Susan Burton knows just how hard it is to get back on track after being released from prison. It's an experience she lived through six times, once for each of the prison terms she served.
"One of the things about incarceration is that you're deprived. You lose all of your identity and then its given back one day and you're ill-equipped to actually embrace it and work it," Burton says. "Each time I left prison I left with the resolve to get my life together, to get a job, to get back on track. And each time the task became more and more and more daunting."
Burton's prison sentences were all drug related. After her sixth release, she finally received the addiction treatment and counseling she so desperately needed. Slowly, she began to rebuild her own life ā then she turned her attention to others in Watts, the Los Angeles neighborhood she had grown up in.
[For more of this story, written by Terry Gross, go to http://www.npr.org/2017/05/16/...-rebuild-their-lives]
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