Nobody Knows What Happened to Them

People sometimes ask what I believe politically. Others ask about my spirituality. Usually they are looking for a label that will tell them where to place me before we continue the conversation. Socialist. Progressive. Buddhist. Abolitionist. Something familiar enough that they can predict what I am likely to say next.

I understand the impulse because I spent years looking for the right label myself. I read political philosophy, economics, comparative religion, psychology, anthropology, and history, looking for whatever would finally explain why people behave the way they do and why societies keep producing the same kinds of harm. Every tradition helped me see something. None explained everything.

The books gave me language. Life gave the ideas weight.

I spent twenty-six years in prison. Before that I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, about forty-five miles out from San Antonio, where we raised Quarter Horses. Cedar and barnyard, guinea hens and peacocks going all day. I played football, I hunted, I loved animals, and summers were the rivers, swimming and tubing. Violence was ordinary enough in that house that I had no word for it until I was grown. I was beaten often, and if I cried the beatings turned savage. That is an efficient way to teach a child that his own feelings are the dangerous part. When it got bad I took a horse out into the woods.

After I got out I had a life, and a relationship betrayal yanked it out from under me. The betrayal was the event. The condition, which I did not see until later, was that everything I had, including where I slept, ran through one other person. What followed was a year of crashing at friends’ houses, sleeping in the woods, and feeling completely unmoored, everything organized around getting through the day. The denials wore on me worse than the sleeping outside did. Every housing application came back to the same messy past, and no form had a place to put it.

Then I got sober, and I am sober now, which is a present tense rather than a finished one. Then I found work alongside people rebuilding their lives after addiction, incarceration, trauma, and violence, which is where I still am.

None of that handed me conclusions. What it gave me was a long apprenticeship in being explained.

Somebody always had a single cause for me. The home explained the trouble. The trouble explained the sentence. The sentence explained everything that came after. Each account was partly accurate, all of them were too small, and every one was assembled by somebody who had never been in the room. I heard them read back to me in cold rooms, across a table, out of a file.

I know what a confident single-cause explanation feels like from the inside. I knew it was wrong a long time before I could say why. The theory came later. It helped me name patterns I had already lived inside.

The longer I paid attention, the harder it became to believe in single explanations.

People want homelessness to be about addiction until they meet someone who became homeless after a divorce, a job loss, a medical crisis, or a rent increase. Then they want it to be about housing until they meet someone whose untreated mental illness has cost them every apartment they have ever had. They want violence to be about bad people until they begin looking closely at trauma, family, neighborhood conditions, social learning, isolation, opportunity, and the ways institutions respond to harm.

The closer you get to actual lives, the less cooperative reality becomes with simple answers.

People who run programs already know this in a form nobody says plainly in a staff meeting. The outcomes will not move. The client journey breaks somewhere nobody can locate. The partnership that looked right on paper does not function, and the theory of change in the grant application has not been opened since the money came in.

Then there is the part underneath all of it.

Ask what happened to the people who came through your doors two years ago and nobody knows. Not because anyone is hiding anything. Nobody was required to find out, so the thing you would need in order to see the problem was never built.

Those two facts hold each other in place. Neither one comes apart on its own.

Everything is interdependent

Outcomes refuse to move because the causes sit outside the boundaries of the program trying to change them.

Politics shapes economics. Economics shapes neighborhoods. Neighborhoods shape schools. Schools shape opportunity. Opportunity shapes health. Health shapes families. Families shape children. Those children grow up inside the institutions, expectations, wounds, advantages, and limitations they inherited, and then they help shape what comes next.

We draw lines between these things because we need ways to study them. The lines may be useful, but they are not real in the way we sometimes pretend. Life does not divide itself into separate departments just because our institutions do.

I do not compartmentalize life because life does not arrive in compartments. Work, play, politics, economics, eating, relationships, spiritual practice, community, conflict, health, money, and family are parts of the same life, and each one shapes the others.

Over time, I found language for this.

