A dimpled Hispanic man wearing a light blue polo shirt with a smudge of dirt on the left shoulder is asked to recite his goals. He nervously shuffles his feet, clad in black leather dress shoes, and says that his first goal is to get a job, his second to return to school and his third to join the Army. In three years he`d like to marry, start a family and move into a better neighborhood. In 10 years he expects to buy a house, ”be raising my family real good” and try to help ”people who have problems like I do.”
A black man in a black pullover, the oldest of the six at almost 22 and the only one who completed high school, is next. He has a slight speech impediment and mumbles something about having a ”good job” in three years.
”What kind of job, doing what kind of work?” asks Fuller.
”I haven`t really thought about it.”
Then he states his three-year goal: ”I can buy me a car and make plans for making plans.”
”How do you `make plans for making plans?` ” asks Fuller, opening her eyes wide.
”I have to. . .”
She cuts him off and asks a quiet man in a red-and-white-striped T-shirt what he thinks about that.
”Has to be more specific.”
Fuller returns to the man in black who says that his two-year goal is a wife and his three-year goal ”to be a better man.”
”A better man in what way?” Fuller demands.
”Try to change my ways.”
”You`ve got to be more specific.”
He volunteers his 10-year goal: ”I`ll be having a better-paying job.”
”What`s your first paying job?” asks Fuller.
”Haven`t got one yet.”
”You don`t have a job, but you want a better-paying job. What`s better-paying?”
”Minimum wage.”
She looks at him in disbelief.
”Better than minimum wage.”
”Does that mean I can hire you at minimum wage and I can increase your responsibilities and pay you a little more than minimum wage and you`ll stay for 10 years?”
Muhammad, who just returned from an emergency conference with a client about to go to a job interview, jumps in.
”Would you be able to live on minimum wage in 10 years?”
”I didn`t mean minimum wage,” he says, weakly.
So it goes until 3 p.m. as Muhammad, a senior employment specialist, or job developer, and an ex-offender himself, and Fuller, a lawyer with an education degree who works by night as a public defender, put their charges through the paces like drill sergeants. They are warm but tough taskmasters, and part of their job is to serve as role models and help their clients realize that even a first minimum-wage job is their key to the future.
In trying to ferret out the men`s true interests and abilities, Fuller tells them that she wanted to be a teacher since childhood, so she went to school and became one. ”For one class I had a teacher who was a judge, and he told me, `You`d make a really good lawyer.` I considered it, took the law exam, got accepted into law school and sure as shootin` I`m a lawyer. My first love is still teaching. It`s more rewarding to me than being a lawyer. I see more positive things.”
”There`s little difference between you and me and Dorothy,” Muhammad says. ”I spent 10 years in prison and went through a lot of the same difficulties you did. You shouldn`t look at us and say, `I can`t get there.`
There`s no difference. With hard work and sacrifice, you can do it. You have to learn how to set goals.”
”Reachable goals,” adds Fuller. ”Hassan is a senior employment specialist, and he`s in charge of me. He`s my boss. I`m a lawyer, and he`s an ex-offender, and he`s my boss. Some goals are not reachable: the one-legged man who strives to be a pole vaulter–that`s not a goal, that`s a dream.”
On a day the young men spend working the telephones to set up job interviews, Muhammad conducts some mock interviews to help them deal with the inevitable question: ”Why should we hire an ex-convict?”
”You have to be prepared to deal with that question in an appropriate, positive way,” he says. ”Say: `I made a mistake. I recognize that I made a mistake, and now I`m attempting to make adjustments in my life.` You have to recognize the change in you. If you mean it, you believe it. You are very good individuals with potential. I don`t see a burglar here. I don`t see a rapist. I see individuals who made mistakes. You`re accountable, of course, but you have a future. Are you changed?”
”Yes.”
”Yes, what?”
”Yes, I`m changed.”
”I know I changed,” he tells them. ”I went around trying to take things from people. I had ulcers. I got tired of people looking for me and me looking for other people. I was spending a lot of time and effort and wasn`t getting anywhere. I was tired, and I decided to change.”
