility, explains that he has come to recognize that his trauma at times warps his perceptions of interactions with people on the outside. And he offers a solution.
“When I got out of prison, that’s the first thing I did was get help with mental health,” he says. “I recognized I had a problem with processing traumatic events.”
Hopkins recalls on the podcast that he had bad experiences with dental care while he was incarcerated, where his pain often went ignored. Those memories leaked into his experience going to the dentist outside of prison.
“So trauma for me is, at times, my inability to understand situations on an emotional level,” he says on the podcast. “And by the grace of God I don’t react. I try to process.” Hopkins hopes that others in his situation will hear his story and start to recognize how trauma shows up in their own lives.
For Trent, hosting the podcast gives him an outlet to talk about the barriers and successes he has found since he was released from prison. He finds some healing in creating a record of his experience. He hopes others will find some comfort in hearing about his struggles, and that he has found solutions.
“It gives us a voice and allows us to be advocates for the people who can’t speak,” Trent says in an interview. “We’re speaking for the brothers and sisters still behind those bars who don’t have a voice. And we try to find solutions for some of the issues that brothers and sisters still face.”
This column is produced in collaboration with More Than Our Crimes, a nonprofit dedicated to raising the voices of people locked in federal prisons across the country.
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