Intersectionality describes how people and problems exist where many forces meet: class, race, gender, family, economics, history, trauma, biology, geography, culture, and policy. Each matters. None explains the whole person or the whole problem by itself.

What I think of as integral thinking asks us to hold those levels together instead of picking one and ignoring the rest. The individual and the system. Freedom and responsibility. Biology and environment. Prevention and accountability. These are often argued as competing explanations when they are different parts of the same reality.

Buddhism speaks of dependent origination, though I tend to think of it as interdependent origination. I do not accept it simply because it is Buddhist. I think Buddhism recognized something that remains true whether Buddhism exists or not.

Nothing exists entirely on its own. Everything arises through relationship.

Even saying everything is connected feels too thin. Connected things can still be pictured as separate objects with links between them. Interdependence goes further. We do not merely influence one another from a distance. We participate in creating one another’s conditions.

Other people reached these conclusions before me, and it would be dishonest to write as though I had arrived alone. The researchers Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda published the adverse childhood experiences study in 1998 and documented strong relationships between childhood adversity and health risks later in life. The political economist Elinor Ostrom studied communities that managed shared resources without relying exclusively on either centralized state control or privatization. She found many of them governing through rules they had developed and enforced together.

Ostrom is the one who cost me something. I came in with a preference about who solves problems, and it did not survive her evidence.

What that does to responsibility

Recognizing the conditions that shape people does not erase choice. It places choice where it actually exists, inside a web of relationships, histories, pressures, opportunities, wounds, habits, and consequences.

Our choices matter. The conditions in which we make them matter too. Both are true at once, and most arguments about crime and poverty are conducted as though only one could be.

Every decision enters an already moving world. The way I treat someone affects our relationship. Relationships shape families. Families shape communities. Communities shape institutions. Institutions shape culture. Culture shapes what people come to believe is normal, possible, acceptable, or inevitable, and those beliefs narrow or widen the choices available to people I will never meet.

What we call individual choices become collective conditions. Those conditions shape the next round of individual choices. The process does not stop.

We are always inheriting conditions shaped by people who came before us. We are always shaping conditions for people we will never meet. None of us acts alone, even when it feels that way.

That does not mean responsibility disappears into the system. It means responsibility is larger than blame.

A person can be responsible for harm while still having been shaped by conditions they did not choose. A society can hold that person accountable while also examining the conditions that made the harm more likely. Understanding does not erase responsibility. It tells us what responsibility has to include if we want a different result.

Why I am an abolitionist

Abolition gets reduced to prisons. For me, it starts with a larger question: what produces harm, and what would have to change for less of it to occur?

That question has no quarrel with the reality of danger. Its quarrel is with allowing punishment to stand in for safety.

If violence arises from interconnected conditions, punishment alone cannot reach it. Sometimes people have to be separated in order to protect others. Safety matters. Accountability matters. I have never believed otherwise, and treating those concerns as manufactured is how this argument loses everyone who has buried somebody.

But separation is not transformation, and punishment does not touch most of the conditions that made the harm more likely in the first place.

Housing is a public safety issue. So are schools, behavioral health, meaningful work, family stability, social connection, and what a community does with someone after they fail. These are not adjacent concerns that safety advocates should get to eventually. They are part of the same subject.

What a thing produces

The same reasoning runs upward. If conditions shape people, then institutions shape conditions, and the useful question about any institution is what it produces rather than what it says it values.

The sociologist Robert Merton distinguished between consequences that are intended and recognized and those that are unintended or unrecognized. He called them manifest and latent functions. An institution can accomplish part of what it announces while also producing effects nobody planned, acknowledged, or wanted. Nobody has to be lying for the stated purpose and the actual consequences to come apart.

Intentions matter, but outcomes tell us whether our understanding was accurate. When an institution produces the same results repeatedly, those results have to be treated as part of how the institution actually functions, whether anyone intended them or not.

So I stopped grading ideas only by where they came from. Labels can tell us something about an idea’s history, values, and alliances. They tell us much less about what the idea will produce under actual conditions.

