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‘It’s a new day for the formerly incarcerated’: Why Not Prosper opens a center in Harrisburg

Harrisburg has an imprisonment rate 2.5 times greater than Philadelphia’s. Now the Philly nonprofit that has helped formerly incarcerated women for 20 years will open its largest housing center there.

The Rev. Michelle Simmons, founder and executive director of Why Not Prosper, on the staircase at a Why Not Prosper recovery home in Philadelphia on April 7, 2022.
The Rev. Michelle Simmons, founder and executive director of Why Not Prosper, on the staircase at a Why Not Prosper recovery home in Philadelphia on April 7, 2022.Read moreELIZABETH ROBERTSON / Staff Photographer

After twenty years of helping formerly incarcerated women rebuild their lives in Philadelphia, Rev. Michelle Anne Simmons, founder and CEO of Why Not Prosper, has expanded the program, opening a housing center in Harrisburg.

In September, Simmons who takes a housing-first approach to providing reentry services for women, cut the ribbon on the organization’s fourth property and its first outside the Philadelphia area. The Harrisburg facility is called the G.R.O.W. program — Giving Real Opportunities to Women — and will house up to 45 women, making it the nonprofit’s largest housing unit.

Harrisburg has the state’s second highest imprisonment rate of 1,144 per 100,000 residents, 2.5 times greater than Philadelphia’s imprisonment rate, according to the recently release report from the Public Interest Law Center and the Prison Policy Initiative. Much of that boom has been the result of the explosion of the female incarceration rate, which has grown by 475% since 1980, twice as high as men’s, making women the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population, according to The Sentencing Project.

“The number of women going to jail has grown so much,” Simmons said. “I can’t even measure 475 percent.”

African American and Latinx women are imprisoned at a rate 1.7 and 1.3 times the rate of white women, respectively. However, since 2000, while the rate of imprisonment for Black and Latinx women is decreasing, it is increasing for white women. And women in state prisons are more likely than men to be incarcerated for nonviolent drug or property offenses. Incarcerated women are also more likely than incarcerated men to experience mental health problems.

The list of negative outcomes that result from incarceration is long, including higher rates of asthma, depression, lower standardized test scores, reduced life expectancy. Almost six out of every 10 women behind bars have children under 18. Since opening Why Not Prosper in 2001, Simmons has been traveling back and forth to Harrisburg advocating for criminal justice-involved women.

“We were always going up there marching and the opportunity (to open another center) presented itself,” Simmons said.

One of her latest legislative fights has been to make certain that women exit prison with a 30-day supply of their prescription medications. Simmons said that Medicaid is supposed to pick up a returning citizen’s medical prescriptions within a week, but it often takes more than a month and “within that time, a woman can relapse, start using again and drop dead.”

Simmons designed Why Not Prosper to be the program she wished she had when she exited prison after substance abuse landed her behind bars with felony convictions for possession, prostitution, and receiving stolen property. Freed from prison after six years, the stigma of being a returning citizen made rebuilding her life outside prison walls and connecting with her children almost impossible.

» READ MORE: Murals of formerly incarcerated Philadelphians aim to change the narrative of life after prison

“Reentry is brutal,” she said. “Philadelphia has a reentry focus but if we don’t hold their hands the ladies will give up on themselves.”

Simmons’s next goal is to develop a retreat center for clients who she always refers to as her “ladies.” She already has an acre of donated land in the Poconos and is now looking to raise $1.5 million to build a center for respite care where her ladies can rest, recuperate and restart.

“It’s a new day for the formerly incarcerated. We have to change mindsets, labels and stigma. So what they made mistakes, look at who they are,” Simmons said, adding that she wanted the ladies to rewrite their narratives.

“We already know their history, their past, their trauma. I want to put some good stuff on clean pages.”

Acknowledgment
The work produced by the Communities & Engagement desk at The Inquirer is supported by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project's donors.