The last two hours of Dwight Davis’ more than 30 years of incarceration were the longest two hours of his life. His wife got lost on the way to pick him up, so he sat in fresh sweats and bright New Balance shoes, sweating. After picking him up, his wife dropped him off at a Walmart to buy toiletries while she was at the grocery store next door.
“Apparently they were called toiletries now, not cosmetics,” he remembered. “I was looking at all the labels. I didn’t want anything I could’ve bought in prison.”
He encountered a cluster of technological difficulties, from the store’s card reader to his wife’s car controls. When they made it to the house, “I just sat on the couch. I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I felt like a trespasser in my own home.”
Davis was released from Farmington Correctional Center in Missouri seven years ago after serving 30 years, six months and eight days in the state prison system. In November 2024, he returned to FCC, which is where I’m incarcerated, to talk to a group of us about his post-prison accomplishments and experiences.
After a brief stint with Save A Lot, Davis sought work at Menards, a home improvement company. The store offered him a job, but they rescinded the offer after the human resources department was unable to find a record of his incarceration. He had checked the box on the application asking if he had been convicted of a felony and provided the requested details. But they wouldn’t hire him because they thought he was making it up.
Davis was frustrated, but he took away a lesson: They didn’t care about his conviction. All they cared about was honesty.
“I’mma tell y’all something,” he said. “People know. But they don’t care what you did. They care who you are.”
Ultimately, Davis found work transporting people in crisis to hospitals and other immediate-need resource centers. He got involved with Salvation Army and Novus, a community health center offering sliding-scale services in St. Louis and Cape Girardeau. He took pride in being the kind of person who helped people when they needed it most.
Davis went on to use his lived experience to help formerly incarcerated people reintegrate into society and seek healthy ways to cope with their mental health issues. He began to develop his own programs, including classes for young men and women on setting and respecting boundaries. His tagline: “Build a better you for you.”
One day, Davis was pulled over for an expired license plate. He provided his license and registration, and the officer asked him for permission to search the car. Davis consented. The officer spent 80 minutes conducting the search.
“It was an itty-bitty Corolla,” he said.
The next morning, at his weekly Bible study, Davis told his friends about it.
One of them was a doctor at Harvard Medical School. He was so inspired by Davis’ resilience in the face of such profiling that he asked Davis to speak to his students. Many were struggling, and some of them were suicidal.
“How is it that they couldn’t see the opportunities in front of them?” Davis said. “They don’t have the same strength you guys got,” he said, pointing to us.
He shared a series of pictures from the visit on the projection screen behind him, with the glee of a recently returned friend sharing his vacation photos. He was the 133rd person to stay in the suite where President John F. Kennedy spent his senior year at Harvard. Davis took pictures of the suite, the campus and the nicest cars he could find.
Davis talked about the challenges he faced during and prior to his incarceration.
“I hated every moment of prison. But now that I’m out, I don’t hate prison anymore,” he said. “I don’t even hate myself anymore.”
Davis uses the Leaning Tower of Pisa as an illustration of how people can leverage their mistakes. The tower wasn’t meant to lean, but it couldn’t be made to stand upright without crumbling. So an architect working on the building created a cornerstone that made it seem like the building was level while a person was inside it, even though it wasn’t level outside. The tower’s flaw became its feature.
“You don’t have to be afraid to go to work, to meet people, to stand up for a cause,” Davis said, adding that there are always people and causes who can benefit from your story.
The shared sense of community was essential to successful reintegration, he added. “When you go home, that’s your community.”
Someone asked: Has it ever been so bad out there that he’d wanted to come back to prison?
“Hell, nah,” Davis said. “Go home rejoicing. Go home knowing it’s where you belong … Everything you want is beyond that gate. But everything you need is within you already.”