Because here’s the truth: I’m not the only one who lives like it’s “Groundhog Day”. For thousands of us who’ve served time, the sentence isn’t the hard part. It’s what comes afterwards. It’s the endless loop of having your worst day reprinted, rehashed and reposted as though nothing came next.
You get out. You try to rebuild. And you learn quickly that reintegration isn’t a phase – it’s a fight. There is no structured national pathway for formerly imprisoned people to re-enter society in Aotearoa.
There are bits and pieces, mostly community-led. Corrections will say they offer reintegration support, but in practice? You’re handed your plastic tub and released to try your luck. If you find housing, work, connection, it’s not because the system helped you. It’s because you clawed it out of the margins.
And before I say anything else: I know people were hurt by my actions. I carry that with me every day. Accountability isn’t a one-time event, it’s a lifetime of reflection and responsibility.
Nothing I’ve done since undoes the damage, but I try to honour it by the way I show up now – with transparency, service and a commitment to doing better. In a word – with honesty.
And the truth is, the only reason I managed to do this is because one person – Professor Khylee Quince, Dean of AUT Law School – saw an opportunity to make real what reintegration aims to do by hiring me. And because AUT backed her judgment. That was my moment of oxygen. That’s what made everything else possible.
But let’s not pretend that’s common practice. And it wasn’t the result of a Corrections policy or a reintegration programme.
It was a risk. A human one. And it says more about her mana and courage than it does about my past. But it wasn’t a case of blind faith – I had to earn the trust and respect of my colleagues.
I completed my LLM [Master of Laws] with first-class honours, worked as a teaching and research assistant, and proved I could contribute.
Only then did I get the chance to teach a class. That decision was still huge – not just for me, but for what it said: that a person’s past shouldn’t be the only lens through which their future is seen.
I now teach criminal procedure and evidence law. I’m writing a PhD on post-sentence restorative justice. I contribute to research into systemic disadvantage and sentencing, and I help introduce the next generation of lawyers to not only what the law is, but what it could be.
So, when a media outlet publishes my name again as part of a “top 10 worst” listicle, I feel the weight not just for myself, but for every person out there trying to move on. People who are parenting, working, giving back, surviving. People who served their time and are still being sentenced every time someone googles them.
The cruellest irony? Inside, no one judged me like that. In prison, we all knew we were more than our charges. The judgment wasn’t moral – it was structural. But out here? The judgment is professional, polite, permanent. It comes in the form of job application rejections, tenancy refusals, damning media retrospectives and systemic silence.
If Aotearoa actually believed in rehabilitation, we’d build pathways. We’d fund reintegration support that doesn’t end at the prison gate. We’d stop punishing people for surviving the sentence we gave them.
Research in Aotearoa shows stable housing, meaningful employment and connection to community dramatically reduce the risk of reoffending – but support for achieving those things is patchy at best.
The truth is, we still don’t treat reintegration as part of the justice system. It’s sidelined, seen as a welfare issue, not a rights issue. Until we change that framing, we’ll keep leaving people behind after pretending we’ve let them go. We don’t have a justice system, we have a punishment industry with a memory problem.
I don’t want a redemption arc story. This isn’t even about me. It’s about all of those who’ve done the work, taken responsibility and still find themselves trapped under a past they’ve outgrown.
Some of us are still moving forward – not because the door was opened, but because someone stood there refusing to let it close.
Lance Ryan (Tūhoe and Ngāti Maniapoto) teaches criminal procedure and the law of evidence at AUT Law School.