What I ask now is narrower and harder to evade. Does this leave people healthier than it found them? Does it reduce suffering without trading away freedom? Does it hold people accountable without cruelty? Does it put power somewhere it can be checked and taken back?

There is a floor under that test.

Nobody’s dignity is available for trade. Power must be checked. A person subject to a decision must have standing to contest it.

I did not derive those commitments from data, and I will not let data overrule them. Evidence can tell me whether a method is producing what I expected. It cannot make humiliation, domination, or disposability acceptable.

If a result ever seems to require abandoning those commitments, my first assumption is that I am measuring the wrong thing.

Within that boundary, I want to learn from whatever works. I do not much care who thought of it. If it repeatedly fails, I do not care how old it is, how popular it is, or how well it polls with people I like.

What that looks like when it is not abstract

A man finishes his sentence and walks out with a paper packet, a bus voucher, and no way to prove who he is.

Everything he does next requires identification: a job application, a lease, a bank account, a prescription, a phone in his own name. The first weeks after release can be consumed by standing in lines to establish that he exists, at exactly the point when stability matters most.

Nobody designed that. It is what three reasonable rules do when they meet each other in a hallway.

The fix is administrative and unglamorous. The department of corrections issues a state identification card and helps secure the necessary records before the gate rather than after, and he walks out holding them.

I’m not going to oversell this. Pre-release identification does not lower recidivism by itself. It is one barrier removed, not a reentry plan. Its value depends on what is waiting alongside it: housing, transportation, healthcare, work, relationships, and support.

Several states operate some version of pre-release identification, but the programs differ enough that the existence of one tells us little about how well it functions.

The failure mode is easy to see once you look: an identification card listing a shelter address, handed to a man with nowhere to use it, followed by a state agency reporting a completed initiative.

What I like about the example is that anyone can check it.

Ask your corrections department, which in my case means TDCJ, what share of the people it released last year walked out with usable identification. Ask how the department knows. Ask what happened when the identification contained an address that could not be used.

If nobody can answer, you have learned something about what the system is organized to notice.

That is the method. It is not a complete philosophy. It is a habit available to anyone willing to be told something they did not want to hear.

My own work belongs on the same scale. Amparo, which I run out of Austin, is an attempt. I believe the reasoning behind it is sound, and I do not yet have outcomes that would convince a skeptic who walked in cold.

Writing about refusing to oversell things would be a strange place to start overselling mine.

What the test is for

A test needs something to be aimed at, and mine is aimed at a world where people have enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, care when they are sick, and work worth doing. Not because they have earned the right to exist, but because they already do.

I want children to inherit fewer of their parents’ injuries than their parents inherited. I want neighborhoods where people know each other well enough that loneliness is not treated as an ordinary feature of adult life. I want schools that teach students how to think, because they will have to deal with the parts we got wrong.

On power, I am harder to place, and I have made peace with that. I want an economy that rewards creativity and effort without allowing accumulated wealth to become command over other people’s lives. I want a government strong enough to stop exploitation and structured so that it cannot quietly become the thing it was meant to prevent.

I do not trust concentrated power, whether it sits in Washington, on Wall Street, behind a pulpit, in a boardroom, or inside a movement that began with good intentions. Every arrangement I have watched closely has become more dangerous in proportion to how difficult it was to question, restrain, or remove.

One of these I hold above the others.

A criminal legal system can take public safety completely seriously and still refuse to organize itself around revenge. Some people have to be separated from others for a while. That is true, and pretending otherwise costs victims their trust in anyone who says it.

Even then, the person is a person.

We should not build institutions whose working purpose is to break the human spirit, and we should not be surprised when the institutions we built return people to us broken.

None of this is a wish list, and I am not asking anyone to be moved by it. It is what I am measuring against. It is also why I have to remain willing to learn that something I support, including something I helped create, does not work.

That brings me to the last thing I want, and the one that costs the most.

I want changing your mind to count as evidence of learning.

Reentry taught me that one. Almost nobody wakes up believing they are the villain of their own story. Most people respond to the world as they understand it, carrying injuries they did not choose and repeating patterns they cannot see from the inside.

None of that dissolves responsibility. Harm is still harm. Accountability is what makes repair possible at all.

It means that if we want a different result, we have to understand the conditions producing the one we have. Punishment is not a substitute for understanding.

The strongest arguments against this

The first objection goes after interdependence.

If everything is connected to everything, then nothing is ever anybody’s fault, and no intervention can be evaluated because every effect has ten thousand causes. Systems language becomes a way for educated people to launder excuses. It arrives most often on behalf of the person who caused harm and almost never on behalf of the person harmed.

A mother whose son was killed does not experience conditions as an explanation. She experiences it as a stranger telling her that the man who did it was also a victim, which is both true and unbearable. Asking her to hold that is asking her to carry something the rest of us would not carry ourselves.

Explanation is not exoneration.

The second objection goes after the outcomes test.

Everybody claims to judge by outcomes. Nobody announces a preference for worse results. Governments and institutions responsible for tremendous harm have always had numbers and charts.

The disagreement is about which outcomes count, how far out we measure them, whose experience matters, and who gets to define words like healthier and safer. An outcomes test cannot settle those questions by itself.

There is also a practical objection. Somebody who will not hold a position is useless in a coalition. Movements are built by people willing to be wrong out loud together.

These objections are substantially correct.

Interdependence explains, and explanation is not exoneration. The two get confused because they sometimes use the same facts. What changes is what we do with them. I can say that a man’s violence grew out of conditions and still say he is responsible for it. I can support his removal from a community. I can believe that the family he harmed is owed something he cannot repay.

What I will not say is that the account is settled once he is gone. The conditions remain, and they continue working.

If holding both feels unbearable, that is because it is. I have not found a version that is not.

The outcomes test cannot choose my values. Its function is smaller. It requires me to say what I expect before I find out, in terms somebody else could check, and then look.

It does not replace principle. It keeps principle from becoming immune to consequences.

On being a bad partisan: guilty. I’m worse in a room than I would be with a fixed position, and I have lost arguments I could have won by choosing a side and staying there.

What I get in exchange is that I have changed my mind five or six times about things that mattered, and every one of those changes came from watching a result I did not predict.

Here is what would move me. Show me a domain where deciding from principle, without testing the results, consistently produced better lives over twenty years. Not one case, because a case can be found for anything. A pattern. I have looked and have not found one, and I would want to know.

What is actually in the way

I have described a test that mostly cannot be run, and I would rather say so myself than have it pointed out.

Nearly any publicly funded program can tell you how many people it served last year. Almost none can tell you what happened to those people two years later.

Nobody was required to find out. Funders asked for outputs because outputs are cheaper to count. An outcome means following a person after they have stopped being your client, and most programs have no staff, authority, data access, or budget line for that work.

The result is that we cannot tell effective programs from ineffective ones. Weak programs survive on sincerity and polished reporting. Strong programs get cut during a lean cycle because nobody collected the evidence needed to defend them.

It is worth being precise about what stands in the way, because complicated is what people say when they have not looked.

Answering the two-year question at any scale means matching records across corrections, Medicaid, housing, and workforce systems and following a cohort forward. Behind that requirement sits a harder one. Those systems are walled off from each other by statute, by privacy rules written for reasons I would defend, and by the plain fact that no agency benefits from producing a number that could embarrass it.

In most states that is a legislative fix and a multi-year build, and I do not think it is close.

But there is something smaller that needs no new statute and no statewide data warehouse.

Take your own program. Find out what happened to the people who left it two years ago.

Not how many people you served. What happened to them.

If you have the number, ask what it shows, how it was measured, and who disappeared from the count. You may have found something worth defending. You may have found something that needs to change.

If you don’t have the number, you have found the first thing in the way.