Tobias Tubbs, a co-founder of Huma House, spent 30 years in prison where he ultimately became a peer educator, self-help facilitator and trainer for rescue dogs with the Paws for Life prison program. Former Gov. Jerry Brown commuted his sentence in December 2017 and he was released in October 2018.
Since his release, Tubbs has been working to help the transition for other people coming out of prison. Soon after meeting Richardson and hearing about her life, he offered her a lead role at Huma House.
“I wanted to make places where women are safe and I wanted to do this not just for the women in my family, my nieces, my mother, my aunts, my godmothers,” Tubbs said. “But I wanted to do this for women behind the wall.”
The National Corrections Reporting Program, a Department of Justice program for data collection on state and federal prisoners, calculates that nearly 2,500 women are released from prison in California annually. The Office of Justice Program’s research showed that women reentering society have “a significantly higher need for support services than men,” and reentry programs need to take gender into account.
Volunteer planting exercise by Huma House for a climate event at the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory
Tubbs also reconnected with his religion, Islam, while in prison, and by the time he came out, he had a renewed sense of purpose.
“The first command that God gave to humanity was: love each other and keep the garden,” Tubbs said. “If we return to the earth, if we return to the natural healing practices, which the Earth offers us, then we can cultivate gardens in our community and within our own selves. [With this work] we are returning to the ways of our ancestors as a means of disrupting a system that has been historically and systemically racist.”
Before starting Huma House, Tubbs worked with nonprofit organizations like Insight Gardening Program, Catalyst Foundation and Words Uncaged while he was at California State Prison in Lancaster. Post-release, he built his life around his goal of breaking the stigma and ending the dehumanization of incarcerated people. He does this by working with educational in-prison and rehabilitation programs.
Tubbs believes that the criminal justice system was never built with reentry in mind and that it is rigged against Black Muslim men like him.
“When they gave us death sentences under the notion that we were super predators, it was to lock us up and keep us housed in prisons and institutions for the rest of our lives. You have a system that has systematically, historically, through intention, deliberate bias and hatred, created conditions for me to stay imprisoned,” Tubbs said.
“Reentry means there’s resiliency,” he added. “Reentry means there’s neuroplasticity. Reentry means that there’s a chance that I can be more than my worst moments.”