Sabbatical Among Ex-Prisoners Is Transforming for a Foundation Vice President

The Open Society Institute, the umbrella organization for the philanthropies financed by George

Soros, offers four-month paid sabbaticals to its senior staff members to allow them to pursue projects related to the mission of the foundation. Nearly two years ago, Gara LaMarche, vice president and director of U.S. programs, spent his sabbatical at the Fifth Avenue Committee, a community-development organization in Brooklyn, N.Y. He wrote about his experiences in a diary he released in conjunction with the publication of a new report on the group’s Developing Justice program, which helps people recently released from jail. Following are excerpts from the diary; some of the names of the organization’s clients have been changed by Mr. LaMarche to protect their privacy

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My roots as an activist and advocate are with national and international human-rights organizations — chiefly, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch. In my work with OSI, I have come to know a great many community activists and visited the leading community-based organizations around the country and in New York, but I wanted to go deeper.

So I talked to Brad Lander, the director of the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn, and offered myself as a part-time volunteer. I chose the Fifth Avenue Committee because I have long admired its work: fighting the displacement by gentrification of longtime low-income tenants, rehabilitating dilapidated or abandoned buildings for affordable housing, even starting businesses such as a temp agency and an environmentally sensitive dry cleaner to train unemployed community residents for the work force. But I also wanted to spend time at FAC because it’s my community organization — though it serves the neighborhoods of Sunset Park and Red Hook as well as Park Slope, its main offices are on Fifth Avenue just a few blocks away from my home on Dean Street.

I was aware that I might be putting Brad in an awkward situation, since OSI is one of his organization’s key supporters. I assured him that he could turn me away without fear of penalty, or put me to work licking envelopes if that’s what they needed most.

But he gave it some thought, and in a few weeks wrote me a memo setting out a number of options for ways I could be useful. I chose to focus on the newest area of FAC’s work, a program that OSI helped to get started, the Developing Justice program. It had been under way for about a year, and Brad wanted me to check on how it is going and give him some feedback on how it might be improved.

Developing Justice was the brainchild of Darryl King, who until he was named director of the new program was manager of FAC’s various housing properties. King, a gentle, warm man in his early 50s, spent 25 years in New York state prisons for the murder of a police officer, a crime he insists he did not commit and which many independent investigations, including one on NBC’s Dateline, have also cast doubt on.

King and other FAC staff noted in recent years that many of the community residents needing assistance with housing and employment are recently released prisoners, whose needs are even greater than most of FAC’s poor African-American and Latino constituency. Besides facing barriers imposed by race and poverty, they are members of an unpopular and growing minority of those who have spent time in prison. Few have more than a high-school-equivalency degree, and most have little experience in the world of legitimate work.

The FAC program, which is entirely voluntary, plays to the organization’s traditional strengths in assisting with housing and job training, provides opportunities for the ex-prisoners to network and build their leadership skills, and has begun to organize participants and their families to press for political change, such as reform of the draconian drug laws, passed when Nelson Rockefeller was governor, that sent most of these men and women to prison for the prime years of their young lives.

The FAC program is, as far as I know, an unprecedented departure for a community-based organization, but it may be in the vanguard, since one consequence of a nation that confines two million people in prison is that each year 600,000 are released to their families and communities. There is a growing “re-entry” movement — which OSI, with its concern about fairness in the criminal-justice system, has supported to a greater extent than any other foundation — trying to deal with this social challenge, and I am somewhat familiar with the players and the literature. But I wanted to understand it at the most basic level: What is it like trying to put your life back together after you’ve done your time?

Most of what follows is the stories of the participants in the program. Almost every one impressed me with his or her determination, humility, and quiet courage. During the period of my FAC work, the organization was also trying to obtain community and community-board approval to convert a city-owned property on Pacific Street — the next block over from my home — to transitional housing for offenders just released from prison. This was not automatically embraced by the neighborhood with open arms, so it is also the story of that process and the debate over it, in which I played a small part.

June 21

Yesterday was my first day at the Fifth Avenue Committee. They’re treating me too much like a VIP, and I hope that wears off with familiarity. Brad says the staff wants me to do a brown-bag lunch, which I readily agreed to do next week. I’m happy to take my cue from them, but I had hoped to blend in as a kind of foot soldier. Maybe that’s unrealistic.

Spent most of the morning reading case files. There are a little over 40 participants so far, and I’ve read all but about eight. Only one has a college degree, and that is a 60-year-old Jewish accountant — not a typical participant and in fact the only white person in the whole program. Otherwise all the participants share, with very few exceptions, three things in common: they are black or Latino, they didn’t finish high school, and they have a substance-abuse problem. No big surprise, but the consistency of it is overwhelming. A number of them get lost track of, slip back into drug abuse, some re-offend. Many don’t have a permanent home, and are literally hard to track down. There are a lot of barriers to overcome.

June 22

Finished the case files this morning. Both Julian Brown, the program’s assistant director who started in May, and Darryl come in to talk with me at different points. Julian seems to want to give the program more structure. Offering a bit too much of my own opinions and impressions too soon, before I really know what I am talking about, I note how many of the participants cite discrimination and attitudes as a barrier to successful re-entry. Julian, who served time himself, is fairly tough-minded about it. Many ex-prisoners face the barrier of their own attitudes about themselves, and many are too quick to cite discrimination for their own failings.

Brad drops in for a few minutes to see how I am doing. I give him a few quick impressions from the stack of case files in front of me, and he stresses how different Developing Justice is from everything else FAC does — they have resisted seeing themselves as a social-service agency, don’t have a case-management approach to everything else they do. So he is really eager for some feedback on how they are doing, how to do it better. Of course I have no social-service background either — I came to FAC in part to get a better grounding in that stuff. So I hope they don’t expect me to bring a trained eye to this. It could be a Gift of the Magi situation — each wanting most what the other can’t give.

Darryl explains to me that the painting on the wall, which appears to be the wall of a prison, guardhouse, and barbed wire done in sunset tones, was done by a prisoner whom the system killed — forced to have a heart attack, he says. I asked him how he got disabled-vet status, and he says the Army forced him to wear boots and ruined his feet. His military job, ironically, was to accompany people to the stockades.

He seems to want to talk with me a lot, periodically mentions how glad they all are to have “a person of your stature” spending time with them. This makes me uncomfortable, but I remind myself it is institutional and not personal (though I do have to pinch myself from time to time to remember that, strangely, I have become a person of some stature in the world, while remaining 5 feet 7 as always). My being there is a way of validating what the agency is doing and, fundamentally, validating the worth of the work and the people involved.

At 6:30 is the monthly participants meeting in a FAC conference room. It’s important for me, since I will meet a number of people in the program, and then have a basis for following up to talk with them personally.

It starts about 15 minutes late with introductions, and everyone is encouraged to say something good about themselves, which they all do without hesitation, generally thanking God and saying how blessed they are to be out, etc. It’s a smaller turnout than they expected, but a good meeting.

The meeting has an agenda — but it’s mainly a kind of group sharing session, a place they can all go to talk about the issues peculiar to them (and about 600,000 other people each year): adjusting to life after prison.

Darryl talks about how he misses his cell, where he could get up and write at 2 a.m. with no one bothering him. He’s building a kind of cell, or private space, in the house he now shares with his wife. Julian talks about his family. He got out to find a younger brother in a gang. Is he a role model for criminality or rehabilitation?

Israel actually misses the life of crime, but hates prison more. He is trying to get a driver’s license, and this was stalled by the examiner making a mistake on his form. He has another exam tomorrow. Abdullah talks about how much he worked in prison, and how he hates being idle now.

For all of them, the money is not the issue. They want desperately to work, to have some structure in their lives, and they all understand the need to start modestly and build a résumé.

I asked Darryl why so many of the participants listed “parole” among the barriers to success. He’s had very good parole officers, but most have the mentality of cops — they’re looking to trip you up, and have enormous power over your life. And many of the restrictions are arbitrary, like a 7 p.m. curfew, which you could “violate” because the subway breaks down. I got a much better sense of the constant fear that a prisoner on parole lives with. A few years ago, Darryl’s urine tested dirty and he ended up in jail for three days, even though it was triggered by the prescription pain medication he was taking, which the parole officer knew about.

