Jermaine Jones, 27, was released from the Illinois Department of Corrections to a half-way house in Elgin on Sept. 12.
Tuesday the Chicago native, who was convicted of a felony count of delivery of a controlled substance, was at the Centre of Elgin learning what kind of support is offered locally to ensure he has a smooth reentry to life outside of prison.
The event, called the Re-Entry Collaborative, was designed by Elgin police and its social workers as a way to introduce parolees to the services available here to help keep them out of jail in the future, officials said.
It is a project the Elgin Police Department has been working on for about a year, said Sgt. Rick Ciganek, who spearheaded the initiative.
He was at staff and command training at Northwestern University and heard what the city of Rockford was doing to help felons reintegrate into the community once they were released and brought the idea to Chief of Police Jeff Swoboda.
“We are trying some different things but the goal here is to make the connection between those who need and those who provide,” services to help them re-enter society, Ciganek said.
Elgin benefits, he said, because people returning from jail who find housing and jobs are less likely to reoffend and commit crimes in the community.
He asked to take it on “because I care. And there was nobody else doing it,” locally, Ciganek said.
Earnell Brown of Building Families Together talked to the nearly dozen parolees about his experience. After years of being incarcerated in juvenile centers, he made the choice to change how he was living, Brown said.
“I did 10 years on the installment plan in juvenile,” Brown said, adding there was no way to get those years back.
What it took to get his life on track was deciding that he was tired of how he was living.
“It took getting over me … and finding out who I am,” Brown said.
Reentry is about more than getting a drivers license, a place to live and a job, Brown said. “It is finding that I made mistakes and that how I was living was not how people in society live their lives. They were standards that were not normal,” he said.
But turning ones life around isn’t easy, he said. “A little hard work will go a long way. A lot of hard work will get you there.”
He is a board member at Building Families Together. The non-profit organization began in 2016 and is designed to help men coming out of prison successfully reenter society.
One of the largest hurdles is helping those parolees get identification. Before they can get a job, they need IDs, Brown said. But to get that ID they also need birth certificates and Social Security cards — paperwork that is often lost due to their incarcerations. But they often need IDs to get their social security and birth certificates, creating a cycle of frustration.
“We hear it over and over again, ‘I can’t get an ID so I can’t get social security benefits, I can’t get housing, I can’t get a job,'” Ciganek said.
To help with that, there are 10 officers at the Elgin department who have volunteered to drive parolees to the offices they need to get those identifications and advocate for them elsewhere, said Cmdr. Colin Fleury.
Jones, who was arrested in Rock Island, served 2 1/2 years for a drug conviction. It was his first time in prison and he wants it to be his last, Jones said. He applied to go to a half-way house program before he left jail and chose Elgin because it was further away from some of his previous negative influences.
He changed his mentality in prison because he wanted to be there for his children and their lives, Jones said.
Seeing that there are resources to help him change his life and stay out of prison in Elgin made him glad, Jones said. “The Elgin police are willing be hands-on with individuals,” he said.
There are services for women coming out of prison, but far fewer for men, said Sherry Green, CEO and founder of Building Families Together. They are working with six parolees living in the Elgin area, helping them reintegrate.
Green worked in Illinois prisons … and now has a son who is incarcerated. That isn’t why she started the program — which is largely self-funded now — but it is a factor, she said.
One detail of incarceration she finds particularly harmful is the number of parolees who, while they have served their sentences, are still in prison because they have no place to go once they are released.
She cites incidents where those just about get parole go through all of the steps then are told that they are “violated at the door.” Because they don’t have a home to go to, they are held as they are now officially in violation of that parole.
One of her hopes is to get transitional housing for parolees — not a half-way house, but a home they can live in while rebuilding their lives, Green said.
Since Jones has been in Elgin, he’s walked much of the community and said he is hopeful that the services he’s found will help keep him on the straight and narrow. It is easier, he said, because he doesn’t see the open-air drug markets and the level of street crime he remembers in Chicago.
“The urge to sell drugs is killed by not seeing the opportunity,” Green said.
He made a deal with Brown, who promised to take him to an appointment later in the day.
“The community is trying to find ways to deal with the things we do out there, and finding more ways to help us than trying to hurt us,” Brown said. “They could just lock everybody up, but they put together service providers. So take advantage of it.”
Janelle Walker is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
