Mr. Smith Comes Home

“Being in a cage sucks.”

Twelve years ago, Jeff Smith was a promising young politician from St. Louis. He had the spunk, charisma, and grassroots following that nearly defeated a Missouri political dynasty, now in the form of Russ Carnahan, for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2004 elections. Although Smith ceded the closely-contested race to Carnahan — by a margin of only 1.6 percent — he would rebound by becoming a state senator in Jefferson City just two years later. Smith, it seemed, was back on track to eventually land a job in Washington. By 2009, however, he would instead find himself in the remote town of Manchester, KY, the cold crack of metal bars collapsing around a cage that housed him in a medium-security prison.

After lying to federal investigators in 2004 about knowledge of his campaign sending out fliers criticizing Carnahan without properly identifying who funded the attack, Smith was sentenced to one year and one day in prison when the crime was uncovered five years later. The transition from freedom to imprisonment was one that, expectedly, did not come naturally to the young politician accustomed to the buzzing nature of life outside.

“There’s a lot of little adjustments that you don’t even think about,” Smith said. “Outside of prison, I was always in perpetual motion. But I remember the first time I got called down to the prison admin building — and they make you wait all the time in prison — so I’m waiting outside this guy’s office for like 90 minutes, and I keep getting these phantom buzzes because my Blackberry was always on vibrate. So, to sit by myself in prison for two hours without anything except my thoughts… it’s harder than you think. It’s a lot harder than you think.”

Despite the difficulty, these long periods of near-forced introspection also allowed Smith to reach the depths of his circumstance through contemplating what landed him behind prison bars.

“Waiting in line for hours and hours on end with nothing to occupy you… it forces you to think, ‘how did I get here?’” Smith said. “What happened in my life? What changed about me that caused me to make a mistake that put me here?”

In 2010, Smith was released from the Manchester Federal Correctional Institution. He spent the following five years at The New School in New York educating students on urban political economy, legislative strategy, public policy, campaign management, and courses on incarceration.

In June 2016, Smith returned to St. Louis and began his job as Executive Vice President of Concordance Academy. At Concordance, Smith works to help recently released prisoners find employment. According to Smith, about 90 percent of employers perform criminal background checks in America and the overwhelming majority of employers will not hire anyone with an incarceration history. To try and alleviate this problem in any form, Smith recruits employers and talks to CEOs of different companies about the mission of Concordance, inquiring if they would consider hiring certain people out of prison.
Smith “work[s] to convince employers that our guys are going to have a broader, more comprehensive support network than anyone else coming out of prison in the country, and so they’re more likely to be successful at a company.”

Each person in the program receives a team of volunteers “to surround them with love, support, and anything they need to nourish them emotionally,” according to Smith.

This support network is important, Smith said, because many ex-prisoners are ostracized after their release.

In addition to helping find affordable housing for Concordance clients, Smith advocates “more compassionate, sensible criminal justice policy” to federal state, and local public officeholders, working with policymakers at the state level to receive state funding for the program.

The Academy is also instrumental in providing career aid to recently released prisoners with bleak prospects of rebounding in the “real world”.

“Most [of our] people have nothing. They don’t have any money, they don’t have any family support, they don’t have community support, a lot of their friends have abandoned them. They definitely don’t have a PhD from a top university. They don’t have job references or work history,” Smith said. “I didn’t have any issues that most people come out with. I didn’t suffer any long-term psychological or physical trauma, and so many people stood by me, and I had a hard time finding a good job. So imagine how hard it is for everybody else. I felt it was important to try to give other people the type of second chance that I got from the New School. That’s why I’m doing it.”

Beyond the difficulty of finding external stability upon release from prison, the inmates Smith rehabilitates often harbor gaping internal gashes.

“The work I do is with people who have suffered a ton of trauma. Some of them have seen people get killed, and some of those people were friends or relatives. They’ve seen things no human should see,” Smith said.

“We’re trying to help people grapple with all the emotions they couldn’t grapple with in prison, because if you express emotion in prison, you’re weak — and you can’t be weak. So we’re working with damaged people — and they’re damaged people we can repair.”

Helping ex-convicts was always a source of interest for Smith, but his experience as a prisoner gave him an entirely new perspective.

“When I got elected [in 2006], I saw that this was a huge issue facing people in my District, and so I decided to work on legislation in that area — never in a million years imagining that I’d be locked up myself. But I think my experience deepened [my concern for the issue], gave me a whole new window into it. With lived experience, it’s a whole new level of engagement,” Smith said.

Smith’s multi-faceted perspective not only informs his career, but qualifies him as the quintessential candidate for his job.

“How many people in the country can say they were a lawmaker, a scholar with the ability to do research on an issue that informs them substantively around criminal justice, and then also was in prison?” Smith said.

“That trifecta is rare enough that I thought I should go do this stuff on the ground, that I should take these three different perspectives and synthesize them so I can be a part of an organization that helps people.”

While working at the New School, Smith decided to chronicle his fall from grace in a book. He published “Mr. Smith Goes to Prison” in September 2015, detailing his experiences in prison to document the tragedy of “America’s prison crisis.”

“When I decided to write the book, it dovetailed very nicely with my pedagogy because I was teaching courses on incarceration,” Smith said. “The book wasn’t just a memoir of my time, but a broader story about what is wrong with our system and what we can do to fix it.”

Since his release from prison, Smith and his wife Teresa have had two children. Smith plans not to shield his children from any of his mistakes. He instead hopes his story can provide valuable lessons for his children.

“With my own kids, I hope they can read my book someday. There’s not going to be a situation where they can hide from the fact that their dad went to prison. Someone’s going to know. They’re going to go to elementary school where I went to elementary school. I want my kids to understand that I don’t care what they did, they just have to tell me what they did. Just tell the truth about it. That’s what I try to instill in my kids,” Smith said.

Smith’s past decade has been so dimensional that, as one of the most interesting people in St. Louis, Smith has emerged as a case study of sorts for many Clayton High School students. In Rebecca Taylor’s Honors English II class at Clayton, students write an essay comparing Smith to an Aristotelian tragic hero. In Daniel Glossenger’s Government class last year, many students chose to read and present projects on Smith’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Prison”.

Smith, now settled back into St. Louis for the long-term, reflected on the whirlwind decade he just experienced.

“I have had a more interesting decade than I ever wanted. The day I decided I’d be running for Congress thirteen years ago this September, I never would have imagined life would be like this … But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I still tell anybody that they should totally run for office. I say of course you should because it will stretch you intellectually because learning all the policy will make you better. It will stretch you emotionally because dealing with the ups and downs of a campaign is an amazing experience. It stretches you physically too. If you’ve seen the documentary, you saw me everyday just running and talking and running and running around all the time. Running for office, being on a campaign teaches you what you’re capable of. I can do more in a day than the average person and I don’t feel arrogant saying that because I learned to work at a level that was necessary to compete with a dynasty,” Smith said. “I think part of the great thing about life is being willing to experience those ups and downs. I learned in order to get from here to there, I would have to be way better. All of us would have to be way more efficient. So the campaign taught me a lot about my own capacity, and about human nature, and how people respond to motivation. I hope my entire story will be a learning experience for ethics and different ethical dilemmas people face in their lives.”