Re-Entry Experience Sparks Housing Plan

Ray Boyd knows what it’s like to come home after decades in prison without support or guidance on how to rebuild his life.

Two years later, he and his wife Jackie James are trying to provide a better homecoming for others — by transforming James’ childhood home into a transitional home for people re-entering society.

In the house at 43 Sylvan Ave., where James grew up, her mother raised a total of 75 foster children, in addition to babysitting kids who lived on the block. 

James and Boyd are now working to turn the house into a home, however temporary, for even more community members. 

The pair envisions housing seven men at a time who are transitioning out of prison — likely participants of Cheshire Correctional Institution’s T.R.U.E. unit, a nationally recognized mentorship and personal growth program that Boyd himself helped to found while incarcerated. They anticipate an official ribbon-cutting in late April.

Each of the seven residents would stay there for between six months and a year, while receiving counseling and resource referrals. 

Boyd and James envision working with the program participants starting while they are still incarcerated, and extending services to their family members, whether blood relatives or chosen family.

The duo is building the transitional housing through their new nonprofit, Next Level Empowerment Program, which is focused on providing resources for formerly incarcerated people and their families.

This mission is rooted in the couple’s personal experiences. 

Boyd got out of prison early in 2021 after being incarcerated for three decades for a murder he committed at the age of 17. His relationship with James, a childhood friend who kept in touch with him throughout the years, had recently turned romantic.

Boyd moved in with James, a social worker and former alder and Democratic town chair, upon exiting prison. The two married a year later. But navigating a 30-year chasm of life experiences as Boyd adjusted to a changed world wasn’t easy.

“I was away for 30 years. I didn’t share my space with a female companion,” Boyd said. Suddenly he was living full-time with James, in a home that had once been just hers.

“He came to live with me with no services, no support, no groups, no family counseling,” James recalled. She described feeling like ​“a deer in headlights.” She found herself leaning on her training as a social worker to work through challenges in their relationship.

Reconnecting with anyone outside of prison can be a challenge, Boyd said. He’s no longer the teenage kid he was before prison. ​“Sometimes old friends and family expect you to be the old you.”

Aware of a dearth of resources for both formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, Boyd and James decided that ​“the people closest to the problem are the people closest to the solution,” as James put it.

So Next Level was born, along with the couple’s dream for James’ childhood home in the Hill neighborhood where they grew up together.

The city is slated to fund the renovation of the house, with a to-be-finalized grant. According to Boyd, Next Level has also received $17,500 from a Community Development Block Grant and a $5,000 donation from Lewis Real Estate, a company founded by an exonerated criminal justice advocate, Scott Lewis. Boyd and James are still fundraising to pay for furniture and operating costs for the next year, with a goal of raising $100,000 in April, according to Boyd. They do not yet have a website; James asked that those interested in donating or obtaining more information contact her at 203 – 676-9478.

The house itself will be named after the late Vincent A. Moore, a counselor at Cheshire who died in a recent car crash.

“He was a mentor of mine,” said Boyd. James, meanwhile, knew Moore as a former colleague at the state Department of Children and Families.

James and Boyd have already launched a ​“warm line,” a number that anyone local with a connection to the prison system can call for guidance on accessing resources and adjusting to new relationship dynamics. James and Boyd man the warm line themselves, answering an average of six calls a week at all hours of the day.

So far, through the warm line, Boyd helped a re-entering man kicked out of his partner’s home in the middle of a storm find shelter for the night. James counseled a formerly incarcerated mom on how she could go about reconnecting with her children in foster care. 

All the while, they are working day jobs — James as a social worker and Boyd as a program manager at the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center. (They get about four to five hours of sleep each night, they said.)

They have bigger dreams for their organization.

The pair hopes to someday build more transitional housing hubs, including for formerly incarcerated women, in the state. They also hope to start a cosmetology and barber training program in the neighborhood, which they envision as serving formerly incarcerated people who have begun such training in prison. 

They see these projects as one way of breaking cycles of incarceration and recidivism in the neighborhood that raised them.

“This is our life’s work,” said James.