The Introduction of Possibilities

What incarceration teaches you about deficit, and what a network can undo

When I was incarcerated, the dominant language around me was the language of can’t.

You can’t get a job with this on your record. You can’t find housing. You can’t access this program, qualify for this benefit, be trusted with this responsibility. The deficit model doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates. Over time, it becomes the water you swim in, and eventually, if you’re not careful, it becomes the story you tell yourself about who you are and what you’re allowed to want.

Omari Amili, author and professor at the University of Washington Tacoma, describes this with precision. In a recent interview, he talks about what it meant to encounter a network of formerly incarcerated people who had used post-secondary education as a route to social and economic mobility. He says it simply: that’s the introduction of possibilities. How do you know what’s possible if everything around you is deficit-based?

That question has stayed with me.

Director of HP3 Omari Amili at HP3 launch event. Photo by Michaela Ely.

What the research says

A 2026 resume audit study by Ballou, published in Criminology, offers empirical weight to what Omari is describing. Researchers sent over 2,600 applications to middle-skill jobs in the Chicago labor market using fictional applicants, all with criminal records, all with incarceration history on the resume. The finding that matters most: applicants who earned a bachelor’s degree while incarcerated saw roughly 77% higher odds of getting a callback compared to those with only a GED. A sub-BA certificate? No statistically significant difference.

This is not an argument for college as a magic solution. The overall callback rate was still around 5%. The labor market remains hostile. But a full degree, combined with relevant experience, materially improves access to jobs that pay a living wage and come with benefits and advancement potential, what researchers call “good jobs,” the kind that function as genuine life-course turning points.

What Ballou’s study confirms is what Omari names directly: not just any door is the right door. The introduction of possibilities isn’t a motivational speech. It’s information about which doors actually open, and proof from people who’ve walked through them that they open for people like you.

A second study, by Henson and colleagues (also 2026, Criminology), followed 30 people who had been sentenced to juvenile life without parole in Pennsylvania, many of whom spent over three decades incarcerated before being released following Miller v. Alabama. The researchers documented what they called post-traumatic growth — not as an endorsement of incarceration, but as evidence that people change, develop, and build meaning even in deeply hostile conditions. Critically, participants were clear: whatever growth they experienced happened despite the environment, not because of it. And they named something else: that without a credible path to release or recognition, growth erodes. Long sentences with no review don’t just waste time. They corrode the capacity people build.

The third piece of research, by Potts and colleagues, examined disability policy readability across state departments of corrections. The policies governing the rights of incarcerated people with disabilities are written, on average, at a graduate school reading level. The population they govern has an average literacy around the 5th grade. The most formal articulation of legal rights is structurally unreadable to the people who need it most.

Put these three studies together and a picture emerges: systems routinely produce the conditions for failure, then attribute the failure to the individual. The deficit isn’t in the person. It’s in the design.

What a network actually does

Omari’s insight is that a network of formerly incarcerated people who have made something, degrees, careers, platforms, positions, does something epistemic. It doesn’t just inspire. It tells you what is true about the world. It is proof of concept in a form that no brochure, no program description, no well-meaning case manager can replicate.

He puts it this way: once you have this group of individuals who are busting these doors open and leaving them open for the people coming behind them, you know it’s possible for you to make something of yourself that you probably never even dreamed of before prison.

The open door is structural, not motivational. It persists after the moment of inspiration.

I think about this in the context of my own work. I facilitate a weekly Civics Academy at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, and I came to that work with lived experience in the system I now work within. The women I sit with don’t just need to know that voting rights are restored. Some of them need to know that a Secretary of State’s Office position is possible. That a Dean’s Council seat at a major public university is possible. That the person running their civics class isn’t a volunteer doing charity work. They’re a peer who figured out how to get inside the architecture.

The introduction of possibilities is not a feel-good add-on to a program. It is the program, if you’re willing to design it that way.

The infrastructure question

Here is where I want to push the conversation further than it usually goes.

Individual networks are powerful. Individual proof-of-concept figures are powerful. But neither is sufficient if the goal is structural change at scale.

What we actually need is institutional infrastructure, built deliberately, that makes it possible for state agencies, universities, nonprofits, and civic organizations to hire people with backgrounds like mine, and to do it well. Not performatively. Not as a checked box. But as a sustainable practice that comes with housing support, supervisory training, peer structures, and internal culture work.

The hire is not the intervention. The ecosystem is.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of my office’s own history. We have done this once, and done it thoughtfully. The question is whether we can build it into something transferable. A model other agencies can replicate. Not a one-off act of institutional generosity but a framework: here is how you recruit from this population, here is what onboarding looks like, here is what your supervisors need to understand, here is what happens if someone needs housing support before day one.

Ballou’s research tells us the degree matters for getting in the door. Henson’s research tells us that growth is relational and contextual. It needs to be met and sustained by the environment it enters. Potts’ research tells us that when institutions write their policies for themselves instead of for the people they govern, access is fictional.

The introduction of possibilities, if it is to mean anything at the scale we need, has to be institutionalized. It has to be designed. It has to be more than one person in one room holding the door.

A note on positionality

I am a WSU alumnus with a bachelor’s in political science and lived experience with incarceration. I work as the Criminal Justice Specialist in the Civic Engagement Program at the Washington Secretary of State’s Office. I sit on the Dean’s Council at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington.

I name these things not to perform credentials, but because they are themselves an introduction of possibilities for someone who might be reading this and wondering whether the doors I’ve walked through are open to them.

They are.

The work is to make sure more of us are holding them open — and to build the infrastructure that keeps them open when we’re no longer standing there.

David Lund is the Criminal Justice Specialist for the Civic Engagement Program at the Washington Secretary of State’s Office. He facilitates the Civics Academy at the Washington Corrections Center for Women and serves on the Dean’s Council at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington.