It wasn’t a label his former teachers at Rosemont High School would’ve used. One vice principal, he recalled, practically celebrated in 2008 when he told Alcantara he had to leave the school.
The teen’s life was a roller-coaster ride of extreme highs and lows for almost 10 years after that moment, but by 2018, he was on his way to getting a general contractor’s license when one night of heartbreak and hard drinking set off a chain of events that landed him a 10-year sentence at San Quentin .
“I was devastated with myself,” he said. “All this stuff I had going for me, I threw it all away, and I was sitting on ice.”
But prison didn’t break Alcantara — it reshaped him. He earned his high school diploma, then an associate’s degree in social and behavioral sciences. He became a mentor, a teacher, a program facilitator and ultimately, a free man. When he walked out of prison in August 2024 , he moved with momentum.
Months later, on a spring Friday evening, Alcantara, 32, stood in conversation with a UC Davis staffer who told him he had the credits, GPA and financial support to transfer to the university and pursue a bachelor’s degree. It was a door he had not expected to swing so wide so soon.
He credited the Reintegration Academywith accelerating that connection. Over eight, intensive weekly sessions, Alcantara and other Sacramento -area residents learned to put their days in prison behind them and instead embrace job
interviews, college advisement and vision boards filled with dreams and second chances.
Reintegration Academy programs have been offered at such institutions as Fresno State , Pitzer College , UC Berkeley , UC Davis and now Sacramento State. In total, 67 formerly incarcerated individuals assembled on the two local college campuses from late March to early May, surrounded by facilitators, career coaches, therapists and peers who had found success in the free world.
The goal wasn’t just reentry; it was reinvention.
So, participants met with college support staff, explored VR career simulations, spoke with business leaders and expungement experts, and they learned how to process emotions, plan wisely, and believe in a future they once thought was closed to them.
Helping People Break the Cycle of Incarceration
Sacramento State student Michelle Sotelo was working on a business degree almost three years ago when she got an email from the college about the Prison Education Project , a nonprofit that has sent thousands of college students and faculty volunteers to help educate people serving time behind bars.
Sotelo had built a successful career running a collections agency before stepping away for health reasons. She returned to college as a way to figure out what the second act of her work life would look like.
The email about the Prison Education Project piqued her interest, so she clicked the volunteer link.
Volunteering inside a youth detention facility, she assisted students intent on gaining the certifications, GEDs, diplomas or degrees they felt would help to transform their lives, she said, but when they were released, they too often met brick walls.
“When employers look at the résumé and they see a gap in work history and put two and two together, they don’t want to give our people chances,” Sotelo said, “so they can’t get to the resources. Nobody will rent to them, and then they can’t get jobs. It’s this endless cycle of ‘What do I do now?’”
One cup of coffee at a time, Sotelo set out to cultivate a network of contacts as committed as she was to helping re-entrants scale those walls. At the same time, she began giving her phone number to her students, telling them to call her if they ran into roadblocks after release.
“A lot of people can say they’re going to do something,” Sotelo said, “but when someone sees that, not only are you going to do something, but you did it and then you followed up with them, … they’re like, ‘I have somebody in my corner.’”
She was just a semester or two away from her business degree when she started volunteering, she said, and she elected to change her major to political science to understand how she could work within the system to move people from prison to possibility.
Last year, she began working for the Clover Agency , a workforce development consultant, and as part of one state-funded program, Pathways to Careers, she began helping young adults ages 18 to 28 navigate housing challenges, employment discrimination, and the red tape of education systems.
Time and again, she has savored breaking the cycle of hopelessness and recidivism. In just under four months earlier this year, she said, 22 of the 82 young adults in her Pathways to Careers program found employment, earning average hourly pay of $22.62.
Eight other individuals have been trained to work in forest fire prevention, earning certificates in skills such as handling hazardous materials, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and first aid and operating wildland chainsaws and portable water pumps.
“I have an individual who completed truck driving school in 52 days and has a great career now with benefits and a retirement and a wonderful salary that’s ... in that higher middle income range,” she said. “He was able to accomplish that with support, encouragement and assistance.”