I am thinking of writing something about the concept of community, which is a sacred word in most of the circles in which I now travel — community justice, community lawyering, respect the community, etc. It’s funny, though, because in my earlier ACLU days, I always saw the word in negative terms — the “community” was trying to keep blacks out, “community” standards were cited to censor dissenting or offensive speech, and so on.

June 26

A walk around the neighborhood, in the broiling sun, with Brad.

It’s amazing the hand FAC has had in the revitalization of various buildings and blocks, and their opening up to low-income community residents and various special-needs types. With some difficulty, Brad tried to explain the management structure of FAC and its various entities, like Red Hook on the Move, the commercial-trucking course, and EcoMat, the environmentally sensitive dry cleaner.

He seems to have some doubts about the strategy of starting businesses to foster work-force development, and is lately more interested in the approaches — like the cable-installation course — that target certain sectors where fairly low-skill, low-education workers can get steady, decently paying jobs. But there are fewer and fewer of those where basic literacy is not a prerequisite, and it’s a big issue, particularly for the returning prisoners.

Julian told me later in the afternoon that not only is follow-up a huge problem with participants in the program — they don’t show up for meetings and appointments that the staff have helped them get — but many of them need remedial work. He made the interesting observation that test-taking skills are a big obstacle — it’s not so much that they couldn’t pass, say, the commercial driver’s test, but that they have little experience in how to game those kinds of tests.

July 3

This week Carlton is on vacation from Paul Weiss, the large Manhattan law firm where he works.

At first he seemed a little terse, but after a while opened up quite a bit. Only 30, he served 12 years in prison for a drug-related assault and robbery — he and some friends robbed some drug dealers. He wasn’t very detailed about the crime, and I was uncomfortable probing.

I am not quite sure how to handle this in these interviews. What I mainly want to focus on is the challenges prisoners have when they get out, and their crimes, or how they handled prison itself, are not necessarily relevant to that. But I have the normal human curiosity about the crimes themselves. How did a smart, attractive young man — he had finished Prospect Heights High School, unlike most of the others in the program — with an intact, supportive family (he’s the only boy, and the youngest in the family) wind up carrying a gun and robbing drug dealers?

He says he was very introspective in prison, thought about his life and how to change it, had a plan for what he would do when he got out. And it seems to be working well.

He’s had two parole officers since getting out last year, both pretty sympathetic. He believes they would cut him a break if, for instance, he got mistakenly caught up in a street sweep. (That’s one of the scary things about parole, where you are always living on the edge. If you are a young African-American man, your chances of negative encounters with the police, however you comport yourself, are pretty high.)

He almost got enough credits for his B.A. in prison, and is now, while working at Paul Weiss, finishing that and getting ready for a master’s program. Even though he’s in most respects a model participant in the program, he says he gets as much as he gives — in fact, that he gets through giving.

He was very chatty about life at Paul Weiss, at which he is a keen observer from his vantage point as a legal assistant. I asked if he wanted to be a lawyer himself, and he said no, they work too hard, he doesn’t covet their lives. What he really wants to do, eventually, is start a program for at-risk kids.

After Carlton left, I went next door and spoke for a while with Ibon Muhammad, the FAC housing director, an immaculately dressed, self-confident woman I would judge to be about 50. She was polite, but had made it clear in responding to my request to talk that she didn’t have much time. But again, as we talked, she opened up easily, and we could have talked for much longer if I had not broken it off after a while to go to lunch.

Ibon grew up in the neighborhood. She has four daughters, the youngest of whom is starting Howard [University] in the fall and the three oldest (ranging from 21 to 27) all getting married this year. She had to take out a bank loan for the weddings.