A crucial part of the job of every Safer employee who deals with ex-offenders is cutting through what is succinctly called b.s., a term that encompasses all the lies, excuses, rationalizations and games that ex-offenders typically resort to. They are frequently admonished to ”be real,” and lying about anything provokes a stern confrontation about their commitment.
”Some of the people are on an ego trip; they`re pretending they`re somebody they`re not,” says executive director Curran, a gray-bearded man everyone calls Bernie, a vestige of Bernard, the name he took as a priest.
”They`ve got hallucinatory ideas, like guys who say, `Man, I can get a job anywhere` and they cannot get a job anywhere.
”Part of (the program) is bringing a person to his truth level so that he doesn`t have to lie, he doesn`t have to play mind games with himself. So that he begins to accept himself and says: `Hey, I`m worth minimum wage. So I don`t read very well; maybe I could get that together, start over again and learn to read and write and go to night school. And if I sacrifice and put away some money every two weeks, someday I can have a car.”`
Benito R. Garcia, manager of Safer`s Humboldt Park office at 2750 W. North Ave. in the heart of gang territory, believes the self-deceit begins in prison. He should know. After three tours of duty as a paratrooper in Vietnam, one Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, Garcia, a Texas-born Chicano, turned to bank robbery. While serving six years and three months in prison, he earned a B.A. in sociology. (”It was either sociology or business, and I doubted that a bank was going to hire me after I stuck up seven banks.”) He has been out for 10 years.
”One of the things I learned in prison is that if you`re white, you or one of your relatives lives next to the Kennedys. If you`re black, you were pimping a blond whore and slamming a Cadillac door. If you`re Latino, you have a connection to the dope man in Mexico. Everybody goes by that rap in the penitentiary.
”When you`re in the joint you have to keep hope by fantasizing, and sometimes those fantasies become, like `Oh, I`m going to get me a degree, and then I`m going to get me this job, and before you know it I`m driving a Mercedes.` When in reality you`ve still got to get your GED (high school equivalency certificate) so that you can go on and get your degree and hopefully find a job. But, no. It`s all done in their minds.”
Since most of its clients dropped out of school, some as early as 5th or 6th grade, Safer also developed a remedial education program, called Basic Skills Training. By contract with funding sources it serves economically disadvantaged persons ages 16 to 21. A Troubled Adolescents Program serves younger ex-offenders, stressing a return to school. The intent of both is to break the cycle of crime as early as possible. However, the Humboldt Park outpost has a Basic Skills program with a separate contract allowing it to take ex-offenders up to age 29. Garcia, no fan of bilingual education, notes that all teaching there is done in English. If a client can`t function in English, he is referred to an outside program dealing in Spanish.
Older clients who do not fit into any of those categories can be referred to other training programs. Those clients typically work individually with job developers in Operation DARE, which remains the heart of Safer, fulfilling ex- offenders` most immediate need: a legal job to put bread on the table.
For those who qualify, Basic Skills Training is an intensive program based on a peer-learning model, which means the students help each other in groups of three to five and the instructors act more in the mold of production foremen than teachers. Student participation short-circuits both disruptive behavior and hostility toward the traditional classroom. Bus fare and a meal supplement are provided.
”We`re not trying to make up for lost years of schooling,” explains Ron Tonn, divisional director of Basic Skills Training. ”We`re trying to restructure disorganized thinking patterns. I don`t think learning needs years to take place. Learning happens just like that. That moment of insight is the thing that puts a bunch of random thoughts together into an organized pattern so that they have a skill and an awareness that they didn`t have before. We try to put as many of those moments of insight together that we can in a period of six weeks.”
The academic training is more of a medium than an end in itself, Tonn says. Though it is geared toward preparing clients for a job or school placement by raising their reading ability by at least two grade levels, it also attempts to refine such social skills as cooperation and to inculcate the habits of attendance, punctuality and time management.
