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Hard Time: Life After Prison

TRANSCRIPT

Broadcast Date: March 1, 2003

There are signs America's historic prison expansion may be reaching its peak. During a 30-yearwar on crime that began in the 1960s, the inmate population doubled, and then doubled again.The United States has two million people behind bars - more than any nation in the world. Butnow, growth in the prison population has slowed to near zero. The soaring crime rates thatprompted the war on crime have come back down in recent years. And tight budgets are makingsome states rethink the tough sentencing laws that helped fill prisons in the first place.

Now, more than 600,000 inmates are leaving state and federal prisons every year - that's

the biggest number in US history. How they fare on the outside, and how communities fare

in absorbing these ex-inmates, is a topic of growing concern.

Hard Time - Scraping By

Gett ing help with the bills

It's a chilly December day in Durham, North Carolina, and Eddie shows up for a noontimeappointment at Presbyterian Urban Ministries.

The ministry is in a big stone church building on East Main Street. Director and Pastor DorothyLane Ellis escorts Eddie to her office in the basement. He's 42, a small, wiry man with neatlytrimmed brown hair and a goatee.

"What brings you in to see us today?" Ellis asks as she types his name and address into hercomputer.

"Well, I got this disconnect notice," Eddie explains. "Everybody 's sending me notices, the phonecompany and what have you. This is another one that I received that they're going to turn me off on the 27th if they don't receive money from me in the amount of $101.20."

Eddie doesn't mention that he can only afford to eat one meal a day. Or that he hasn't paid thismonth's rent and worries he might be homeless within a few weeks.

"Do you currently have any income?" Ellis asks.

"Well, some small odd jobs that I can find. Like today I'm sawing up some wood for a fella andhe's going to pay me probably enough to put gas in my tank and get some food," Eddie says.

Eddie doesn't fall within the categories of needy people Reverend Ellis usually helps - familieswith children, disabled and elderly people - but, luckily, a recent ice storm that knocked out





power for days brought in a fresh batch of donations Ellis can draw from. She agrees to payEddie's bill and calls the electric company to tell them a check is on its way.

"Thank you," Eddie says. "How about a word of prayer before we leave?" When Ellis agrees,Eddie bows his head and begins, "Father God, we thank you for the blessings of this day. I thank you for this dear sister who serves you by serving others ... ."

Battling addictions to alcohol, sex and crack cocaine

Eddie was not always the sort of person who breaks into prayer with near-strangers. He turned toreligion in prison. Eddie grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of a policeman. He quit highschool to join the Navy and later held a series of jobs back home. He battled, and beat, addictionsto alcohol and crack cocaine. But in 1996, his life came apart.

"What it basically was, was sexual addiction," Eddie says. "I put down drugs and alcohol andstuff like that and I just started to get involved with, you know, lewd women. And slowly butsurely that became an addiction. And I eventually got hooked up with a young girl and I got introuble that way."

Eddie got caught having sex with a teenage girl. He was sentenced to find years' probation, butwas then arrested on a similar charge in Virginia. A New Jersey judge sent him to state prison formultiple counts of endangering the welfare of a child. He served five years and two months. He'snow gett ing treatment for sex addiction as a condition of his parole. Eddie left p rison inDecember of 2001 with no job, literally no money, and litt le support from his family.

"Because of what I had done, my mother told the rest of my family that they were forbidden tomention my name in her house ever again," Eddie says. "My brother's a police officer. I mean,we were so close when we were kids and he just doesn't answer any of my letters, he doesn'twant anything to do with me. And then when I needed two hundred dollars because they weregoing to turn off my phone and they were going to turn off my water, he told my father to tell meto go someplace else to find it, to take it out of the garbage can where I've taken everything elsefrom. It hurt."

Eddie says it's not surprising that some ex-inmates, shunned by their families and employers,turn to their old friends st ill doing crime. He says since leaving prison he's met drug dealers and

bookmakers who, when they heard he was an ex-con, offered him "jobs."

But he's opted for whatever honest work he can get.

"Have you ever been convicted ... ."

Eddie climbs into his 1991 Dodge van and heads to a poor part of north Durham. He moved toNorth Carolina after his release because of a spiritual group he'd heard about in prison, the





Human Kindness Foundation, which is based near Durham. The group helped Eddie find anapartment here, though he still has to pay the $575-a-month rent. A wealthy volunteer with the

foundation bought Eddie his van for $1,700.

