Adam Grant: The journey to a Brighter Way

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

As Adam Grant strode into the room we’d reserved at the library, my eyes caught on his black leather jacket, the tattoos snaking up his hand and arm. But as soon as we started talking, every assumption I had about him went flying out the window. After serving a 27-year long prison sentence, Grant is now the executive director of a Brighter Way, an organization devoted to lowering recidivism rates in our community and helping formerly incarcerated readjust to society.

Grant was born to two high schoolers, a freshman and a senior. His parents, who were married for two years, divorced, and less than a year later, his mother remarried.

“It was abusive,” Grant said. “It was verbally abusive, physically abusive.” After his parents divorced in 1978, his mother remained single for a while, even returning to school. However, this left Grant largely responsible for his siblings.

A few months after his grandfather’s death, Grant committed his first robbery.

“I just stole from everybody after that,” he said. “People have the best intentions, they don’t always say things in a way that is taken the way it’s meant. So [my parents] always talked about my potential, but they didn’t realize that what I heard was, ‘You’re not living up to it.’”

This pressure wore down on Grant until, over time, he stopped trying to meet those expectations.

“The actual crime that I committed that led to those 27 years in prison was a bank robbery and conspiracy to commit bank robbery,” Grant said. And it wasn’t your runof-the-mill bank robbery.

Out of approximately 9 million people in Michigan, approximately 2 million have some form of a criminal record.

Out of the more than 650,000 ex-offenders in the US who are released from prison every year, almost 44 percent return to prison within their first year out, and approximately two-thirds will likely be rearrested within three years of release.

It wasn’t one where I came in and presented a note or something. I came in with a shotgun with two other people.”

When the judge described Grant as a terrorist, the first thing he thought to himself was, I’m not a terrorist.

“But then I realized that I was,” Grant said. “I terrorized people, I came into a village of 700 people with a shotgun, and walked into a bank and told them to give me money.”

Grant had been detained a couple of times as a juvenile, but had never actually been placed in detention facilities.

“Had I been a black male in these situations, the chances are that I probably would have been incarcerated sooner,” Grant said. “They gave me chances because of the pigmentation of my skin. So I don’t take that lightly.”

The Michigan Department of Corrections was not exactly a welcoming place. The food was awful; inmates slept on mattresses that were three inches thick and lumpy, leaving Grant’s back permanently damaged.

“’I’ve also described it like this: if you were told to go to the Four Seasons hotel and you can’t leave for 27 years, it would still be a prison,” Grant said. And although prison is not meant to be a pleasant place, Grant asserts that the things that people do to make it that way are too extreme.

“They don’t understand that the worst part about prison is the separation from people, not having options and opportunities,” Grant said. “And you don’t have to make the conditions all that much more harsh to drive the point home.”

Grant later recalled a memory from early on in one of his sentences: while walking to the dining hall, an acquaintance of his was stabbed in the neck right next to him.

“I was standing on one side of them, and I watched the knife come out of the side that I was standing on,” Grant said.

That incident made him realize how serious everything was. Can I do this, can I survive this?

Grant found himself thinking. “You see some things that you can’t unsee,” Grant said. “You see people getting raped, you see people getting killed.”

However, the latter 17 years of his prison sentence changed the trajectory that the rest of his life would go.

“I started to realize whatever you stole, the respect of somebody being afraid there may be consequences.” are good and bad elements to anything, there are good and bad people wherever you go,” Grant said.

And so, he started to live that way before he was even released.

“There might be a bigger pool of less savory people in prison. But there are also a lot of good people, people who helped put me on the path to living a life worth living.” painful part for Grant when he thinks about his time in prison: there are people still there that he genuinely cares about, and that he knows shouldn’t be anymore. we put on people not only separate us from them, they separate them from us,” Grant said. “We draw these lines.”

Out of approximately 9 million people in Michigan, of reentry into society. On Dec. 1, 2022, however, Grant took over as executive director. Although the organization has evolved since its creation, its mission and methods remain the same: mentors work one on one to help them navigate potential pitfalls upon returning home.

“Ultimately, what we try to do is improve a person’s quality of life,” Grant said. “If a person’s quality of life is markedly better here, then they’re not going to go back to prison.”

Out of approximately 9 million people in Michigan, approximately 2 million have some form of a criminal record. And if you put it on a national level, it gets even bigger.

“There are the same number, if not more, of people who have a criminal record in the United States, as people who are married,

“The employment problem has been kind of mitigated, it’s kind of hard to work if you don’t have a place to stay, especially in this day and age,” Grant said. “And it’s kind of hard to be able to get a place if you don’t have a good credit rating. And if you don’t have good credit, there can be all kinds of problems.”

Those who have been formerly incarcerated are not a protected class, Grant argues.

“What we need is options and opportunities to talk to people,” Grant said. “We need to reduce stigma, we need to help people understand why what we do is important.”

And although A Brighter Way is still a fairly small organization, Grant’s passion is clearly one of the things that makes it so impactful on our community.

“I’m not going to direct you to somebody else, you can come to me,” Grant said. “We’re located in downtown Ypsilanti, 124 Pearl Street, suite 201. We’re open Monday through Friday nine to five. It’s not a very big office, but we have a coffee pot and a microwave and anybody is welcome to stop in.”