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Aaron Kinzel holds hands with his4-year-old daughter Lily as the pair walk through a park in Ann Arbor.
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Ex-inmates face obstacles when rejoining society

The Blade/Katie Rausch

Ex-inmates face obstacles when rejoining society

Breaking through stigma after leaving incarceration difficult

The reaction to a mark in the felony checkbox on most job applications is, almost always, uncompromising.

Just ask Dundee Township resident Aaron Kinzel, who, despite his three degrees, did not land a job until he was out of prison for six years.

“All that time I applied at different places for employment and checked that box? Never got a call back,” said the 38-year-old man, now a criminology professor at the University of Michigan who has three degrees and is going for his PhD in public administration.

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“I actually had several interviews when I didn’t check the box. I would go in and be articulate and talk about my strengths and they would say, ‘Hey, we’re interested, let’s talk further.’ And I would say, hold on, let me tell you about this,’ and of course I would never get a call back.”

The “this” refers to Kinzel’s attempted murder conviction and 10-year prison stay for an incident in 1997 when he engaged in a shootout and high-speed chase with troopers in Maine and was then the subject of a manhunt that ended in his arrest about 24 hours later. He was 18 years old.

The Public Safety Performance Project, an analysis by the Pew Center on the States, found the return-to-prison rate within three years for inmates released from 33 states in 1999 was 45.4 percent, and it was 43.3 percent for those released from 41 prisons in 2004.

Another study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics released in 2014 found that 68 percent of 405,000 prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years of release.

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While valid attempts at prison re-entry reform are being made in Michigan and Ohio, it remains difficult to break through the stigma that surrounds those who have left incarceration.

To assist in removing the stigma of a criminal record, many states including Ohio have adopted “ban the box” policies. 

Kinzel is part of the former U.S. prison population who has pushed through and is considered a valuable member of society. He is not asking for favors. Nor is he asking for anyone to forget what he did. He just hopes for a better tomorrow for former criminal offenders who, like him, learned from their mistakes and are serious about reform.

“I did some serious s---, let’s be real,” he admitted. “I understand that. But at the same time, when are we going to stop punishing? … Ninety-five percent of people in our prison systems are coming home eventually.”

Sins of the past

It was a hot day in July 1997, and Kinzel and his girlfriend at the time were driving along the east coast of Maine. He was driving to get away from his life in Monroe and Toledo, where since he was a little boy, he had been learning to be a criminal from the adults surrounding him. Crimes within his family circle had gone from drug use, trafficking, and petty theft to more serious offenses, like armed robbery.

He recalls wanting to get away from the thug life, to wean himself off the drugs that had taken over his life. But it was that day that Kinzel did exactly the opposite, making the biggest criminal mistake of his life.

When the troopers pulled him over at noon that day, Kinzel — who was on probation for a cocaine trafficking conviction in Michigan and was not permitted to leave the state — reacted.

“I pulled my gun out, and I fired out the window at the state trooper on the left; he falls back, and the guy on the right, who I now realize is a [plain-clothed] cop, fires 15 rounds from a 9mm Beretta from the back of the car,” Kinzel said. “He hits the dash, hits the windshield, blows the back windshield out, hits the gas tank. It was kind of like, when I recall, The Matrix. Everything freezes, and it was just really surreal, like I was in a movie.”

Bullets came through the upper level of the driver seat, but none struck him. Kinzel fired one shot that day. It didn’t hit either trooper.

The entire incident was over in a matter of seconds. Kinzel and his girlfriend led authorities on a high-speed chase, then fled on foot through a wooded area, causing an hours-long manhunt. The two made it through the night undetected but were arrested the next day when they exited the woods. With the handgun he used to shoot at the trooper still in his pocket, Kinzel surrendered.

“As my peers were graduating from high school, at that time I should have been graduating too, I was graduating to the prison system,” Kinzel said. “People ask me all the time, why would I do that, and I don’t really have a good answer, because it just happened.”

The road ahead

Kinzel faced eight felony counts for the offenses that occurred that day and ended up with a 19-year sentence in the Maine prison system. He was released in 2008 after serving 10 of those years and returned to the Monroe area.

“As I walked out the door I thought, I’ve got to make a choice,” he said of his release. “And my family tried to get me back in the game, [but] I just went the other way.”

He started taking classes at the community college. Relatives gave him some money to help with an apartment. He flew through the associate and bachelor’s degree programs and started on the master’s program in public administration at the University of Michigan.