The most compelling observation she made to me — I think it was when I mentioned Carlton, and what a successful re-entry he had made — was about the role that conversion to Islam plays in so many such cases. Carlton became a Muslim in prison, and apparently so did Darryl and Julian, though none of them have mentioned it and none have taken a Muslim name. Ibon herself, though Hispanic and raised a Catholic, is also a convert. She thinks that the attraction of Islam for so many black and brown people is not necessarily the religion as such, but the connection to their own history, culture, and self-worth. Some of the participants don’t talk much about the Muslim connection because of bigotry — they think that many people connect Islam with terrorism. I want to probe this more.

July 26

The community meeting about FAC’s proposed Pacific Street transitional housing took place on Thursday night at the Immanuel Church down the block from my house.

Brad spoke — he has a terrifically effective, quietly respectful manner — about how FAC got into the work with ex-prisoners: how they found they were dealing with many of them anyway, how FAC’s track record with housing and employment can be helpful with what they need most. Then Carlton, telling his success story (to great applause, beginning a trend, on both sides, for the evening), and Joe, a local cop active in FAC, who was once the community police officer, testifying to FAC’s effectiveness. “I don’t want to sound like a liberal cop,” he said, “but you can’t keep them in forever. If they wanted to put it on my block, I’d say OK.”

It seems to be going splendidly, but I could tell that a Chinese couple from Pacific Street — he was holding a hand-lettered poster calling the proposed project “environmental racism” — were getting impatient. Julian is next, with several big sheets of paper running through the key points of the project — how tenants will be screened, how community residents will be involved, how the cops will have standing permission to search the building at all times (that raised my civil-libertarian hackles a bit), what the curfew and noise restrictions are, etc.

Then it was time for community reactions and questions. An African-American woman, holding a small child as she spoke, read a letter on behalf of a number of Pacific Street residents.

Some of the questions it raised — will there be child molesters or rapists in the building? — had already been addressed by the FAC presentations, and indeed by the leaflets distributed during the door-knocking rounds. Her basic argument was that Pacific Street has suffered enough, and that this project would bring mental anguish to the block’s residents. “We are guilty of being low-income people of color,” she argued, pointing out, correctly, that such a project would never be attempted on Sixth or Seventh Avenues.

Next up was a longtime Pacific Street homeowner who lives four doors down from the building in question, a middle-aged African-American man with flip-up sunglasses.

“This is a good program,” he disarmingly offered, citing his own previous work with Rikers Island prisoners, “but this is not the block for it.” He told the story of the block’s difficult progress overcoming rampant prostitution, no trees, etc., how he and his wife had raised their children, now in college, on Pacific Street, and how it was slowly becoming a place for young families, despite the odds.

A middle-aged black woman then came to the front, introducing herself by saying she owned three buildings on Pacific, and was a successful professional, an OB-GYN. “But if you met me in another setting, and didn’t know that about me,” she told the room (about 60 people for most of the evening), “many of you might not treat me so respectfully.” Then her tone turned angry and provocative, asking the critics who they were to think they were better than — implicitly, her — and the participants in the proposed project. The atmosphere was by that time pretty intense, with a lot of anger building up on both sides.

When I spoke next, I tried to defuse it a bit, saying I had refrained from applauding any speaker, and that I was struck that no one in the room has yet questioned the need for or the wisdom of such a project — just whether it was right for Pacific Street, whose residents had worked hard and whose views deserved respect.

I did, however, question the premise of the environmental racism sign — I could not stand in a house of God and have my friends equated with toxic waste. That seemed to quiet people down a bit, and I could tell from the head nodding and from what the ex-prisoners each said to me later that it had meant a lot to them.

August 29

Diane was brimming with positive energy. Since I saw her about a month ago, her housing situation seems to have settled.

She’s living in Manhattan, with her 15-year-old daughter, Ashanti. Her daughter is one of three kids who went into kinship foster care when she was imprisoned, and she hopes to get her 10-year-old — who was only a few months old when separated from her — back with her soon. She says that Ashanti has chosen to go through everything with her, no matter how difficult. Her father is also imprisoned, and the father’s girlfriend helped raise her and stays in close touch, something Diane seems to appreciate, not resent.

