Michael Marshall was still in high school the first time he got in trouble with the law. He was 17 years old when a robbery charge landed him at Chesapeake Juvenile Services.
Marshall, a Portsmouth native, lost his mom when he was 9. Without any guidance, he said, he ended up getting involved with drugs and criminal activities at a young age.
When he got out of jail, he said he went back to the same communities and the people that got him into trouble in the first place. He hadn’t learned his lesson, Marshall said.
He returned to prison, this time for more than a decade.
While incarcerated a second time, Marshall’s mindset changed. He met a veteran who became his mentor, held him accountable and helped him land his first job out of prison at Norfolk State University.
He had all the tools he needed when he was incarcerated the first time, Marshall said. He just had to want it for himself.
Marshall created First Opportunity in 2014, through which he provides mentoring, job training, substance abuse counseling, housing and reentry services. He began to work with churches and community nonprofits to design curricula to help those transitioning out of incarceration.
“I used to hear a lot of times people talked about second chances,” Marshall said. “But I never really heard a lot about people getting first opportunities. I felt like that a lot of individuals that were incarcerated or had come from marginalized populations and communities … some of them never had a first chance.”
Forty-four years after he was first incarcerated, Marshall walked back into Chesapeake Juvenile Services — this time, to connect with the youth there as someone who had been through incarceration himself. It was something he felt he had to do, Marshall said.
“If I can give back to some of these kids and help redirect their behaviors, then we can make society much safer,” Marshall said. “A lot of them shared with me that they don’t have mentors.”
He said he tried to show the juveniles through his own story that they could clean their acts up now and never have to go through the adult system. Many expressed feeling like they didn’t have anyone to go to about their problems.
After his visit, Marshall said he spoke to Kawanna Ward, the founder and chair of Suffolk-based nonprofit Blakey Weaver Counseling Center. They partnered to create a program that would provide mental health, mentorship and reentry assistance for people coming out of the detention center.
The goal of the program, which Marshall called “Exodus” after the Book of Exodus, is to ensure that no kid who wants to start new is left behind. He thinks it will be different for juveniles to see someone with the same lived experience who cares and wants them to succeed.
“You never hear anyone say, ‘Oh yeah, well, I’m going to be the best bank robber in the country’ or ‘I’m going to be the biggest drug dealer on the block,’” Marshall said. “People don’t come to the world looking to be criminals.”
