Armatus Reintegration Program helps veteran rebuild his life after prison

Aug. 16--For many veterans, leaving the service is only just the beginning.

Returning home can be its own uphill battle, leaving men and women who fought for our country to piece together their lives, while coping with the possibilities of unemployment, mental health challenges, addiction and homelessness. In the midst of these struggles, some can fall through the cracks, driven to actions that lead to incarceration and eventually forgotten.

With 10% of the nation's prison inmates being veterans, the locally founded Armatus Reintegration Program helps these forgotten veterans find the tools they need to reintegrate into society.

Since its founding in 2017, the Armatus Reintegration Program started within the prison system with the help of TDCJ to find and recruit veterans that could benefit from the program. The program focuses on rebuilding their camaraderie and increasing their reentry skills through the use of cognitive curriculum intervention (CCI) therapy.

"Hopefully they only recruit them once -- that's our goal, that they recruit them once and when they come out, we do not want them (to go back)," Armatus CEO Rick Pritchard said.

The program has since expanded to include the Buratus Welcome Home process, held at an interim housing facility in Riverside. There, releasees are provided housing, food, clothing, transportation and job assistance while attending cognitive-behavioral modification sessions to get them back on their feet safely.

The Armatus Reintegration Program for incarcerated veterans welcomed its first Buratus Welcome Home graduate back into society Wednesday.

"We didn't know when that first graduate was going to happen, and I am so blessed that it's Mario Martin," Pritchard said.

Since being released in March, Martin has committed himself to confronting his underlying problems, bettering himself and his peers, and is determined to stay on the right path to succeed in life. According to Martin, he owes it all to the CCI curriculum provided through Armatus.

"I'm a proponent of the curriculum here because not only does it help me to confront anti-social behaviors and it helped me through the changes of my inner self," Martin said. "My problems in life come from being impulsive and compulsive due to when I had symptoms of depression."

Growing up in Detroit, Martin had been seriously thinking about playing college football in Virginia. However, after spending a summer with some high school football friends who had already enlisted, Martin impulsively enlisted on a dare with no research or thought as to how his future would be affected.

After serving for eight years from 1977 to 1985 mostly on the east coast of Virginia with some time served in Wisconsin, followed by Detroit, Martin was honorably discharged with excitement to return to his old life. However, as time would have it, his home that had been so familiar to him had changed in his absence, and Martin was left feeling that he would not be able to make it in Detroit.

"I'm not proud of this, but I'm one of the many veterans that served their time honorably and still find themselves challenged socially, and these challenges can lead to personal struggles," Martin said.

Nationally, 55% of incarcerated justice-involved veterans are in prison due to actions driven by PTSD, according to the Armatus Reintegration Program.

"I suffer from PTSD, I was a veteran, I did eight years in the United States Navy and went through some trauma during my service years, but ignored it for a long time as just being an experience of life," Martin said.

As an African American man in America, Martin was not unfamiliar with trauma, especially social trauma, however, he didn't recognize or realize how much of an effect that had on him until now.

"I'm not going to blame that on the choices I made, but I certainly learned from the curriculum here that it had a huge part in the decisions that I made as a person," Martin said.

On the surface, Martin's story reads like any other "normal" person -- he graduated from Sam Houston State University with a degree in sociology, he's owned several businesses throughout his adult life, he was married and fathered two daughters. However, a single moment driven by his impulsiveness, depression and PTSD would force him to face the damage underneath that he had been struggling with all this time.

Already into his early 50's, Martin was charged with credit card abuse and was incarcerated in 2015. The experience was awakening.

"I realized for the first time in my life that I was one of the oldest people around, so I knew right away that I wasn't supposed to be in the prison," Martin said.

It wasn't until July 2019 that Martin first met Pritchard at the Beto Unit where he was in a trustee camp waiting to be transferred for release in March. Martin would again be reentering a world under new circumstances, challenged with forging a new life for himself during the COVID-19 pandemic when many were already struggling.

"COVID did not fit into my plans to reintegrate," Martin said. "The job market was closed and there was not much to look forward to."

Now, against all odds, Martin has graduated from the Buratus Welcome Home process with a full-time job already secured and a bright future ahead.

"I want to give testament to the organization ... In all reality, I'm not even supposed to be standing up here today. There was a lot of struggles from the very beginning, not only COVID-19, but it was social struggles with just trying to acclimate coming from a different environment and just the devil himself," Martin said to a room of veterans, friends and Armatus volunteers that had helped him through his journey.

"Mario took it seriously from day one, he took the MRT, everything he did, he did for good, and one day he will be going back inside those walls and he will be an instructor. He will be an example that it can be done because he did it during the peak of COVID-19," Pritchard said.

Out of all of the cognitive programming and classes that Martin tried in the prison system, the Armatus Reintegration Program's CCI therapy was by far the most beneficial to him, inspiring him to help other incarcerated veterans change their lives for good.

"I didn't want to go to the grave leaving a legacy of failure to my daughters, I couldn't stand that," Martin said. "I received help, so now the responsibility is on me. I've enlisted myself, I've invested in myself."

"Since I've been a part of this program, my whole attitude is what I can do for others -- what I can do for other veterans, what I can do for the people that I've come in contact with, and that was kind of cleansing for me. So just taking on that attitude, it gave me purpose, going through the purpose, it gave me validation, so it just all came together like clockwork," Martin added.

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