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 Striving to Fit In By Jill Bauerle When Mustafa Gerald Tyson arrived on Ward’s Island in 2002, he had $28, a bag of mail, the clothes he wore and five packs of cigarettes to his name. After spending 27 years in nine different prisons in upstate New York on drug charges, 50-year-old Tyson had lost contact with his family.
Not knowing how he was going to make a living or where he was going to stay was scary, he said during a recent interview. On his third day at the men’s shelter on Ward’s Island, he said, he witnessed a murder. Although Tyson’s experience sounds like the opening of a Quentin Tarantino film, ex-offenders experience the harsh realities of reentry every day. Last year, 26,146 people were released from New York prisons. More than half of them returned to New York City, according to the state Department of Corrections. Reentry has become a hot topic among legal experts, said Debbie Mukamal, director of the Prisoner Reentry Institute at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The latest Department of Corrections reports put the state recidivism rate at 40 percent. “The vast majority of people who go to prison will return home at some point,” Mukamal wrote in a recent e-mail. “Without planning for their release, the chances of them returning back to prison are extremely high.” The state spent $31,126 per inmate in 2005, according to Department of Corrections spokeswoman Linda Foglia. Only about $3,000 of that sum is dedicated to special programs like job training or substance abuse, which might be considered transitional services, Foglia said. The state doesn’t keep tabs on how much money goes to transitional services. New York State has already begun to ease parolees transition with a special reentry court, initiated in 2001 and located in Harlem. There, a judge monitors the progress of 100 nonviolent parolees who committed drug offenses, and caseworkers follow up to make sure they fulfill their commitments, whether they’ve been assigned to drug rehabilitation or anger management. But for every 100 who are closely supervised by a judge through the reentry court, more than 13,000 parolees who returned to New York last year were left to fend for themselves. Some parolees like Tyson simply luck out. While he was at Ward’s Island, a counselor recommended that he check out the Fortune Academy, a non-profit residence for ex-offenders in Washington Heights. After a screening process that included a psychological assessment and a drug test, he left Ward’s Island and moved into the brand new facility in a converted catholic boarding school overlooking the Hudson River. Reflecting on his transition, Tyson said that one of the best things about his experience as a Fortune Academy resident were the group meetings with other residents where he said he learned: “Whatever my problem is, someone went through it before me.” After eight months at the Fortune Academy, Tyson moved into his own studio apartment three blocks away. Today, he’s the head chef at the residence. Once residents at the Fortune Academy get a job, they’re charged 30 percent of their salary for rent and encouraged to learn new skills that will increase their earning power, since a $9 an hour job won’t be enough for a New York rental, according to Barry Campbell, a special assistant for The Fortune Society. For the majority of the residents, the program helps them make the most important transition in their lives – from prisoner to civilian. The Fortune Society has drawn up plans to build another residence next door to the Academy where a parking lot now stands. But for now, the thousands of parolees in need of housing will have to wait. “The sad part about it is that we only have 59 beds,” Campbell said. |
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© 2006 NYC24 is a production of the New Media Workshop at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism |
