One Love, One Community – Detroit Community-Engaged Research Program

One Love, One Community

Coming into a new work environment changes a lot of people. I am no exception. When I started my internship at Focus Hope 5 weeks ago I definitely didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I didn’t know that I would be working with  people who ranged from having  an eighth grade education to people with master’s degrees. I also didn’t know that I will be working with a lot of felons.  

I haven’t had a lot of experience or known a lot of people who have felonies so when I learned that I would be spending a lot of time with felons my bais took over how I interacted with the people participating in my program. I am a bit  embarrassed to admit that I was afraid of the people I was hired to help.

The stigma attached to felons and attached to the crimes that felons commit was overwhelming for me. When I think of a felon I think of a mass murderer or someone who has committed a horrific crime. It wasn’t until I begin to open up and talk to the people in my program that I realized  felonies are not that hard to come by.

A lot of the people in my program had committed nonviolent crimes and those crimes resulted in a felony. I believe I had trouble looking past the societal stigma and seeing that there was an actual person behind that.  I think a lot of people who are tasked with helping people who have criminal records or are down on their luck fail to realize that there is an actual person behind the case file.

Ever since making this realization within myself I look at people differently. I look homeless people differently because being homeless is not who they are,  just like being a felon does not define who you are as a person. I think the stigma behind a lot of these societal labels given to people need to be broken because they make it easy for people to forget about the humanity behind the person they are labeling.

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