We opened paper folders and beheld our to-do lists.

Visit our parole officers. Get housing. Get food. Get clothing. Apply for a job.

We had 10 minutes.

Go.

So began Adler University’s Social Exclusion Simulation — an exercise designed to let participants step, very briefly, into some painful shoes.

“It was developed as a learning experience so that the psychology students and clinical students at the time could get an understanding of what it would be like to go through being a woman re-entering society after being in prison,” said Tiffany McDowell, executive director at Adler’s Institute on Social Exclusion.

The exercise is based on extensive research into what women actually experience after being released, she said, and is adjusted annually to reflect changes in housing and other policies. In the years since Adler created the simulation in 2008, those who have gone through it include probation officers, lawyers and caseworkers.

The simulation is designed as a game. Tables were set up in a large room at Adler University representing the tasks we would try to complete. Students and staff members assumed roles like health clinic workers, CTA operators and parole officers.

We had three 10-minute periods, each representing one week of real time, in which to make our rounds of the tables to complete a group of tasks. We needed a transit pass to get to each one and were given five passes to start.

Our middle-class group, all but one of us white and our numbers including several Adler board members in business suits and dresses, was ready.

Or so we thought.

I headed to the health clinic to get my asthma medication, handing over one of my transit passes on the way.

“The wait is 6 hours,” the young woman at the table told me. I sat down to wait — and suddenly realized that I had forgotten to take my folder, which held my social security card.

I walked across the room to retrieve it, started to walk back and …

“Ticket!” barked a transit worker.

Ticket? I had already paid my fare with one of my precious transit passes; I was just fetching something I left behind.

She was not interested. “Ticket!” she repeated.

Another transit worker headed over. “Is she giving you trouble?” she asked with a menacing look at me.

I handed over another transit pass.

I got seen at the health clinic and headed to the housing office. Three transit passes were now gone.

The staffer was kind but said there was nothing available that night. Maybe my parole officer could help.

I headed to the parole officer, but …

“Ticket!”

I was perilously low on transit passes. I switched directions and headed to the social service office to get more passes. Now I could go see my parole officer …

But the time was up.

We headed back to our seats. Core faculty member Janna Henning took stock.

How many of us had gotten permanent housing? None.

How many had gotten food? None.

We would each lose a minute in the next round; hunger would slow us down. And those of us who had failed to visit our parole officer were given warrants for arrest. We were going to jail.

Play resumed. In “jail,” a corner of the room, we stood silently facing the wall. “No talking! No reading!” the corrections officer shouted. “You think about what you’ve done to get in here! Take some responsibility!”

Even though I knew it was only a simulation, my face grew hot. I had run out of time to see my parole officer because I needed transit passes so I could get food and clothing. Who was she to lecture me?

So help me, I hated her.

And so it went. By the time the simulation ended, with most of us having accomplished almost nothing, we were seething.

“I was just so angry I couldn’t function,” said Audrey Peeples, an Adler board member. “Really, I just gave up.”

“No one would listen to me,” said Anthony Chimera, Adler’s vice president for institutional advancement. “When I was, what I thought was, contesting something, they would throw me in jail.”

“I was almost in tears, I have to tell you,” said Joy MacPhail, a board member who reported that she had been put in solitary confinement “for being mouthy.”

Some of us had “resorted to criminal behavior,” as Peeples put it. Several sneaked transit rides. One lied on a job application, claiming to have a place to live. I hid a warrant for my arrest in my pocket to avoid going to jail.

The problem wasn’t simply that people were mean, participants said. A number of them had tried to help. A cop had even given MacPhail a transit pass.

But the system seemed built for frustration and failure. There were not enough resources to hand out. Social service workers were overwhelmed. Agencies did not coordinate their services. Application forms were needlessly complicated.

“Sometimes we think people are just not motivated or just not trying hard enough, or maybe if we just give them a few more resources they’ll do better,” McDowell said. “But in reality if we don’t change and make the system work more efficiently, we’re definitely going to miss a whole group of people.”

It had been a short walk in those uncomfortable shoes, but a powerful one. It made me think of how cushy mine are; how humiliating it would be to walk in the painful ones; and how many people around me are doing so every day.