On the job front, after her perfume-company job turned out to be a scam, she was asked back by the telemarketers, and is about to go into a new training course. She got a GED and some kind of computer training at Bedford Hills, but feels a bit rusty and needs some experience using the software she learned.

She connected with the Fifth Avenue Committee through a childhood friend, also in the program. She grew up in Park Slope, and at 16 was a straight-A student. She was living with a man she called her stepfather (though he was not living with her mother) and his three natural daughters across the street from her mother, with whom she maintained close ties.

Some kind of turning point for her was when a local thug named Skull (he had a shaved head) moved back to the neighborhood after serving time for strangling a woman to death. He borrowed five bucks from her on the street, and one day showed up at the apartment when she and her stepsisters were there. He came into her bedroom, and when she tried to get rid of him, he moved to choke her.

A chilling little detail of this story, which she told laughingly, is that her stepfather kept two-by-fours in every room of the house — for security? She doesn’t know how she found the wherewithal, but while Skull was choking her, she got hold of one and hit him on the head, knocking him out.

Her sisters called an ambulance, and she ran away. Skull ended up comatose in the hospital. The 78th Precinct was sympathetic to her, when they finally got a sister to find her (hiding in a basement on Dean Street), and most, but not all, people in the neighborhood considered her to have acted in self-defense, done a public service. But it was a tense atmosphere, and soon caused her family to move.

A year or so later her stepfather urged her to take a summer job in a factory on Third Avenue, where some of her family and a number of local kids were working. She burned her arm badly in an accident there, ended up in Methodist Hospital for seven months, went to live with an aunt in Crown Heights and was so self-conscious about her disfigurement that she didn’t go out of the house for a year. Her aunt had to arrange a tutor for her.

Not sure what finally brought her out, but by her early 20s she was living with a man, the father of her children, who was dealing drugs, and got used to living in a certain style. When he was imprisoned, she continued it by dealing herself, and finally, at the late age of 25, starting to use. In a year or so she had a 10-year prison sentence — she’s 37 now — from which she returned late last year.

She isn’t on parole anymore, but had a very good relationship with a supportive parole officer, and checks in with him voluntarily to tell him how she’s doing.

A new participant, Jonathon, dropped by, and I spoke with him a bit. He’d just had a job at Pathmark and seemed to be in his early 30s, a light-skinned Hispanic man with a carefully shaped narrow beard. His hands were red and scarred — almost as if burned — from a bad case of psoriasis.

Jonathon did 10 years for attempted robbery, got out in March. He’s living with a sister, since his parents retired and moved back to Puerto Rico while he was in prison. He had a few odd jobs before going to prison, and since has worked the late-night shift stocking shelves at Pathmark in Sunset Park. But his psoriasis is apparently a problem gripping the glass jars, and he asked his supervisor to give him work that didn’t involve that, which he was not willing to accommodate. So he’s been laid off, and is pondering a discrimination claim.

At first Jonathon seemed to me slightly mentally impaired, or perhaps someone with a slight speech defect. But as we talked, it became clear this was not so, and he became articulate, even passionate.

“I read about all these mayoral candidates promising to reduce crime, but what they need to do is help ex-prisoners get jobs,” he said, pointing out that many in prison are parole violators who go back to crime because they can’t find work. His own parole officer is very supportive. Except when he had the late shift at Pathmark, he has a 9 o’clock curfew, and the officer checks in a few times a week, cutting him slack if he’s under a half-hour late.

“In prison, all we have is hope,” Jonathon told me, “and FAC helps make that hope a reality.” I think he has a future as a direct-mail copywriter.

Next was Angel, whom I hadn’t seen since the participants meeting in June. One of the oldest participants in the program at 53, he’s been in prison a total of 23 years, the last time seven years, getting out last December. In and out of prison during that time, he’s had a drug habit, and, after a lapse soon after his last release, says he’s been clean since, going to Narcotics Anonymous and other kinds of meetings. He’s obviously in a period of self-reflection, talks a lot about confronting his character defects.

