My name is Dominique Harris. Today is February 23, 2023. This interview is being conducted at Union City, Georgia Phase 16 Diesel. Do I have your consent to record you and use your likeness?
Yes you do.
During the South DeKalb listening session with Canopy Atlanta, a DeKalb County Sanitation worker expressed concerns for his fellow coworkers that were formerly incarcerated felons, that they were not receiving pay based on their convictions. That led to Canopy Atlanta Senior Fellow Ann Hill Bond to start exploring reentry programs in South DeKalb, and how returning citizens could navigate and socialize back to society. Helping returning citizens successfully reenter society decreases recidivism, and is a increase to public safety. What is your full name?
Kevin Skidmore.
Do I have permission to record you on an interview?
Yes, you do.
Would you like to tell me where you were born? And when?
I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1979. And I moved here to Atlanta at the age of 13 in 1991.
Who was your family? Meaning, you know, did you have relatives living with you with the siblings, with your mom and dad? Who was the family?
Actually, it was just myself and my mother. I'm an only child so it was just me and her. I have family in New Orleans, but when we moved here, it was just she and I.
Are they any traditional names that comes with your family that's of importance or, you know, ties into the work they did?
What you mean?
Just any type of like, you know, Washington or traditional names, nicknames. Any type of tradition family tradition that might have came with you from Atlanta, from New Orleans to Atlanta.
Not that I know of. No, not really.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So what did your community look like outside your family, meaning besides Mom? Did you have any other people around you that you can call friends or family?
Do you mean before incarceration?
Before incarceration, yes.
My peers. Yeah, honestly my peers and the older guys in the neighborhood, which they would call now "OGs." But the older guys, they pretty much, we'd looked up to them. We pretty much raised ourselves kinda, so I didn't really have anybody else.
How y'all meet? Like your peers, how y'all meet? You know, in the neighborhood?
Yeah, we met in a neighborhood or at school. We had common interests. That's pretty much how we would meet and we mainly had the common interests of living in the same apartments and just saw each other enough. And we just end up you know, being cool to some new friends.
Okay, tell me about the house you grew up in? Like whether it's in New Orleans or Atlanta, tell me about the house you grew up in. Like, was it furnished? Was it loving? Was there care? Anything about the house that you just remember from then to now?
Man, what I remember most vividly about the houses in New Orleans. One, in New Orleans, every house that I lived in got burglarized — every one. So growing up like as a kid, to a teenager, I'm accustomed to it. When I go to school, my mom would go to work. Our house might get broken in. And I kind of grew up with that. It didn't happen as much here when we moved to Atlanta, but that's kind of what I grew up in that kind of environment.
On a positive note, like do you remember I'm sorry, any type of fashion you might have been interested in, clothes you might have wore or wanted? You know whether it's Starter or Guess, whatever it may be? Do you remember any of that from your childhood?
Oh, absolutely. Man, you might as well call me Polo. That's all I wanted, like, as a kid, Polo. Starter was popular, but Polo — if I had a polo shirt, I felt like oh yeah, I made it, I'm finna go to school flexin.
You remember your first job?
Is that before or after?
Before.
So yeah, my first job. My very first job was at a grocery store called Cub Foods over on Lawrenceville Highway. And I remember I worked that job and it lasted one day. The next day, I quit. I ain't ever go back. After that, I had a second job, which was at Dairy Queen. I worked there for about a week, and I quit that also. And I have to admit, I was, I had become addicted to fast money. So I was already kind of hustling, but I was like, well let me get a job, trying to, you know, cover up what I'm doing. But going to work at 15 years old, you had a work permit, and you know, I can go in in the hood and make a move to get some money. Man, this job takes too long to do so I was like 'I'm out.'
Okay, so um, I guess you've touched on your background a little bit. Would you like to expound a little more about your background, as far as just what you want to expand on and how you became involved in advocacy in South DeKalb?
My background is more or less I was one of those youth that I didn't really get — I come from a crime-ridden environment in New Orleans, but I didn't really get into crime until I moved here. And the reason I even got involved in it is because my mother was struggling. So when she moved to here from New Orleans, she had a house there, and she couldn't sell it. So she had to pay the rent there and the rent here, which means she didn't have the money she used to have. So in my mind, my juvenile mind, I'm thinking, I'm gonna help her help me. So I started, I started with stealing candy out of, out of the gas stations, and selling it at school. Eventually, that turned into drug dealing. And then I didn't like the drugs because the older guys wouldn't let me sell ... So I had to find another lane and a friend of my older brother introduced me to robbing, and that's how I ended up doing that. Really? I was only robbing to go get fresh. I'm finna go lay somebody down, and go straight to the mile mark. You know, so and then my mother, you know, such a great woman, she, you know, and she worked hard, she worked hard. And she couldn't monitor me. And I kind of just had kind of gotten out of control. She did her best, she did her best. And I thank to this day that, you know, the work ethic I have right now came directly from her because when I left prison, one thing I can say that she showed me, she showed up for work every day, no matter what, no matter how she felt. So it wasn't hard for me to get out and get a job and just show up.
Um, and the second part of their question, how did you get involved in advocacy in DeKalb?