"I'm glad to have it; it certainly beats walking," Eddie says as he drives up Roxboro Road. "Idon't know what I'd do without it because I certainly wouldn't be able to do painting jobs. But itneeds a little work. The brakes in the front need to be redone. It blows smoke now, and it seemsthat that situation's getting worse and worse. I can't afford the repairs right now."

When Eddie got to Durham he joined a local Church of Christ, and his connections there get himsome of the informal work he drums up. This day he's working for a friend from church whoowns a home in need of repair. Behind a big old house with worn and warped clapboards, Eddiespreads a drop cloth on the ground and sets to work scraping away old paint. The job will pay

him ten dollars an hour.

"I'll just work out here for maybe two hours or so and just make a little bit of money today,"Eddie says.

Like Eddie, many ex-convicts struggle along on sporadic, informal work. Researchers havefound that a prison term takes a slice out a person's earning power - a 15-percent slice, onaverage. Since most people who go to prison have few marketable skills to start with, a 15-percent wage hit often means poverty. Federal and state laws ban many felons from holding jobsin schools, nursing homes or airport security. Eddie's home state of New Jersey has a long list of jobs off-limits to certain felons - from bartending to firefighting, to working at a racetrack or as a

parking attendant. Before his arrest, Eddie held jobs as a postal worker and an optician and hemanaged a Radio Shack store. Since prison, he says, he's applied for dozens of entry-level jobs.

"I went into Wal-Mart recently," Eddie recalls "and I f illed out an extensive application and I satthere for quite some time waiting for someone to come and take my application. And a fellowcame out of the office, and he was standing right next to me, out in the open, and he said, 'Themanager wants to talk to you so could you please just wait for a few more minutes. He wants tosit down with you and discuss things.' I said, 'OK, fine.' He came back out a few seconds laterand he said, 'I noticed that you forgot a few blocks on this application. Could you just fill themin.'"

Those empty blocks were the questions about the applicant's criminal record, Eddie says. Hesays he won't lie as a matter of principle, but he sometimes leaves the questions blank hopinghe'll get a chance to tell his story in person. So now he filled them in.

"And where it said, 'Have you ever been convicted of a violent crime?' I checked no because Ihaven't. And then it said, 'Have you ever been convicted of a felony?' and I checked yes becauseI have. So he said, 'All right, thank you,' and he went back in that office. And then he came outanother door. This time the counter was between he and I, the fella that I had just shook hands





with and been talking to, and he said, 'Is this the number that you can be reached at?' I said, 'Yes,it is.' He said, 'Well, the manager's in a meeting right now.' And I said, 'Look buddy, you don't

need to lie to me. I see what's going on. And I'm just gonna pray for you.' You know. And so Ileft," Eddie says.

Eddie says he understands why a manager might push a convicted felon to the bottom of theapplicants' p ile, but he claims to have done things differently himself. "When I was a managerfor Radio Shack and guys came to me and were honest with me and said, 'Well, I 'm on probation'or 'I got to go to AA' - I hired them."

If Eddie really behaved that way as a manager, he apparently wasn't typical. Gudrun Parmerdirects a Durham County p rogram for ex-prisoners. She says ex-cons had a better chance of finding work a few years ago, when jobs were plentiful.

"A lot of times the employers were willing to give them a break on the criminal record becausethe need for workers was so great, especially in construction, landscaping, the service industry.But now they can pick. Now they have more people looking for work than there are positions.Our guys are usually the last ones on the list," Parmer says.

Some advocacy groups suggest policies to make ex-prisoners more attractive to employers - suchas expunging the criminal records of ex-cons who stay out of trouble for a given period, orgiving tax credits and other incentives to employers who hire former inmates. In the meantime,'re-entry' has become a buzzword. Lots of crime experts and corrections officials say there oughtto be more programs to help ex-convicts succeed - job-training courses, halfway houses and drug

treatment programs. The actual growth of such programs is slow, partly because governments arestrapped for money. That leaves religious groups to fill the void.

Faith-based Support

Eddie has gott en support from one such faith-based group. One afternoon he and several otherex-inmates sit in an upstairs meeting room on East M ain in Durham, listening to a localbusinessman, Ellis McCoy, lead them through the first chapter of the Book of James.

