This column is part of Times Opinion’s 2024 Giving Guide. Read more about the guide in a note from Times Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury.

On April 4, 2017, Damon Christian Watson walked out of jail in Los Angeles County after being incarcerated for nine months for identity theft, burglary and other convictions. Alone, ashamed and addicted to drugs, he wound up returning to the life he’d led before his arrest.

“I was a dead man walking,” Watson told me. “I was a homeless drug user on Skid Row. I was unrecognizable.”

If you think people are free when they get out of prison, consider Watson’s story. Like many former convicts, Watson emerged from the criminal justice system with zero resources to help change his direction, which is one reason most people who come out of prison quickly re-enter the system. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 68 percent of people released from state prisons are arrested again within three years; 83 percent within nine years.

“Prison breaks people and it makes them unable to rebuild,” Watson, now the senior director of legal services and corporate development at New Jersey Re-entry Corporation, a nonprofit that assists former prisoners, told me. “You come out and you have no hope, no resources. And if you don’t have those things? You’re not much different than the person who was put in jail in the first place.”

This is the ugly back end of America’s mass incarceration disaster, a system that focuses far more on retribution than on rehabilitation or redemption. And Watson himself is a stunning example of what we lose when we, as a society, continue to punish people who have already served their time.