Justice & The Next 250: Tearing Down the Walls We Build Around Ourselves and Each Other

By Lana Mendis (Leading with Conviction™ 2022)

The last time I saw my 17-year-old daughter, she was sitting in a waiting room.

She had come with me that morning because I told her it would be quick — just a stop, an arraignment, an in-and-out procedure. I had never been in trouble with the law before. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So she sat. And she waited. And hours passed. And no one — not one person in that system — walked out to tell my child that her mother wasn’t coming back out that door.

That was the last time I saw her face.

No goodbye. No explanation. No decency extended to a seventeen-year-old girl sitting alone in a hallway, wondering where her mother went.

I want you to hold that image as we celebrate 250 years of American freedom on July 4th. I want you to hold it while the fireworks go off.

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Before I was incarcerated, I had a life that most people would recognize as success. I worked at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, UBS, and the Chicago Board of Trade. I had good credit, a career built over twenty-plus years in white-collar corporate finance, and children I was raising the best I could — while carrying trauma from a childhood that had broken me in ways I wouldn’t fully understand until I was locked inside a cell with nowhere else to look but inward.

I grew up in foster care. I survived physical, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse. I survived domestic violence. I survived things I am only now, for the first time, able to say out loud and in public. I share this not for sympathy — I share it because the system that later prosecuted me never once asked about any of it. It did not factor into the recommendation. It did not soften the gavel. My pain was not admissible.

What I can tell you is this: before I ever saw the inside of a courtroom on criminal charges, I had already spent two years inside a different system — family court. A brutal divorce and custody battle that I initiated to protect myself and my children cost me everything I had built. My ex-husband’s refusal to let go, his repeated appearances at my workplace, the constant dragging in and out of court — it cost me my position at Merrill Lynch and, with it, my twenty-plus-year career in finance. I found part-time work. I lost financial ground fast. I had no child support coming in. I was holding on with nothing left to hold with. Desperate circumstances produced a desperate choice — one I have never repeated, one I would never repeat, and one I do not offer as an excuse. I offer it as context, because context is exactly what the system refused to give me.

What was admissible was the color of my skin.

I sat in the same courtroom, before the same judge, alongside people who had defrauded not hundreds of thousands but millions of dollars — people who had come before that same judge again and again, who had recidivated, who had more charges, more history. They went home. They were not Black or Brown. I, a first-time, nonviolent offender, who had been formally assessed and recommended by the court’s own process to be sent home on probation — was not.

I was originally facing 33 years. I was told I would die in prison.

I did not die in prison. But pieces of me did.

This is what I want the next 250 years to reckon with — not just the walls of prisons, but the walls we build around each other inside this work.

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I went from Cuyahoga County Jail — where I sat for months before sentencing, unable to close my affairs, unable to communicate with my children, indigent and invisible — to Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, and then to the Northeast Reintegration Center. While I sat in county, my car was repossessed. My credit, which I had spent decades building, collapsed. I could not call lenders. I could not explain. I could not do anything. The judge would not grant me even the briefest window to go home and put my life in order before prison swallowed it whole.

When I came home, I did what people like me “are supposed to do.” I went back to school. I completed my Bachelor’s degree. I earned my MBA in organizational management and administration. I began doctoral work. I wrote a book. I built. I kept building.

And still — a cashier job at a fast-food restaurant wouldn’t dare hire me.

Over 20 years of corporate finance. Graduate degrees. A published memoir. Leadership credentials. And the box on the application — the one that asks whether you’ve ever been convicted of a crime — closed every door before I could even knock.

Here is what no one talks about loudly enough: this doesn’t just happen in corporate America. It happens inside the criminal justice reform space itself. The very organizations built to dismantle these barriers sometimes replicate them internally. There are those of us who arrive with education, professional experience, and hard-won wisdom — and are told, quietly or directly, that our credentials don’t count here. That what matters is our wound, not our wholeness. That we are most useful when we perform our pain, not when we lead with our expertise.

We have to do better than that. We have to be better than that.

If we are going to demand that corporations practice fair chance hiring, we must practice it ourselves. If we are going to demand that systems see the full humanity of people with records, our organizations must see the full humanity of the people we claim to serve. You cannot build a liberation movement on the same hierarchy you say you’re tearing down.

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This is what I want the next 250 years to reckon with — not just the walls of prisons, but the walls we build around each other inside this work.

I want us to reckon with the fact that when someone comes home with nothing — no housing, no credit history, no employment, no family safety net, no access to mental health services — and we offer them a waiting list, we have already decided their outcome. The recidivism rate is not a mystery. It is a math problem. You cannot subtract every resource a person has and then be surprised when they can’t build from zero.

I want us to reckon with what it costs a child to wait in a hallway and never be told the truth.

I want us to stop dismissing small wins. A win is a win. Progress is progress. When we tear down every incremental step because it isn’t the whole staircase, we demoralize the very people doing the climbing. We need to celebrate the steps and keep building them.

I want us to stop just talking. I have been in enough rooms, on enough panels, in enough convenings, to know that our sector can be very articulate about problems and very slow about solutions. We need strategies. We need implementation. We need consistency and follow-through. We need to hold ourselves to the standard we demand of everyone else.

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250 years later, we still have not resolved the question the founders refused to answer: Freedom for whom?

July 4th, 1776: 250 years later, we still have not resolved the question the founders refused to answer: Freedom for whom?

Not for the woman who sat indigent in a county jail while her credit score disintegrated and her daughter waited in a hallway.

Not for the millions of people who come home to closed doors, waiting lists, and organizations that see their pain but not their power.

Not for the Black and Brown communities who watch people with more charges and more money walk out of courtrooms while they are told they will die inside them.

Freedom is not a firework. It is not a speech. It is not a celebration held once every 250 years.

Freedom is what happens when a woman with a record can get a job that matches her over twenty years of experience. It is what happens when a child is not left alone in a hallway without an explanation. It is what happens when organizations that say they believe in redemption actually build cultures that reflect that belief. It is what happens when we stop performing justice and start practicing it — on each other, first.

I promised my children I would come home. The system made that promise nearly impossible to keep. I kept it anyway.

Now I am asking the system — all of it, including us — to keep its promise too.

 

Lana J. Mendis is a Leading with Conviction™ 2022 alumna, Leadership Training Manager at JustLeadershipUSA, Ohio State Director for the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, and author of Unseen, Unbroken: The Story of a Resilient Woman. She holds a BA in Leadership & Pastoral Care and an MBA in Organizational Management & Leadership, and brings over two decades of corporate experience to her work in criminal justice reform.

 

Published in partnership with the Justice & The Next 250 campaign