The Power of Home

Joseph House is a residential community for those returning home from prison. It's a place that was created amid the encounters and conversations I had with Florida's incarcerated, a social worker, close friends, and my own prayers and daydreaming while driving from prison to prison.

The pediatrician turned psychoanalyst, DW Winnicott, has helped me with the basic truth: people cannot be made to develop but they can be provided with an unintrusive setting in which development is possible. I have taken to heart Winnicott's affirmation of the "silent integrative forces" that organically develop for a person inhabiting a safe environment.

This is a truth that is bedrock at Joseph House. Home is a place; it is a place where we know we belong. I can't think of a more powerful truth. This is why, in the words of my dear brother Pre: "Joseph house is not a halfway house, it's a home." Home is where one may let go of all these negative thoughts and give themselves over to dreaming again. Home is a physical space where meaningful relationships make it possible to believe in a meaningful world.

If anything, the sense of safety and belonging should prevail and wash over any thoughts of not belonging. It must be known home is also the place where some of the more difficult emotions surface, testing and silently questioning if we are truly secure. Feeling at home may take some time. How might a home in a relatively quiet area provide for those leaving a space filled with the threat and anxiety? This was the question some of us asked as we set out to built a home for those returning to society. Our hope was to create a space that served as an incubator, of sorts, for forming new relationships in a living context.

De-incarceration is the unspecified period that it takes to shake off the prison feel and think past the prison mentality. One may either gradually feel that they can't find their footing apart from the control of the state, or that the unpredictability of the outside world may bring on an unbearable amount of stress. But if one has both the material and relational resources to shake-off the stressors, then their first days out may bring new experiences strengthening their connection with the world around them.

Often a resident will ask me if I believe they can have their own place one day. It's a struggle, no doubt, but I assure them with focus and taking their dreams seriously, I think it is possible. For those who have been shackled to the monotony, tedium, violence, and the sovereign control of zero expectations that sums up prison life, it's liberating to encounter the simple pleasures that help them rebuild their world. It is because we at Joseph House know the power of home that we have purchased the house next door.