"Verse four: 'But let patience have her perfect work,'" McCoy reads. He looks up at the menaround the table. "Patience will bring maturity. Going through a trial brings maturity."

The men have each found their way to New Beginnings Outreach, a fledgling ministry aimed athelping ex-offenders. Phillip Jackson is the ministry's founder and Executive Director. He gaveup a well-paying management job to start New Beginnings. Jackson grew up in a rough townnear Philadelphia. He carried a gun by age twelve, he says. He did 18 months in a military prisonbefore turning to Christ ianity . He says God called him to help ex-convicts, even though it's notalways easy or rewarding.





"We've had some success stories, but we've had some who have come out and had us pay theirbills while they were going to ask other people to pay the same bill, and just really tried to take

advantage of us," Jackson says. "So I do understand the apprehension, but we've got to take achance. We can't give up . Because there is that one that we may reach and turn their livesaround. That's what drives us."

Jackson wants to teach ex-inmates about Jesus - and give them what they most need in thepractical world: paying work. He started a little painting and cleaning company, and he tries toscare up jobs for his crews of ex-cons. In a weak economy, he's finding only spotty work forthem. Jackson admits he's also having trouble raising money from local church leaders for hisex-offender program.

"I've talked with many pastors and I have heard pastors say, 'That person got themselves into that

position and they need to get themselves out of it.' I just don't know where that comes fromscripturally," Jackson says.

As the New Beginnings Bible study continues, Ellis McCoy prompts Eddie to read the next verseof James 1: "Verse five," Eddie says. "'If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, whogives generously to all without finding fault ... ."

But a couple of months later, Eddie still hasn't found a real job. In a run-down house in northDurham, he spreads off-white paint on the interior walls, trying to make the place fit for renting.It's another one-day paycheck, this time for Eddie's landlord. The money will help Eddie squeak by on his bills for another month.

"I'm trying to build a business," he says, carefully stroking paint onto a French window frame."A little painting company. And if God blesses me that way, I'm going to be the exact oppositeof society. On my applications it will say, 'Have you ever been convicted of a felony?' And if they p ut 'no' I'll tell them I can't hire them."

Eddie sometimes talks bitterly about society's treatment of ex-prisoners like himself. Then in thenext breath he'll say he brought it all on himself - he's to blame. Either way, he argues that theoverwhelming hurdles ex-convicts face aren't good for anybody.

"If I could take back the things I did, I would. But I can't," Eddie says. "There's nothing I can do.

But I'll never do them again. So isn't that enough? Five years of my life have been thrown away.I threw them away. But is society going to want to throw away another five just for goodmeasure?"

In early 2003, 13 months after his release from prison, Eddie finally got a pair of part-time jobs -at a gas station and a pet-care shop. The service station didn't ask about a criminal record. Theapplication at the pet-care shop asked if he'd had a felony conviction within the past five years.Eddie was locked up in 1996, so he could truthfully answer no.





Hard Time - Marsha and Sons

Family life is often collateral damage in the war on crime. The Justice Department says two-thirds of the women in prison, and half of the men, have children under the age of eighteen. So atany one time about one and a half million American children have a parent behind bars.

Marsha, the mother of two boys, served seven years in the North Carolina state prison system forsecond-degree murder - a result of her relationship with a drug-dealing boyfriend. She was just22 when she got locked up and left her young sons behind. Now she has to reclaim her role astheir mother.

Most of the inmates at the Raleigh Correctional Center for Women wear the required blue-greenshirt - sort of like the shirts surgeons wear. This day Marsha wears jeans and a black sweater.

She's a pretty, round-faced woman with shoulder-length hair. She's reserved and watchful, buttoday she wears a distinct glow. It's release day.

"Today is Thursday, November 15, 2001," Marsha says, her voice breaking into a giggle that shecan't quite supp ress. "It 's a date I will never forget."

Marsha sits down in the prison cafeteria across from her new parole officer, who reads her theterms: the early-evening curfew, no traveling outside of Wake County without permission, theunderstanding that she effectively remains in the custody of the state.

As Marsha gathers with several of her closest friends in the prison's grass courtyard, the talk has

the feel of graduation day - except that only one of the women is graduating.

