Syrita Steib was released from prison to a New Orleans that had been transformed. In the almost 10 years she spent incarcerated, technology had advanced, social norms had changed, and Hurricane Katrina had swept away so many of the things that would have anchored Steib to her community. Though Steib had family ties and support, they were unable to help her reintegrate into society.
It fell to other formerly incarcerated women to help Steib navigate her way as she adjusted to life post-incarceration. They assisted her with everything from obtaining a copy of her birth certificate and getting a social security card to learning how to program numbers into a cell phone and figuring out which styles of clothes were in fashion.
“When I was released from prison, there weren’t any resources available to women specifically,” Steib said. “There were a few things here and there. There was a Dress for Success over there, and maybe a few things at Goodwill, but nothing that was really concentrated on resources that were available to formerly incarcerated women.”
Programs like Dress for Success offer clothes for interviews, but Steib needed the things we often take for granted: socks, pajamas, undergarments, accessories.
“What was so instrumental and important were the women who had been formerly incarcerated that really showed up to be a part of my life and make sure I was okay,” Steib said.
Steib is the founder and executive director of Operation Restoration, a New Orleans-based nonprofit that provides support for women and girls impacted by incarceration — both those who are currently in prison or detainment, and those who were formerly incarcerated. Operation Restoration’s work covers a lot of ground, including advocacy, arts, education and social services, to name a few.
Founded in 2016, Operation Restoration initially began with two focuses: education and direct services, including providing things like clothing and hygiene items. Since then, it has grown to 15 programs and has 17 full-time employees, all of whom are formerly incarcerated women.
Operation Restoration receives both public and private funding. Its philanthropic funders include the Kresge Foundation, United Way of Southeast Louisiana, the Coalition for Public Safety, Grantmakers for Girls of Color, the Lumina Foundation and the National Bail Fund Network. Initial funding from Kresge came in the form of a multiyear general operating support grant of $300,000. With the onset of the pandemic, Kresge decided to continue that support. To date, Kresge’s investment in Operation Restoration totals just over $425,000.
A growing problem
According to a recent publication by the Sentencing Project, the incarceration rate of women in the U.S. has risen by more than 400% over the past 40 years, twice the pace of men. In 2020, there were approximately 1 million women under justice system supervision, with 83,054 in prison.
Although getting released from prison is obviously a major step forward for incarcerated women, it’s only part of their journey. “The term that we commonly use, ‘returning citizen,’ is kind of a misnomer in that when you are coming out of prison, you are actually stripped of a lot of your rights that you might have as a citizen of this country,” said Joelle-Jude Fontaine, senior program officer for the human services team at the Kresge Foundation. Voting rights, access to public assistance like housing, and the ability to find employment or apply to college are all limited, and in many cases, entirely inaccessible.
“All of these are things that we take for granted, that we’re able to do as citizens of this country, when you’re coming out of being incarcerated, you don’t automatically get these rights back,” Fontaine said.
On top of that, formerly incarcerated women often have fines and fees to pay upon their release, which puts women struggling to find employment at a serious disadvantage. “So if you can imagine that you’ve been incarcerated for five years, not only have you lost your freedom, but then upon coming out… you’re coming out with a deficit. And there are all of these barriers placed upon you, even if you could very quickly start to generate an income that would allow you to pay these fines and fees,” Fontaine said.
Steib, for instance, was ordered to pay a $1.9 million restitution in addition to serving time in prison. A long time after her release, she received a full presidential pardon from President Donald Trump on his last day in office, and no longer has to pay the remainder of the restitution. It was through her restorative justice work that she got in touch with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and later applied for the pardon.
One of the biggest barriers for formerly incarcerated people is that rehabilitation is chronically underfunded. Steib said that since the prison system is profitable, money is invested there. “They don’t think about the cost of incarceration on our economy. They only think about the profits that people are making,” Steib said, adding that until rehabilitation becomes profitable, it will continue to be underfunded.
Steib also noted the importance of collaborating with people who’ve had a variety of experiences. “What I’ve also begun to understand is that we also need people who can grant access to all communities because I think a lot of times we’re making policy in silos or in our own experiences,” she said. “And for me, that is not how I approach the work here. That’s never how I’ll ever approach any work that I do, because the only experiences I can speak of are the ones that I’ve had.”
“I don’t have the right to speak as a formerly incarcerated mother. I don’t have the right to speak as a formerly incarcerated transgender person or any of those things. So [it’s about] getting to a place where I can open up and provide access and space to people who can speak about their own experiences,” Steib said.
Intersectionality and advocacy
It’s this intersectional approach that helped draw the Kresge Foundation’s attention.
“The fact that the organization is made up of women who have been formerly incarcerated and so who really fundamentally understand the experiences and the challenges faced by the population that they’re trying to serve, all of these things were really critical reasons why we thought that they were a good fit for the Culture of Justice initiative,” Fontaine said.
