Peer support specialists provide valuable mentorship and emotional support — grounded in hard-earned personal experience.
This story originally appeared in Reasons to be Cheerful, a nonprofit online magazine.
When he walked out of prison after 28 years, the first thing Allen Burnett did was drive to the ocean. “I just stood there for a minute,” he recalls. “I wanted to feel the air.”
For most of his life, Burnett never expected that moment to come.
He entered California’s prison system as a teenager in the early 1990s after participating in a fatal carjacking. Sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, he believed he would die behind bars: “I was told I’m not worthy.”
Instead of planning for freedom, he focused on finding purpose within the prison walls. That choice set him on a path that would reshape not only his life but the lives of countless others.
At California State Prison, Los Angeles County — often simply called Lancaster — Burnett eventually earned a college degree with magna cum laude honors thanks to a pioneering in-prison education program through Cal State, and he found mentorship with other prisoners. Governor Gavin Newsom commuted his sentence and the parole board found him to be no longer a threat to society in 2019.
Today Burnett is the co-founder and executive director of Prism Way, a Los Angeles nonprofit that trains formerly incarcerated people to become peer support specialists — mentors who help others navigate trauma, addiction and life after prison.
The work draws directly on the peer-counseling culture Burnett experienced during his own incarceration.
The mission is clear: turn lived experience into healing.
A mental health crisis behind bars
California’s correctional system houses tens of thousands of people with mental health needs. Federal estimates show that 44 percent of people in jail and 37 percent in prison live with a diagnosed mental illness, compared with 18 percent of the general population. More than half also struggle with substance-use disorders. A large prison system study published in BMC Public Health found that nearly half of incarcerated people have a diagnosed mental health condition, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress.
The crisis is particularly acute in local jails, including the massive jail system run by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Advocates and researchers have described Los Angeles County jails as the largest de facto mental health facilities in the United States, where people with psychiatric conditions often cycle through the justice system rather than receiving treatment. Federal oversight has repeatedly highlighted systemic failures: understaffing, long waits for psychiatric care and harsh disciplinary measures that exacerbate mental distress.
Burnett watches the new initiatives with relief: “You can’t just lock everybody up and expect them to get better,” he says. “If you don’t help and support them, locking up isn’t doing anything.”
The prison that pioneered peer support
Remarkably, incarcerated men created their own rehabilitative culture in the Towers and within the Lancaster facility long before the current state initiative.
In the early 2000s, incarcerated men proposed an honor yard in Lancaster, a space where participants pledged to reject gang violence, drugs and racism, and commit to education, self-reflection and accountability. Inmates created programs ranging from book clubs to victim-awareness courses to addiction recovery meetings. They invited professors and volunteers to teach classes. “The real benefit of Lancaster was the men teaching men,” Burnett recalls. “If someone was struggling, we’d walk laps together and talk for hours. It was a space where we could ask for help without shame.”
Participants held one another accountable. Minor behavior resembling gang culture could lead to removal from the yard. The result was a culture where men serving life sentences focused on education, therapy and personal growth — even when many believed they would never leave prison. Burnett eventually confronted his own traumas — including finding his father dead from a drug overdose at age five — and the pain his crimes had caused to the family of his victim.
“Hurt people hurt people,” Burnett says. “But healed people help people.”
Learning to heal — and help others
Among those shaped by Lancaster’s peer culture was Tyson Atlas, sentenced to life without parole at 16. “I was so young I didn’t even understand what my sentence meant,” he says. Meeting Burnett became a turning point: “Watching his healing journey helped me see what was possible.”
Through peer-led programs, Atlas learned counseling skills, group facilitation and recovery techniques — often without knowing they mirrored formal psychological practices. Later, while studying academic literature, he recognized the concepts he had been practicing all along.
Atlas earned certification as a substance-use disorder counselor while incarcerated. In 2024, after his sentence was commuted, he joined Burnett in leading Prism Way’s peer support training.
Founded in 2021, Prism Way trains system-impacted individuals to become certified peer support specialists, recognized within California’s behavioral health system. The program combines roughly 80 hours of classroom instruction, group discussion and experiential learning.
Respect. Honesty. Patience. These are among the values Atlas scribbles on the whiteboard in the light-filled rooms of Prism Way on Downtown Los Angeles’s Hope Street. His 23 students listen intently. Most of them are former lifers like Atlas and Burnett; others recently became sober or are working with at-risk youth. One of them, Moises Huerta, was released from prison just five days ago. He had met Burnett in Lancaster in a grief support group. “They pick me up from my halfway house, they show me how to operate a phone,” he says gratefully about the help he has received from Prism Way staff after several decades behind bars. Now he is here to train as a peer support specialist to pay it forward.
Peer support specialists do not diagnose conditions or prescribe treatment. Instead, they provide mentorship and emotional support grounded in personal experience. “We harness our lived experience and come alongside people in their recovery,” Atlas says. “All the years someone spent incarcerated — those experiences can prevent someone else from going down the same path.”
For many, certification also provides a career pathway, helping address the employment barriers that often hinder successful reentry. Prism Way sometimes waives tuition for participants who cannot afford it.
“We know what it’s like coming home and navigating the workforce with that stigma,” Burnett says. “If we don’t help them, some might end up homeless or fall back into addiction.”
Both the attendees and the trainers emphasize that peers got through to them when others couldn’t. “I had counselors who wanted to help me, but they hadn’t been in my situation,” Burnett remembers. “They hadn’t been assaulted, sexually molested, they hadn’t lost parents to drug abuse and been around gangs; we didn’t speak the same language. They didn’t have to go home to the same struggles that I had to.”
Shifting prison culture
Edwin Cruz, who co-facilitates the course with Atlas, spent 17 years in prison after a life-without-parole sentence. He struggled with depression while grappling with the prospect of dying in prison. Yet he didn’t ask for help. “As a Southern Hispanic, going to mental health was seen as weakness,” he recalls. “You could be targeted for it.” Peer-led support changed that. “Having somebody to talk to helped me process trauma, depression and addiction.”
Cruz notes that peer support is not a replacement for professional treatment. “Some individuals need multiple levels of care,” he says. But programs like Prism Way have shifted the culture, creating spaces where seeking help is now encouraged.
He and Burnett first met in prison as members of opposing gangs. “We’re living proof that this works,” Cruz says with a laugh.
Prism Way’s work reflects a broader idea emerging in criminal justice reform: that the people closest to the problems of incarceration may also hold the most practical insights into change. Burnett sums it up: “People closer to the problem are closer to the solution.”
Though critics question why inmates should benefit from free mental health care when many Americans can’t afford or access care, California’s data suggest the efforts pay off. Calmer inmates mean fewer resources spent on staffing and security. According to the Board of Parole Hearings, fewer than one percent of people released from life-with-parole sentences between 2011 and 2020 were convicted of a new violent crime within three years.
Prism Way now hopes to expand beyond Los Angeles, partnering with youth programs and juvenile facilities in Orange County. A cohort set for early 2026 will train young adults between the ages of 18 and 25, pairing skill-building with mentorship and employment support.
For Burnett, the mission is deeply personal: “I don’t want people to remember me by my crime,” he says. “I want them to remember me by the work I’ve done.”
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