"It's a beautiful day to go home!" says Marsha's friend, Maleena.

"God, Marsha, you ready?" says Candace.

Gina teases Marsha about an earlier conversation: "I asked her, 'What's the first thing you'regoing to do?' She says she wants to go to the grocery store!" The women laugh and joke aboutMarsha's impending freedom from prison cafeteria food.

"I just want to go to a grocery store and push a grocery cart, and let my sons pick out what they

want," Marsha says dreamily.

Marsha's fellow inmates will tell you she's a sure thing to make it on the outside. She got herdegree from Shaw University while in prison. Classmates in her job-training course voted herMost Likely To Succeed. Partly because she was such a model inmate, Marsha served just sevenyears of a 30-year sentence. Even before her release she lined up a job with a Raleigh housingcorporation; the job will pay $25,000 annually plus benefits.





Marsha pockets her gate check - $45 in North Carolina - says one last goodbye ("I love y'all!")and walks out of prison.

The challenge begins

On Friday, December 6, three weeks after her release, Marsha waits for her sons to come for avisit. She sits in her new apartment in a residential part of Raleigh. It's part of Harriet's House, atransitional program for women leaving prison. The arrangement gives Marsha cheap rent andaccess to counseling.

"Some people getting out of prison they say they'd rather go on their own," Marsha says. "Theydon't want to go into a transitional house because of all the rules and this and that, but I feel like Ido need that. You know, I haven't lived on my own in seven years."

But the halfway house requires ex-prisoners to get settled for six months before taking on thefull-time care of their children. So Marsha's kids, Michael and Khire, still live with Marsha'smother in a small town on the North Carolina coast. Every other weekend a Harriet's Housestaffer drives out and picks up the boys and brings them for an overnight stay with their mother.

When they walk into the apartment, Marsha greets them with kisses. Michael is eleven; Khire'snine. They wear baggy jeans and jackets. They have round faces like their mother's. The threetalk about what's new in school, weekend plans. Marsha breaks out the toothbrushes she boughtfor her sons to use at her place. They all seem at ease with one another.

"I thought that they would kind of be a little uncomfortable with me, that it would take somegetting used to. But no, they were just theirself," Marsha says with a smile.

A Song of Lament

While in prison, Marsha wrote lots of letters to the boys and told them she loved them. She hadrelatives bring them for visits from t ime to time.

And yet, while Khire is sunny and affectionate, his big brother M ichael is quicker to show anangry edge - and a bruised sense of trust that his mother will stay around this time. WhenMarsha, talking with a guest, describes something she wrote for a prison drama program,

Michael overhears her and asks what she's talking about.

"One of them's a lament," Marsha says of her writings. "And it's about coming to prison andleaving you and Khire."

Michael misunderstands. "What?! You're leaving us?"

"No, you'll be with me," Marsha says.





"Oh." Michael seems reassured for now.

Since her release, Marsha has continued to perform with C.H.A.I.N.S., a drama troupe made upof women inmates. On a winter evening the group performs at a Church of Christ in Raleigh.One of the show's most dramatic moments is Marsha's performance of the monologue she wrote- her "Psalm of Lament." As she recites it in a strong, impassioned voice, her eyes well up andher voice breaks.

"The worst pain I have ever felt was the day Michael lashed out at me, telling me he hated meand he would never forgive me for coming to p rison. 'You're my mommy. You should haveknown better!' my son said. Michael later hugged me and said, 'Mommy, I love you and I forgiveyou.' I'm glad Michael forgives me, but I cannot forgive myself for the pain I've caused my son.God of mercy, save me from hating myself! Give me grace to forgive. Heal my son's wounds!"

Michael does seem more wounded than his litt le brother, Khire. Michael was four and Khire justtwo when their mother and father went off to prison. And when their parents committed thecrime that got them sent there.

"I remember the day that they did the drive-by," Michael says. "Khire might not remember it'cause Khire was really young. All I remember my mom saying, she was going to the store, andlike that's what I really remember, and that's when she came back and everybody started cryingand stuff like that. And she was real scared."

On the way to the store, Marsha says, she and her cousin saw their boyfriends and stopped.

Marsha's boyfriend was the father of Michael and Khire. He and his friend were drug dealers.

"They both caught a ride and on the way back, they both got out of the car and ended up shootingand killing two guys," Marsha says.