So I emailed one day, honestly, one day, I was at work, and life was really, really good. Like, I'm making like, 70k at the job. Then I got a truck. I'm good. I only — I'm good. You know, I'm traveling, I had a passport. I'm living life on that level. And one day, God was pulling at my heart. One day God was pulling at my heart while I was at the job and was like, "I see, you know, you're doing good, but who are you helping?" So I went on a mission, like figuring out how could I just give back and initially, when I sent the email, I thought it was for community service. I just wanted to help in any kind of way, you know, when you just don't know what to do, so I'm gonna do something, I don't know what to do, so I just email , say, "Hey, how can I help? Whatever I can do to help." I gave them some bullets on like, you know, who I was. Like, "Hey, former convicted felon, I do this, went to school here." I just gave her a list of the things I had been doing and she emailed me and asked me to come in for a meeting. And I came and met with her, not realizing that was with DeKalb County Probation Office, which I am currently a board member of and still have been a board member of for what, almost five years now. Um, but that's how I got involved. So once I got in touch with her, everything kind of spiraled from now.
Okay, what are some of the biggest challenges facing individuals who are reentering society in DeKalb, and how do you and your organization work to address these challenges?
Man, breaking that spirit of entitlement. Like a lot of a lot of individuals come out and think everybody's gonna just open the doors for them and do everything for them, and that's just not the truth. And then also, just trying to help talk them through that, like, it's gonna take time. People say that we're gonna do this, but when you get out, they might not and you, you know, can't get mad at them. Like, maybe they ain't got it, they're just, who knows? But, you know, just getting an individual to understand that nobody owes us anything. That's the biggest challenge. Once we get over that hurdle, nobody owes us anything. We go hard because one thing about it — can't nobody outwork a convicted felon.
Can you share a success story of someone you successfully helped reenter society after being incarcerated and how your organization was able to help them?
My success story, I'd say the first one, the biggest one of many, but I will say James Young. I met him at Metro Reentry. And he, he pushed up on me say, hey, I want a job when I get out. I said, okay, like I said with everybody, it was, "OK, just find me, you know, call me." And he did. He called me when he got out. I told him what to do. He went and did everything I told him to do, he got his CDL. And once he called, he sent me a picture of the CDL, I had to honor my word. I went ahead and gave him a job, bought a truck and put him in a truck. And he's still with me now. He's been with me since he's been home, and it's been a little over three years. So that's a success story that's really close to my heart because, you know, he always will say like, "I don't know what my life would be. If you didn't give me a chance."
What are your hopes for the future of reentry advocacy in DeKalb, and what process do you think you can see coming in the next few years? Progress, I'm sorry. Well, progress in the next few years.
I hope, I hope to see, I hope to see the employment opportunities open up more, and also the opportunity to have a nice place to live. Because if we could, you know, solve that problem, we could face a lot of things. So I'm hoping that the progress we see in DeKalb will be with more jobs that are, you know, accepting individuals with a background. And more apartment complexes accepting individuals with a background, because you have the money but you get hit with the background, you know. I went through it firsthand, I went to over 30 different apartment complexes before I found my first one. The first one was in the same neighborhood where I caught my charge. It felt like a setup. So I would love to see that progress. And it's something that, you know, is being worked on. I can say the one good thing I do know about DeKalb is that the probation office has really taken a different approach. And I feel like since I've been involved, they really do try to help, which once upon a time they were not trying to help, so.
How do you think the broader community can be better educated and informed about the challenges facing individuals who are reentering society? And how they can be supportive? How do you think the broader community can be better educated and informed about the challenges that individuals returning face, and how you know, they can help you to reenter society, and be more supportive of that?
I think we got to find a creative way to make them aware. I don't know the exact way, but I do know, I want to reference a skit that I did in New Orleans at the Americans Corrections Conference. And we did a skit in that room, it was about 50 people. And it was cool, like, everybody got a folder. And in that folder was your name, your prison sentence, you might have had like, a few dollars, like in play money, or Monopoly money, and that you had an agenda, you had to go to probation, you had to go to work, you had all these things you had to do. And we had to figure it out, we had to get that folder and go around and figure out how to get the work. Well, you can't go to work because you ain't reported yet, so you got to go and just try to navigate through that. I think if we could put something together like that, that will really, really help educate, you know, the larger population because it's really, really tough and a challenge coming home from incarceration is already the fact that you have a lack of information, but then you have to work with such limited resources, and try to figure out how to do everything. And even in that instance, in that room, you had prison wardens, all kinds of people different levels of the prison system, and a few of them in that room went back to jail. Because you had a corner with about 20 Cecil's from jail. Like one of them tried to try to sell something at a pawn shop and got in trouble, but, and he was laughing, but he was really trying. So I think we could put something together like that because skits really, really show people like this is what they're going through. So if we could just get to do something like that, just get them to really understand. I think that'll definitely help a whole lot.
So using, using art to reflect what a person is going through to make it visual, instead of just telling them, 'Oh, this is what being a returning citizen is."
Yes, absolutely. Even if it was say a little 30-minute little movie or something, just to show the challenges because we people are visual — you can tell me all day, and I can hear it, but when I see it, it is a little bit different. You know, like, when you see it, you can't, like, you can't not address it. When you hear, you hear it and you know 'okay,' but when you see it empathy kind of kicks in, so I think if we could get something put together like that, I think that will really, really help. That was a good day. That's a good idea too, like a little commercial or something, seriously — Yeah, man. Call Tyler see if he could, you know. Nah, I'm just playin'.
Um, again, thank you Kev, for your time. It's been very great.