One participant at the Sacramento State Reintegration Academy , Michael Standing Bear Frederiksen , said the Friday evening sessions gave him the motivation and encouragement to keep going in his job search after he’d filed 130 applications with no success. At the academy graduation, he told facilitators that he had finally been hired.
Employment Is the Antidote to Recidivism
Steady employment dramatically lowers recidivism rates, according to a 2023 Harder+Company Community Research study of the nonprofit Center for Employment Opportunities , or CEO, in San Diego .
CEO places re-entrants in transitional jobs within three months of release, and statistics showed these individuals were significantly more likely to stay out of prison than those who didn’t have such an opportunity.
The report emphasized the importance of wraparound support: mentorship, trauma-informed services, and skills training that prepares people for sustainable careers — not just minimum-wage survival jobs.
The Reintegration Academy follows those recommendations to a tee. From the first week’s Myers-Briggs assessment to the eighth-week job fair with employers including Iqpersonnel staffing agency and Sacramento County , participants are treated like people with potential, not problems.
The academy participants did mock interviews to prepare for the job fair, and Sacramento resident Anh-Tuan Pham , 35, said he found that practice session useful, just being put on the spot and being forced to come up with answers.
Alcantara was especially drawn to the tech-forward side of the academy, leaping into an introduction to virtual reality: “I had never used those headsets before. I did the demolition of a bridge. I did the EMT simulation at a car accident, and I did a knee surgery, just because I’ve had my ACL repaired. That was a trip. The headsets had pages and pages and pages of options.”
Sotelo helped every participant try them and surprised Alcantara and other students when she told them that they could use the VR technology to earn certifications for some work.
“When people are supporting people, and you’re rooting for them or you’re listening to them, they now can trust,” Sotelo said. “They have that positivity in their life to believe and to dream and to make those dreams realities.”
She learned that lesson through her volunteer work with the Prison Education Project , a nonprofit founded in 2011 by Renford Reese , a political science professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona . He also established the Reintegration Academy in 2009.
Reese has been recognized for his work, and he has developed prison education initiatives in Uganda and Scotland and Uganda . Sotelo just returned from a trip with him to Scotland where they educated people in prisons.
To get programs under way at Sac State and UCD in March, Sotelo combined funds from her Pathways to Careers grant with funding from the Reintegration Academy . After seeing the benefit of those programs, her funders agreed to back Sotelo’s proposal for a Pathways Academy that she designed for the young adults she serves through the Clover Agency . She plans to run two sessions of this new training program at Sac State later this year.
More than 550 participants have completed Reintegration Academy courses, and the program boasts a 92 percent success rate at helping individuals find employment or enroll in college — and, critically, stay out of prison. Parole or probation officers make referrals, and participants receive hands-on support: financial aid, free laptops, a weekly meal, resume and job interview training, referrals to other resources, and exposure to career paths tailored to their personalities.
Working with Elizabeth Siggins , a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at UC Davis, Sotelo customized the Reintegration Academy curriculum to bring in people from the deep network she had built in the Sacramento region.
Many speakers offering resources, training or job opportunities actually had worn prison blues at one time in their lives as well, and just as Sotelo had done in the youth detention facility, they provided their phone numbers to Alcantara and his peers and pledged to try and help them if they called.
People leaving incarceration all too often have no safety net, Sotelo said, but the Reintegration Academy and her Pathways to Careers program help them build a support network. The Sac State Reintegration Academy ended May 9 , she said, but it’s already paid off for so many participants.
About two and a half weeks after the Sac State Reintegration Academy ended, Douglas Smith texted Sotelo to thank her and others who volunteered their time to help him: “I put to use the skills that you guys helped provide me with, and I was successful. I start my job on Friday (June 6).”
Less than a week after he started work, he texted Sotelo to let her know that he’d gotten a promotion.
Rising From the Ashes of Their Past Lives
Academy participant David King , 63, said he was inspired by the speakers who had overcome their history of incarceration and had bettered themselves. If he heeded their advice and followed in their footsteps, he said, maybe he could do the same.
King is on his way. Next year, he said, he will graduate with his bachelor’s degree in communications from Sacramento State.
In 1999, King said, a judge sentenced him to 25-37 years in prison, a lengthy sentence mandated by California’s Three Strikes Law. “I was just being dumb, using drugs, doing stupid stuff, not really paying attention or worrying about the consequences,” he said.
