‘Legislation to Living Room’: Reentry Home Opens for Incarcerated Women

Tucked away in a quiet Antioch neighborhood is a new reentry home for women transitioning out of incarceration. For some of its residents, the home can also serve as an alternative to jail or prison time. 

Free Hearts, a Nashville advocacy group led by formerly incarcerated women, celebrated the opening of the new home on Friday, Oct. 9. The space is able to house up to seven women and is the first of its kind in Tennessee, established via a reentry model created by the New Way of Life’s SAFE Housing Network. 

The home provides its residents with a support system that can help women secure things like housing and identification, as well as assisting them with family reunification and building workforce skills. 

“I know what it feels like to come home and realize that being released from incarceration doesn't mean that the barriers disappear,” said Free Hearts executive director Dawn Harrington, who was formerly incarcerated. “You still need somewhere to sleep. You need food. You need transportation. You need employment. You need people who believe in you. And sometimes you just need someone who understands what you've been through without making you explain yourself.”

The new home follows a law — largely pushed for by Free Hearts — passed by the Tennessee General Assembly in 2019. The legislation allows certain nonviolent offenders who are their household’s primary caregiver to go through community-based alternatives instead of jail time. 

“Today we're taking that work from legislation into a living room, from changing laws to opening doors,” Harrington said, noting that Tennessee incarcerates women at a rate of 194 per 100,000 residents — higher than most other NATO countries. 

Despite this statistic, Harrington tells the Scene that incarcerated women are a frequently overlooked population facing unique barriers, especially because they are often the primary caregivers for children. She says Free Hearts wants to continue to open more homes exemplifying this model across Nashville and Tennessee.

“The thing about the model is to make it feel really like home, and a place that you would be honored to live in,” she says. “Sometimes the halfway houses, it's really a lot like being in the prison, it's run like a prison. We wanted it to be the opposite. We wanted it to feel like home. We wanted it to feel like a dignified place for people to be able to come to.” 

Dawn Deaner, recently elected Davidson County Criminal Court judge and formerly a public defender, emphasized the importance of these alternatives to jail time.

“I've only been sitting on the bench for a month, but I was a public defender for many, many years in this community and represented hundreds, if not thousands, of women who were coming through the court system,” Deaner said. “[They] had needs that needed to be met, and didn't need to go to prison and didn't need to go to jail, and the options and resources were just not available for them. And here they are.”