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The reason so many people are repeat offenders is they are already broken.

They have been set up for failure before they even have a chance to begin.

Once you are thrown away like trash — literally and figuratively — you are beaten down, the broken get even more broken, even shattered. There’s no hope in here. No rehabilitation, especially now that COVID has hit. These women need rehabilitation more so than confinement and being treated the same as the people that do belong in here such as murderers and child molesters. Instead you mix population and take broken, damaged, abused people and you put them in the lions’ den. Good if they survive — or is it? They have now lost themselves more than before they came in. People use drugs to numb pains or hide the bad that has happened to them most of the time. Those people should be given mandatory rehab and made to complete programs that give them the tool belt for life and managing those addictions when they come back out. Going into prison, you are surrounded by drugs and tainted more by a toxic and volatile environment. So when people get back to society after being forced to confinement with no rehabilitation, they resort back to what they know and hopefully they don’t end up dead in less than a month because they just went through hell, tossed away and forgotten and come back with less people that support them, probably lost everything, a new title forever that hinders them and makes them feel inadequate and back to the only constant.

Priscilla Tetterton Modlin is an inmate within the NC Division of Adult Correction. She is a Beaufort County native.