Truth Be Told: Finding Freedom in Your Truth
Healing Through Community
Words by Janine Stankus Photos Courtesy of Truth Be Told
Truth Be Told provides a transformational program that helps incarcerated women heal from past trauma and become empowered.
About 75-95% of women in prison have a history of childhood physical or sexual abuse. This fact speaks volumes. “The penal system is not considering what happened to you prior; they’re managing what you’ve done,” says Rutanya Pearson-Mitchner, program facilitator and graduate of Truth Be Told. “The mindset is, ‘let’s make it as bad as we possibly can so they don’t want to come back.’ It doesn’t work like that,” she shares boldly.
Established in 2003, Truth Be Told (TBT) is a women-founded non-profit that provides transformational, trauma responsive programming for women who are or have been incarcerated. Their goal is to break the cycle of incarceration by helping women heal, with a focus on communication skills, community-
building, creativity, and care for self.
According to Rutanya, TBT is one of only five programs recognized as rehabilitative by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) parole department. TDCJ sets a benchmark of three years after release. Any arrest within that window is considered recidivism. As of 2019, 86% of TBT graduates had reached that mark—tracking lower than the state average for women.
Lainey Lefeve is among those successes. Arrested at 16, she spent 30 years in prison. Lainey remembers her skepticism when she met the facilitators from TBT, especially when she learned she would be making a timeline of her painful memories. “It’s hard to be vulnerable in front of people who are coming in from the outside and then leaving,” she admits. “You never know if they’re being authentic.”
But Lainey stuck with it and ended up bonding with her facilitators. She graduated from the program and was released in 2019, celebrating her three-year anniversary in July. Stepping back inside a prison for the first time, she advised a group of new TBT graduates, “If you put half the effort into rehabilitating yourself and using the tools that you have gained through this program, you’re going to succeed—because it is a lot easier to do the right thing than it is to do the wrong thing.”
The tools that women gain through the TBT program are critical to facing what lies outside. Inmates get tossed back into the world with $50, a bus ticket, and staggering hurdles to overcome: transportation, securing basic documentation, employment, housing. Even with steady income and a stack of references, Lainey had to beg landlords to give her a chance.
But she did, and so did Rutanya. They both fought for themselves to secure their needs and to thrive. And that speaks to the transformational impact of this program. “Most of these women have never had a voice, they have never understood that they have the power to say no, or to speak up for themselves,” Lainey explains. “I believe in my heart that one of the best things that Truth be Told does for us is to teach us how to use our voice and to be assertive.”
For Rutanya, who started with TBT in its earliest days, the community they’ve built is “magical.” Members hold their shared truths sacred and create a safe space for each other that transcends the walls of the prisons. “Anyone who reaches out to Truth Be Told and has gone through our program…they are sisters,” she proclaims. “We’re tiny, but we’re very powerful.”
Contact:
truth-be-told.org
office@truth-be-told.org