Kresge’s Culture of Justice initiative is a joint effort of Kresge’s Arts and Culture Program, Boys and Men of Color Working Group and Human Services Program. According to Regina R. Smith, managing director of Kresge’s Arts and Culture Program, the initiative’s purpose is to “challenge traditional notions of community justice and support residents, particularly justice-involved individuals, as they, along with community partners, reimagine community justice.”
The Culture of Justice initiative launched in 2019 with $1.2 million in funding. Other grantees in the cohort include Performing Statistics, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, Shooting Without Bullets, and Carnegie Hall’s Neighborhood Opportunity Network model (NeON Arts).
“Those organizations and those who are… closest to the challenges and the issues are those who have brilliant ideas about creative solutions [moving] forward,” Smith said.
In addition to direct services, Operation Restoration conducts advocacy work. “Part of the reason we’re really interested in them is that beyond providing direct service, they are also engaged in policy and advocacy,” said Fontaine from Kresge.
Operation Restoration’s legislative efforts include efforts to “ban the box,” referring to the practice in which colleges and universities ask about criminal history on their admissions applications. After being released from prison in 2009, Steib, who had been taking classes behind bars through a community college, applied to a university. However, she was rejected despite her high GPA. Two years later, she reapplied without checking the box. This time, Steib was accepted. (She later told a professor that she had been incarcerated, and the professor advocated for her with the university, which allowed her to continue her studies.)
In 2017, Louisiana became the first state to pass legislation that removed the incarceration history question from college applications. Six additional states have followed since then, all with guidance, training and support from Operation Restoration.
Operation Restoration has also been involved in similar efforts like helping create the Unlock Higher Ed coalition, which successfully advocated to restore Pell Grant eligibility to incarcerated students (Pell Grants are a form of federal financial aid for low-income college students that does not have to be repaid) and to remove questions around incarceration on FAFSA applications.
“They’re framing the narratives for themselves”
Another of Operation Restoration’s areas of focus is art and how it can help with rehabilitation. “The work that they're doing really leverages artistic expression… It’s one more tool that they’re applying to support a really broad and holistic approach to help those who have been justice-involved, namely women and girls, lead more self-determined lives,” Smith said.
Steib said that art is a way to communicate with others about experiences during and after incarceration. In partnership with Tulane University’s Newcome Art Museum, Operation Restoration curated an exhibit called Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana, which featured 30 first-person narratives from women who were formerly incarcerated. The women were paired with artists who created work based on their stories.
“One of the most important things of the Per(Sister) exhibit was that we presented the information in multiple ways that reinforced the same content over and over,” Steib said. “I really think that is why it’s been so successful — because we didn’t just stick to the… I don’t even want to say ‘normal’ ways, but the ways that people feel art should be delivered.”
The Per(Sister) narratives came in the form of voice recordings, sculptures, paintings, photography and handwritten notes, among others. The exhibit has traveled to museums across the U.S., including New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
“It’s authentic narratives of individuals and communities, but not as philanthropy telling the story or framing the narrative,” Smith said. “They’re framing the narratives for themselves.”
Operation Restoration is also in the process of creating an opera around the stories of incarcerated women. A group of about 15 women will write poetic pieces that will be set to operatic music. The lead composer on the project has also been responsible for bringing the New Orleans Chamber Orchestra to the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at Jetson and the Elayne Hunt Correctional Institute to do Christmas concerts. Plans for the opera’s release are set for mid-2023.
Transformative aims
Steib believes philanthropy needs to reckon with its past to truly make a difference. Rather than falling back on a system that creates and perpetuates trauma and harm, philanthropy has to evolve.
“If philanthropy is truly invested in solving the problems and not just having tax write-offs or places to put their money in, if they’re truly, truly invested, then they have to do a lot of self-reflection themselves and start to question and challenge the practices and the processes that they have in place on how they give,” Steib said, pointing out that organizations led by Black women receive far less funding than those led by white people.
In addition to her work with Operation Restoration, Steib is running for a U.S. Senate seat against incumbent Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy and other candidates in the fall. During an interview on the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” Steib mentioned that her No. 1 priority was women’s rights, noting that while women’s rights are being attacked everywhere, relevant issues — like reproductive health, for example — are heightened inside prisons.
“There are all these different things that are specific to women that are under attack,” Steib said during the interview. “I think I would be remiss if I were to focus on anything other than that initially.” Steib, however, faces an uphill battle. No Black woman has ever been elected to a statewide office in Louisiana.
Meanwhile, Steib’s hope for Operation Restoration is for it to become obsolete. “I want to end the incarceration of women and girls across the world, not just here in this country, but I am also realistic to think that may or may not happen in my lifetime,” Steib said. “So I’m making sure that the organization is sustainable to continue to do the work, irrespective of whether I’m here or not.”
She added, “My great hope for the future is that prisons begin to exist only in museums and that we work ourselves out of business.”