Giving Compass' Take:

• This first-person essay on the Marshall Project describes what one man's journey finding a job and normalcy after being incarcerated. When Kansas failed him, he headed to Alaska, where he felt more welcomed.

• What program policies are more conducive to former inmates who want to start over and be given a chance? It varies state-by-state, but it's worth looking at why Alaska in particular seems to have gotten it right.

• Here's why the odds are stacked against those who have recently been released from prison in the US.

I’d been arrested in February 2009 for possession with “intent to sell” cocaine, within 1,000 feet of a school. I was in my mid-20’s, and it wasn’t my first trouble with the law—I’d been locked up for much of my teenage years on a marijuana charge. This time, I was convicted and sentenced to a few years in a prison near Kansas City. When I got out, in the summer of 2012, I knew I wanted to start over ...

I packed my things and flew to Fairbanks on a Saturday. I knew it was perfectly legal for me to leave Kansas, and yet I still felt nervous the whole way, expecting at any time to be stopped and arrested. The registry had conditioned me to be paranoid. When I arrived, it was -29 degrees, and I didn’t own a jacket. I thought, What fresh hell I have come to? But by Monday, I had a job at a rental car agency at the airport. They did a background check on me, but it was just for crimes committed in the state, so I came up clean.

I soon learned I’d come to the right place. In Alaska, it feels like people judge you by your words and actions, how you represent yourself. If you abuse someone’s trust, you can lose it, but people give you a chance.

Read the full article about trying to start over in Alaska after prison by J.T. Perkins III at The Marshall Project.