Shock of freedom: Life after prison

VINNY VELLA, Daily News Staff Writer vellav@phillynews.com, 215-854-2513 Posted: Wednesday, March 25, 2015, 12:16 AM

DURING HIS first moments as a free man in nearly 45 years, Clarence Safwat Davis was thinking about groceries. Specifically, about whether his family needed to pick up bread and milk on the drive home to Tioga from the state correctional institution at Graterford.

"It's something that's part of our normal flow as a family, something we always do and ask about," Davis, 64, said the other day, a few weeks after that January night. "I didn't want to miss that step. I really just wanted to pick up where we had left off."

But his first thought, even before pantry staples, was how surreal it felt to be able to do whatever he wanted for the first time since he was 20 years old. "I hoped that no one would come along and pinch me and wake me up from this dream," he said. "It was unreal, and, in many respects, it still is unreal."

Davis' experience of re-entering society in what he calls a "second childhood" after years of captivity, of struggling to ease back into a world that evolved while he sat frozen in time, is shared by scores of men and women every year.

According to data from Philadelphia's Office of Reintegration Services, about 300,000 former inmates live among the city's 1.5 million residents. The Daily News interviewed three of these "returning citizens," three men from Philadelphia born anew after many years in prison.

A few days after Davis made that trip into the parking lot in Graterford pushing a cart full of the belongings he had accumulated in prison, someone asked him what was new.

"Everything," he said. "It's like they let me down on another planet."

Philly was a city that, more than 40 years ago, Davis knew like "the back of my hand." Now, on SEPTA buses he has to ask the driver where his stop is.

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Shock of freedom: Life after prison