The sentence shook him.
“When I got back to the cell after they sentenced me, I still didn’t believe it,” he said. “It took like six or seven months for it to sink in. I didn’t figure a burglary would carry that much time. But it finally hit me when I got to the prison and saw all the paperwork.”
King initially went to High Desert State Prison in Susanville . It didn’t have a college education program, and the only reading in his cell was a dictionary that had seen better days. He spent hours studying it, starting in the A’s.
“’Ascension’ was one word that kept me focused because it means to rise,” King said. ”I took it as rise from your downfall, and that was a word that I really held close to my heart.”
The book enhanced his vocabulary, he said, but it also kept him grounded. He had watched men around him struggle with their mental health over long periods without outdoor recreation.
“We were stuck in the cell like seven months at a time because, when we’d go outside, they’d get in a fight. Then everybody riots, and we’re locked down,” King said, describing and oft-repeated pattern.
He took the chance to work on his own personal ascension when he was transferred to Folsom State Prison and was able to sign up for a correspondence college course. In 2023, he got his associate’s degree in criminal justice after just 18 months.
When he was released from prison last year, he connected withProject Rebound, a program that Renford Reesehelped to expand in the California State University system. The UC system has a similar program called Underground Scholars.
Both aim to end “the revolving door policy of mass incarceration and increase community strength and safety.” Project Rebound has posted a recidivism rate under 3 percent since its inception, said Michael Love , an outreach coordinator for the program at Sacramento State. That compares with a 39.1 percent rate reported by the state of California for people released in fiscal 2019-2020.
Making Something Beautiful After Prison
Like many of his peers in the Reintegration Academy , King has found transitional work through CEO. The nonprofit has signed a number of different employment contracts with companies and government agencies: King is now cleaning up litter along some stretches of California highways.
He hopes this will help him land long-term work and financial independence. While on parole, he shares a room in what he described as a beautiful, fully furnished residence operated by the nonprofit Freedom Through Education in south Sacramento .
Alcantara, meanwhile, moved back in with his parents in Sacramento .
While still in the reception center at San Quentin , Alcantara began spending some time on self-examination through a book called “Houses of Healing” and later on through programs such as Guiding Rage into Power and Victim Offender Education Group. It helped him break through the tough exterior he acquired while trying to cope with bullying in his childhood and gang life in his teens.
He had grown up in a culture in which, if people didn’t show you respect, you had to physically demand it, he said, and he would come to be known as a bare-knuckles brawler who never ran from a fight. Reading “Houses of Healing,” he saw how his mental attitudes and behavioral responses were linked to childhood trauma.
At first, he said, he dismissed the book, but there were too many examples that seemed to mirror his choices, his experiences. The book also provided ways for him to heal and nurture his inner child.
Before the COVID-19 lockdown was over, Alcantara had earned his diploma, and he shifted to working on his associate’s degree. He attended groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous , and he facilitated meetings for Criminals and Gangmembers Anonymous. Teachers asked him to take over classes when they had meetings.
One of the education administrators asked him and another Spanish speaker to develop a curriculum for their peers who wanted to take the GED in that language. They developed a course of study that is still run by inmates today.
Before Alcantara left San Quentin , he participated in Quentin Cooks , a culinary arts program that prepares incarcerated individuals to work in restaurant kitchens when they are released. Just before he left, one of the co-founders told him they were looking to start a paid culinary internship for graduates on the outside, and she asked whether Alcantara would be interested. He leapt at the possibility.
Today, he’s running the pantry station at Mulvaney’s B&L, one of Sacramento’s top restaurants, as part of the Quentin Cooks’ Stepping Out internship. The kitchen, he said, runs like a construction job site — fast-paced, full of pressure and always ending in something beautiful.
Alcantara has found acceptance there, and he could see himself working in the world of fine dining. But he has other paths that he could take to a stable, financially secure future. He plans to finally take the state exams to get his contractor’s license. And, he could see himself pursuing a bachelor’s degree at UC Davis with support from the staff at Underground Scholars.
“I’ve always been a leader,” he said. “Before, I was leading my friends into a ditch. Now, I’m showing people a way out.”
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