Michael has heard the story from his mom and dad.

"They was in this car, and these two dudes, they wouldn't give my uncle his money back, and hehad a gun, and he shot both of them while they was driving. And then that's when my mom gotreal scared so she drove off. My momma didn't know nothing about it, though. She didn't know itwas going to happ en," Michael says.

Asked how he feels about his parents' involvement in such a crime, Michael says, "I really don'tfeel sad about it because I know they didn't do it. But if they did do it I'd be kind of mad atthem."

Desp ite Marsha's relatively minor role, she still served hard time.





"In the beginning I felt like it was unfair," she says, "because I didn't actually, you know, killanyone. But then I had to realize that I still played a part."

Michael's Troubles

Two months after her release, Marsha gets full-time custody of her sons. The three share a two-bedroom apartment in the Harriet's House program, and Michael and Khire transfer into Raleighschools. Michael has had behavior problems for years; he's been expelled from school severaltimes while living with his grandmother. In the fall of 2002, he enters Longview School, a"separate," special education school in the Raleigh district for kids with behavior problems.Michael's problems continue.

"Michael's generally non-compliant," says Longview Principal Karen Hamilton. It's not that he

simply talks back to teachers from time to time, says Hamilton. "For children to be here, that hasto be something they do more often that not."

With a reporter following him through a day in school, Michael behaves unusually well,according to his teachers. He sits quietly and does at least some of the work he's asked to do. Butin math class he slips. He bickers with a classmate, then erupts. "Who you hollerin' at?" he asksthe other boy, Travis. "You hollerin' at me? I'll punch you in your mouth!"

"No, you won't, says Travis.

"Shut up!" Michael yells. "Tell that dude to shut up!"

A teacher intervenes.

Ms. Rhonda Victor is Michael's science teacher. "There are days he'll sit and he'll suck his fingerlike a little baby and not say a word, but he's not willing to work," she says. Other days he'sdisruptive. "He's very into 'beating,'" - drumming loudly on his desk with his thumbs and fingers- "and he enjoys that but he'll do that all period if I allow him to, so we're working on that,"Victor explains.

Most of Michael's middle school classmates in the alternative school have already beenconvicted of crimes - from alcohol possession to car theft to assault. Michael has not.

His teachers say he shows signs of trying to get his behavior under control.

Back at home, Marsha reminds the boys to do their homework. Khire, she says, is doing great inschool.

"Hopefully when I get my annual report," Khire says, "I'll have A's and B's. I do my homework every day."





Nine months after being reunited with her sons, Marsha admits, "I'm still happy that I'm herewith them, but there's a lot of challenges that I didn't anticipate."

It's not just Michael's behavior. Marsha and the boys have been grieving, too. Just two weeksafter Michael and Khire moved to Raleigh, their grandmother, who'd taken care of them forseven years, died suddenly of a heart attack. She was just forty-nine.

"I didn't even really cry," Michael says.

"Yes you did, you cried," says Khire.

Michael concedes that he did cry. "I been around my grandma for so long, for like almost mywhole life."

For a while after their grandmother's death, the boys slept with Marsha; they were too upset tosleep alone. Now Marsha has a new challenge: Her sons are signed up for after-school programs,but some days Michael just goes home to the empty apartment.

"I think I'm about at the very end of my rope with him," Marsha says. "He's been suspendedagain. And his grades are actually dropping. Basically he's not really doing anything. I've askedhim why. He says he's bored in class." Marsha thinks her son's troubles go deeper. "I think he'svery angry. He talks a lot about wanting his dad here, and not really having anybody as far as amale to identify with, he talks about that some."

And raps about it. Michael takes pride in his free-styling; he rattles off rhymes without writingthem down. He says he's never rapped about his mom, but he will rhyme about his still-imprisoned father.

Asked to free-style about his dad, Michael says he's willing but struggles. "Dag, I wish my dadshould've never left," he begins. He stops. "Man, I'm shy, man." He gathers himself and startsagain. "Dag, I wish my dad should've never left / In the future, all I see is death. / But I try tolook past that and turn the other way / I crash that, smash that, put the nine away./ As I--."Michael falters again. "I can't, man."

Michael and Khire's father is in the North Carolina state prison in Gatesville. The boys used to

visit him when they lived with their grandmother, but they haven't seen their dad since theirmother got released a year ago.