Those who have spent time in penal institutions are accustomed to having their time managed for them. On the outside, many grew up in single-parent homes without the example of a father going to work every day. They may have spent most of their time on the street without supervision, often running with street gangs.
Ex-offender Macklin sums it up this way: ”When you come up, you had a mother and a father to guide you, so you had a sense of direction and you had a sense of moral support outside your family–the next-door neighbor, they had a mother and a father, a home, they`re married. But when I come out of my house to my park, all the kids is cursing, drinking, the girls having baes, the daddies is in the penitentiary or not around. Only the blessed, one out of a hundred or something, have a sense of direction.”
Shortly after 9 a.m. six students enter a windowless 3d floor Basic Skills classroom equipped with six long tables with four orange plastic chairs each, two beat-up chalk boards and two CTA maps on a bulletin board. They are told to spend some time reading books they each have selected, books that truly interest them. At 9:45 a.m. a seventh student comes in late. The last straggler arrives at 10 a.m. Warm weather or summer jobs have apparently lured away seven or eight others who were present when the class began a week and a half earlier.
When clients fail to arrive on time or don`t show up at all, facilitators call their homes. ”If family support is there, parents become irate at the calls, and they make sure they`re here,” says facilitator Oscar Carter. ”For chronic lateness, I`ll call when I get up at 5:30 a.m., and parents don`t like that at all. We also maintain relationships with their probation or parole officers.” After three unexcused absences, clients are terminated.
At one table a young man listlessly pages through a ”Rules of the Road” booklet. His partner is staring at a page of an old social-studies textbook. Carter scoots his chair over to talk. Noticing the textbook, he asks the student if he applied for a library card as had been suggested. Obviously not. Then he repeats locations of branch libraries that would be convenient. He flips through the textbook, which has some pages defaced by gang graffiti, and asks, ”What kind of reading do you like?” The man says it doesn`t make any difference what he reads. Carter suggests a chapter titled ”What is Money?” ”I`m going to push your brain, Steve. You know that.”
”You can only push a brain so far.”
”Not so. Your brain is like a muscle. It`s like a sponge. Everything registers. Read this section here about developing thinking skills. You can learn how to think better.”
The second man says his favorite subject is auto mechanics. ”Do you want to be a mechanic?” asks Carter. ”Have you ever worked in a shop?” It turns out he worked on cars with his father and took some auto shop classes in high school but had no training in prison.
”Think back to when you were 9 or 10. What did you say you wanted to do?”
”Go to school and get a job. But now I`m an ex-offender.”
”Ex is the key thing,” Carter explodes. ”You can request a pardon from the state if no crime is committed in a certain period of years. You have to stay straight to accomplish that. You`ve had a bad experience, and now you know it doesn`t work. You can get it off your record. It`s going to be hard, your life has been hard, but there are options for you. What you want to do is possible–if you really want it. You can go back to school–you`ll probably be 19 when you graduate–but you have a fair shot.”
At another table he notices a John D. MacDonald mystery and a book titled ”Junkie.” He picks up the latter and says: ”If you read this and read it right, you`ll be okay. If you interpret it wrong, you`ll be in trouble. Pay attention to the bad parts: the sleeping in basements, the not eating, the not bathing and stuff like that. Better yet, find something more constructive. This, you already know. Seek out some knowledge you don`t have.”
Safer`s education program started informally when a volunteer worker, the late Sam Broyde, a lawyer, said that he could teach people to read in six or eight weeks. He paired a person with very poor reading skills with one who could read and then told the reader to explain to his partner what he had read in a constitutional law book. The first students loved it.
”Sam told us that during the Industrial Revolution they had to teach people to read and write, too, because the technology had advanced, and people had to learn how to run the machines,” remembers Curran. ”His basic ideas were based on that. Then he quoted something, nihil novum sub sole–nothing new under the sun. Later we took what was best in his ideas, added to them and structured it. I mean, constitutional law wasn`t very practical, but he helped us start.”