He’s a small man with a closely trimmed beard who favors baseball caps, and he’s very funny and engaging. All of his siblings have been drug addicts at one time or another; the others have made more successful transitions to the mainstream so far. His sister runs a clinic in Coney Island (where he lives with his mother). He volunteers there as an AIDS counselor a few times a week since he doesn’t have a job yet. I asked about his parents, and he said they were in the iron and steel business — his mother ironed and his father stole. She’s an enabler, he said, and someone with an addiction of her own, gambling.

He tells me he never worked, but spent his time stealing, wheeling, and dealing. But he was a burglar, specializing in the houses of the well off on the north shore of Long Island, mostly Glen Cove. Specialized in diamonds. He liked the work and the lifestyle, and could clear as much as $30,000 for a job. I couldn’t help but think that it was a kind of job, even a craft, requiring all manner of skill, resolve, and knowledge, if you leave aside the illegality or immorality of it. He saw it as almost a victimless crime. Many of the houses had poor security, as if they were asking to be robbed, and indeed some were. He worked with a corrupt insurance agent who let him know which houses wanted to be robbed so they could collect insurance and in some cases buy their own stuff back at a cut rate.

He got to FAC through his parole officer, who told him about Darryl, whom he had known in prison, since they’re contemporaries. (At one point he rattled off a long list of prisons he’d done time in, practically every one in the state.) He seems a little particular about what he will do, not surprising since he was a higher-class criminal than most of the participants in the program. He’d just turned down a job working with garbage that also required two subway trips a day. He finally got a driver’s license — he’s always driven and had cars, he assured me, but never had a license before — and after the waiting period will try to take the commercial-driving course.

The most surprising thing about Angel was when he mentioned in passing an interest in mysticism and ancient cultures. During his flush periods, it seems he traveled widely, to India, Rome, the Middle East, Peru, Guatemala, Mexico, etc. (as long a list as the prisons he’s been in). I mentioned that I had been to Machu Picchu, and he discussed it and other places in Peru quite knowledgeably. All self-educated, a lot of reading inside and outside of prison.

August 31

Talking with Eddie Rosario, the new caseworker, and Julian, I mentioned that I instinctively do not ask participants the details of their crimes — focusing on their lives before and after — and not a single one has volunteered the details. Is this because I don’t ask, or is it some kind of denial? Both said that they rarely discuss their crimes if they don’t have to, and they think most ex-prisoners avoid the topic because there are so many occasions where they are required to discuss it, and they want to resist being defined by their worst act.

September 5

Had a good meeting with Benjamin Dulchin, FAC’s director of organizing.

We had an interesting talk about the role of organizing in a CDC [community-development corporation], most of which have a service orientation, and his theory — somewhat at odds with my own experience and impressions — that people organize best around positive goals, not negative ones. (A living wage is positive, but what about reform of the Rockefeller drug laws?)

He smiled, and said it was a very good question, when I asked how FAC determines its organizing priorities, readily conceding that much organizing is manipulated and top down. In FAC’s case, he says that the displacement campaign grew organically from what the tenant activists wanted to do, but some other organizing has been much more staff and funder driven. (He also acknowledged the complexities of organizing individual interventions against landlords, both because it isn’t systemic, and because sometimes the landlords are struggling, too.)

He believes, and I agree, that there are many restraints on ex-prisoners’ organizing politically — literal ones, their economic and personal circumstances, and the disinclination to identify themselves by their involvement in the criminal-justice system. Not so with their families, and he sees a lot of potential in the mothers who line up every week for the bus upstate to see their incarcerated sons and daughter

You can’t come to know Carlton or Angel or Jonathon as I have — or Darryl, Julian, and Eddie, the FAC staff who work with them and many others, whose own transformations are an inspiration to all of us — without having your own beliefs and assumptions challenged about the men and women among us who wind up behind bars. I can’t see them any longer as ex-prisoners, defined only by their worst acts. I see them as neighbors, whose best selves contribute to their families and communities. And I see them as friends.

A copy of the “Developing Justice in South Brooklyn” report, to which Mr. LaMarche contributed an afterword, is available at the Fifth Avenue Committee’s Web site, http://www.fifthave.org.