"I can't take them because I'm not approved to see him because I'm still on parole," Marshaexplains. For now, she's raising the boys alone.





At a Raleigh Boys' Club on a Saturday morning, Marsha watches Michael at basketball tryouts."Yesterday was November 15, which was a year since my release," she notes. "Doesn't seem like

it's been a year. But I think a lot has been accomplished in that year."

Marsha says in prison, it's all you can do to muster a sliver of hope. She ached to trade that bleak life for this one - the life of a single mom caring for her sons and help ing them through their ownthickets. She's where she wants to be. But she wishes there was more help available for Michaeland Khire and other kids like them - kids who've had a parent in prison.

"They're so intelligent but it's certain things, it's either their behavior or they're still angry at theirparents, and they can't get past that to concentrate on anything else," M arsha says.

When tryouts are through, Michael runs across the asphalt parking lot to Marsha's car. He's

thrilled to announce he made the team. Marsha congratulates him, and asks if that tall man whowas running the tryouts will be the coach. That's right, Michael says. "He wants to teach us thefundamentals of the game."

Hard Time - Collateral Damage: East Durham

50,000 people now leave prison every month. Crime experts and policymakers are debating whatto do about them. These ex-convicts have served longer sentences than inmates of earliergeneration, and they're less likely to have gotten any education or job training behind bars—onlya third do so. In the 1980s and 90s, as prisons filled to overflowing and a tough-on-criminalsmind-set prevailed, states cut rehabilitation programs. So ex-cons typically return home carrying

all their old liabilities—addictions, poor education, bad work habits—and they bring new ones:stigma and damaged relations with family. Most return to where they came from, to places likethe east side of Durham, North Carolina.

On a drizz ly fall day, community organizer Steve Hopkins takes me on a driving tour of eastDurham.

"I wanted to take you down on South Street to give you a sense where a lot of the [ex-cons] hangout at," Hopkins says.

Hopkins seems a well-qualified guide. He was born in Durham. He's active in his neighborhood,

one of the city's poorest and toughest: Northeast Central Durham. He works for the DurhamAffordable Housing Coalition and he is, himself, an ex-con. Hopkins served several terms behindbars from the 1960s into the early eighties, for burglary, armed robbery, and kidnapping, he says.At forty-seven, Hopkins has lived prison-free for 20 years. But his neighborhood has not grownout of its problems.

The homes in east Durham are tiny bungalows with front porches. Quite a few are boarded up.Young men stand in groups of three and four on street corners. They give passing drivers a





steady look. "He's trying to stop you, trying to sell you something," Hop kins says as a youngman gives us a furtive thumbs-up.

Hopkins knows a lot of these young men, and their histories. "Most of the drug dealers in thisarea are ex-cons."

Like most American cities, Durham saw its crime rate fall after the worst years of the crack epidemic and gang violence in the early and mid-1990s. Now east Durham has the feel of a batt lezone where the worst of the shooting is over but the rebuilding hasn't yet begun.

Hopkins takes me to the Fayetteville Street Public Housing Community . "There's a lot of singlefamily females that live over here," he says. "Some of the absentee parents are in the penalsystem."

Joyce Snipes, the housing project's Resident Council President, notes that out of 200 families inthe p roject, perhaps two are headed by a married couple. There are "very few fathers involved,"she says.

The project's tan brick apartments surround a spartan grass courtyard crisscrossed by sidewalks.As we walk the grounds, a small group of teenage boys approaches. One boy walks with hisarms wrapped tightly around the shoulders of two others. "That guy that's in the middle rightthere," says Snipes, "he was shot about a couple weeks ago at a teen's party" at a nearbycommunity center.

Pellets sprayed from the gunman's shotgun st ruck the young man in the face, damaging hiseyesight.

"They try to make it look like he's just a normal person, "Snipes adds. "They walk him, hold him,hug him, rather than [him] using a cane or a stick."

We stop and ask the teens to chat. The boy in the middle, the tallest of the group, says his nameis Kevin. His friends introduce themselves as Dimetrius, DuShawn, Dante and Brandon. Theyrange in age from fourteen to sixteen.

Kevin's eyes don't seem to focus on anything. The skin on his face is marred by small pockmarks

from the shotgun pellets. "He didn't mean to shoot me," Kevin says of the young man who pulledthe trigger that night. "He was trying to shoot somebody else."