He became a father to now-4-year-old Lily, one of his biggest priorities and his “pride and joy.”

But he was still on parole and still without a job.

It wasn’t until he entered the PhD program at Western Michigan University that someone looked his way professionally. It was 2013 — almost six years after his release. A professor, who already knew his criminal history, believed he could use that to his advantage and hired him to teach at the university.

“For the longest time, I didn’t talk about it. Then I had some really long, in-depth conversations with some faculty members who I confided with, and they were like, ‘You need to own this, and you need to tell your story because there’s power in it. And why not use that as a niche in the market?’”

He recently returned to the University of Michigan, Dearborn, to finish getting his doctorate in education. He currently teaches criminal justice systems and policy and criminal justice theory, both upper-level courses, as he works on his dissertation on convict pedagogy, which includes interviewing former prisoners on their educational experiences during incarceration.

He was named one of 39 finalists for the Open Society Foundations's Soros Justice Fellowship for criminal justice reform. He was also named one of UM Dearborn’s Difference Makers for being a leader on campus.

It was back at UM that he met retired Washtenaw County Circuit Judge Donald Shelton, who became the university’s criminal justice program director in 2014.

Judge Shelton said Kinzel gives the students a different perspective by conveying both the “theoretical and the real” to students in the classroom.

“He’s been out of the ivory tower. He’s experienced everything from the classroom to the cell and the court system. That’s something we don’t find in academia very much,” Judge Shelton said.

Kinzel starts out every class he teaches by telling his story.

“He’s a really good professor; he’s super laid-back and everything’s super real,” said Erin Horne, 22, who took a race crime and justice class with Kinzel last semester “We have a textbook, but it’s more about his experiences and just real life things that happened that [bring] it closer to home.”

Changing the system

In recent years, the criminal justice system has readjusted itself from the “tough on crime” initiatives of years past, mostly after recognizing the cost of imprisonment, and has started putting the focus on rehabilitation instead, Judge Shelton said.

“It was the field of dreams concept: if you build it, they will come, and they did. The more prisons we built, the more we filled them up,” said the jurist.

After the adoption of a prison re-entry program in Michigan, state officials were able to reduce recidivism by 18 percent for 2007 parolees, according to a 2012 report by the Council of State Governments Justice Center's National Reentry Resource Center.

Shelton said an academic study of his own court docket for the first 20 years showed that more than 70 percent of the felons he sentenced had charges against them that were drug related.

“One of the biggest problems with our corrections system is that, number one, at least in some states, we don’t really engage in any real rehabilitation efforts anymore in our prison system,” Shelton said. “Then when people do finish their sentence and get out, we often stick them on the same street corner and expect a different result.

“Part of the problem with that same street corner is it’s worse than it was when they went in because now they can’t get a job or people won’t even rent housing to them. If we don’t engage in real rehabilitation and don’t give ex-offenders a real opportunity to be productive citizens, we are never going to reduce the long-term prison population.”

Ohio has had similar results with rehabilitation efforts, reducing the three-year recidivism rate (the percentage of offenders who returned to prison within three years) from 39.1 percent in 2001 to 27.5 percent in 2011. The state is working on several new initiatives, including a partnership with the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services to increase in-house prison treatment and improve support services to prisoners upon their release.

Kinzel said he recognizes the importance of connecting with those still in the system. He also works as a consultant and holds several speaking engagements, has conducted training seminars for law enforcement, and hosts art, entrepreneurial, and re-entry workshops in many of the state’s prisons, including Toledo Correctional Institution and the juvenile detention centers where he served time. Sometimes, his students go with him, and he recently created a new criminology and criminal justice studies club student organization.

“I’m not someone who … has done 20 years of research interviewing prisoners or criminals; I was a criminal. I’ve grown up with these people my whole life, so who better to blend two worlds? Because I’m an aspiring academic, but at the same time I’ve done the dirt,” he said.

Contact Roberta Gedert at:

rgedert@theblade.com,

419-724-6075, or on

Twitter @RoGedert.

First Published June 12, 2016, 4:00 a.m.

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Aaron Kinzel holds hands with his4-year-old daughter Lily as the pair walk through a park in Ann Arbor.  (The Blade/Katie Rausch)  Buy Image
Aaron Kinzel at age 19.
Kinzel stands among artwork by Michigan prisoners at an exhibition he helped organize.  (The Blade/Katie Rausch)  Buy Image
Aaron Kinzel tosses his 4-year-old daughter Lily up in the air.  (The Blade/Katie Rausch)  Buy Image
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