When Helping Becomes a Performance

I remember one meeting where the room spent twenty minutes discussing whether a participant counted as retained, placed, served, or lost to follow-up. The debate was not cruel. That was what made it worse. Everyone was trying to satisfy the report. No one asked what had happened to him after the job fell apart, whether he had a phone, whether anyone had called twice, or whether the program had failed before he did.

The organization had witnessed the issue.

It had not witnessed the person. That failure should trouble anyone who works inside the nonprofit ecosystem.

In the previous essay, I described the enlightened witness as someone in the front row: a person who sees, enters, names, and remains. That kind of witness does not reduce a child to his shame, an addict to his appetite, or a person who caused harm to the worst fact of his life.

But the need for enlightened witnesses does not stop at the edge of a family. Institutions also witness. Courts witness. Nonprofits witness. Reentry programs witness. Schools, funders, agencies, and advocacy groups witness.

The question is whether they witness people or merely record them.

Subscribe now

Since returning from San Quentin, I have worked with more than half a dozen organizations in the criminal justice field. My roles have included policy research, legal writing, grant development, journalism, communications, workforce programs, board service, and direct advocacy.

I have worked with Root & Rebound, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, QA Commons, Humans of San Quentin, Bonafide Life, Friends of San Quentin News, Man 2 Man Urban Youth Advocate, and others. I helped write a federal reentry guide. I have worked on grants for housing and employment programs. I have mentored returning citizens and justice-involved young people. I have helped people face parole, custody, child support, jobs, and the paperwork that follows a sentence long after the cell door opens.

I offer that record for one reason: my frustration comes from proximity.

I am not criticizing people who chose to care. I have met serious people doing hard work inside damaged systems. Some programs changed lives. Most staff members gave more time than their job descriptions required. Some organizations put useful tools into the hands of people who had been denied them.

This is not an argument that all programs fail or that measurement is meaningless. It is an argument that measurement becomes dangerous when it replaces contact.

I have seen money, intelligence, and moral passion produce far less than they should.

The common explanation is that criminal justice problems are hard.

They are.

Housing is scarce. Employers discriminate. Families carry old wounds. Addiction does not respect program calendars. Government systems contradict one another. A person may satisfy parole and violate housing rules by doing so. A father may find work and lose the time needed for a custody hearing.

Reentry is a set of interacting problems, each capable of making the others worse.

But complexity cannot excuse bad measurement.

Too many organizations meet the person where the program is and an expectation that the person should be grateful for it.

The program has an intake form, a theory of change, a funding category, a schedule, and a definition of success. The person arrives with fear, anger, pride, obligations, bad information, no sleep, a dead phone, a court date, and a nervous system trained by years of scarcity.

The institution asks the person to translate that life into its categories.

When the translation fails, the person is labeled disengaged, noncompliant, resistant, or not ready.

The institution rarely asks whether it was ready.

This is where the idea of the enlightened witness becomes more than a parenting principle. It becomes a test of institutional legitimacy.

Read more