Four of the teens live with their mothers, and one with his grandmother. Only one of the five hasa father in the house. Four of the five boys say at least one of their parents has been to jail orprison.





"My father's locked up for life," says Dante, adding he hasn't seen his father for some six years."It's like hell when your parents ain't there for you. I can't see my dad for a long—for a lifetime."

Asked what he would say to his father if he could speak to him, Dante answers withouthesitation: "'I love you.'"

Pharmacy on the Street

Steve Hopkins says in parts of east Durham, imprisonment has become much more pervasivesince he was young, and harder to recover from. "In Durham, the ex-cons really don't have achance," he says.

When Hopkins finished his last prison term— in 1982— his parole officer helped him get a

construction job and a car, he says. Now, because of changes in sentencing laws, more and moreinmates are serving full terms and getting released with no p arole. That means they have noofficial contact with the state, no officer monitoring their behavior or offering support.

Entry-level jobs, for ex-cons lucky enough to get them, pay less than they used to.

Heading back up Fayetteville Street we pass a strip mall that's anchored by a chain drug storeand a KFC. In the 1920s, a street near here became known as the "Black Wall Street." It washome to Mechanics and Farmers Bank, the nation's first black-owned financial institution; thelargest black-owned insurance company, North Carolina Mutual Life; and other, smaller, black-owned businesses. When Hopkins was a kid in the 1960s, the neighborhood was still the center

of black economic life.

"Then urban renewal came through," along with the new Durham Freeway, "and took out a lot of the black-owned businesses," Hopkins says. North Carolina Mutual moved to downtownDurham while many other black-owned businesses disappeared entirely.

The forces that swept through east Durham are common to lots of urban neighborhoods.Desegregation allowed middle class blacks to move out, leaving pockets where almosteverybody was poor and working class. Then the factory jobs went away.

"We used to be a tobacco [and] textile town," Hopkins says. "Now all the tobacco plants are

closed down, and most of the textile plants are gone. And now we don't know what we are. Theycall us the City of Medicine, so I guess we have become a service-providing community."

To leaders in this town of 140,000, the "City of Medicine" slogan means high-paying jobs at theDuke University M edical Center, at area research labs, and at the technology companies inResearch Triangle Park. Raleigh-Durham was a New Economy boomtown until the bubble burstin 2001. But most people in east Durham qualify only for the jobs at the bottom, serving food orcleaning.






In other words: for young black men with litt le education, the prison boom wiped out theeconomic boom.

Experts like Western talk about incarceration as a form of churning—removing people from theneighborhood, then sending them back as a bigger drag on the community than they were before.Multiply that effect hundreds of times in a neighborhood and, some researchers say, the effectcan be the reverse of what's intended.

In the late 1990s, sociologist Dina Rose and her colleague Todd Clear, then at Florida StateUniversity, looked carefully at crime statistics in Tallahassee. They found that in theneighborhoods with the highest incarceration rates in a given year, crime went up faster thefollowing year than in other comparable neighborhoods with lower incarceration rates.Controlling for other factors affecting crime, they and reached a provocative conclusion:

"There was a tipping point at which increasing the number of people in prison really increased

crime in those areas," says Rose. "That's not to say that we shouldn't be incarcerating anyone,because at low and moderate levels, [imprisonment] does [reduce crime], and there are clearlypeople in these neighborhoods who need to be removed. But it does mean we need to think aboutour use of incarceration very carefully and try to think about the ways in which incarceration as aprocess of removing and returning people can destabilize communities in general."

Steve Hopkins, the ex-con and community activist, agrees that some criminals need to bearrested and locked up. But ask him what he would do to make things better in east Durham, andstepped-up crime fighting doesn't make his wish list.

"I would make sure that everybody from the age of eighteen and up had a safe, decent place tostay," Hopkins says. Other priorities: a stronger education system to help young people followtheir dreams, and better jobs for them to aspire to.

"But," says Hopkins, "I see now a big disconnect. People would rather lock you up and throw thekeys away than to help you discover who you are and to help you become who y ou can be. Andthat's a waste of people. We can't afford to just throw people away like that, like yesterday'sshoes."

Transcript_ Hard Time_ Life After P 1

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