Unlocking Potential

IMAGE REVIEWED BY US MILITARY PRIOR TO TRANSMISSION
BY: ALL OVER PRESS / EPA-PHOTO CODE: EPAXX8

In the driver’s seat of a scuffed yellow forklift, Wade Tate wheels through a vast distribution center on this city’s outskirts, storing inventory – boxes of machine parts or Sterno fuel kits – and fulfilling customers’ orders.

With the forklift’s prongs, he selects cardboard cartons, lifts them up and guides them to where they need to go. The process is an apt metaphor for the work that criminal justice reform advocates are doing for ex-offenders like Tate himself.

The 45-year-old has spent more than half his life in Tennessee state prisons, landing there in 1992 after pleading guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. “I was running with the wrong crowd, along with alcohol,” he says, shaking his head at his younger self.

Paroled last May, Tate returned to this city on the east bank of the Mississippi River – initially to a halfway house, then to a private home. Now, with a local government program and a faith-based charity helping to smooth his re-entry, he’s trying to construct a life as a trustworthy employee, father, partner and friend.