INTRODUCTION

In 2008, I was reporting on the “stop snitching” phenomenon that had come in to vogue; omerta set to hip hop beats and emblazoned on t-shirts and baseball caps. To what extent was this another salvo at authority from youth culture and how much was this a manifestation of a deeper divide I wondered. I went to Newark and spoke to high school students there. Many told me that not talking to the police was a simple matter of survival. A young man named Larry had lost a cousin two years earlier, he knew the killers but he would never say anything for fear of retribution.

This silence was devastating in Newark where dozens of murder cases had fallen apart in recent years as witnesses were killed, disappeared, refused to testify or recanted. According to the FBI, in the first half of the decade, the percentage of violent crimes solved in cities of Newark’s size had fallen 20 percent. But for many of the young people I spoke to, especially the men, fear wasn’t the only reason; they simply didn’t trust the police. Many hated them, for harassing them on the way to the store, for sending away family members to jail for decades; and for not keeping them safe.

In the course of my reporting I interviewed criminologist David Kennedy who teaches at John Jay College in Manhattan. He described how decades of heavy-handed law-enforcement strategies and strict mandatory minimum sentences that have characterized the “war on drugs” had not only failed to protect residents of crime-ridden neighborhoods, but also destroyed the trust of law-abiding citizens who lived there. It was a bleak picture in which those most exposed to violence had the least access to protection and redress. It was, in Kennedy’s words, nothing less than the end of civil society.

Towards the end of our interview Kennedy touched on a possible solution. He had pioneered a new policing model and a growing number of cities that had Newark’s problems were trying it. It involves an honest admission on the part of the police, prosecutors and residents of high crime neighborhoods that relations have broken down. Through a deliberate series of steps, the High Point Model, as it is called, seeks to foster the respect and trust between citizens and the state without which justice and peace are impossible.

A few months later, I enrolled at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. I decided to write my masters project on this novel approach to policing. Earlier that year, the city of Hempstead New York had adopted the model in the Terrace and Bedell area which for decades had been home to one of Long Island’s most notorious open-air drug markets.

Over the winter break I moved to Hempstead to see how the application of Kennedy’s theories was working out in one neighborhood from the perspective of residents, drug dealers trying to change their lives, assistant D.A.s and police officers.

Here’s what I found.

[Note: I have changed one person’s name in the article, that of Aaron.]

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As Aaron lay in his hospital bed, all he could think of was revenge. He’d been rolling dice on the sidewalk outside his apartment building on a spring night in 2008 when a local drug dealer walked up to him, pulled out a 9-caliber pistol and shot him in the stomach. The bullet barely missed his spine.

Aaron was also a drug dealer, but the attack wasn’t about territory or a deal gone bad. Rather it was one of those petty beefs that too often end in violence and death. A man hears that someone has put him down and he answers with gunfire. The shooter didn’t want to kill him. If he had, he’d have worn a mask. This attack was meant to humiliate. Aaron had never felt so violated in his life.  He wanted to hurt him badly. But Aaron had more than his pride to worry about. The man who’d shot him was still riding down his block in Hempstead, Long Island. On the streets, the logic is simple: if you let someone hurt you, you’re seen as weak and expose yourself to more danger. “It’s no different if you had a son on the lunch line and they took his lunch” says Aaron. “You tell him not to let it happen again.”

But as the days passed, a different choice emerged in the form of a 50-year-old mother of four. Her name was Risco Lewis. An assistant district attorney for Nassau County, she was the only one who came to visit him in the hospital. She sat with him, cried with him, and she made him an offer. She vowed that if Aaron did the unthinkable and cooperated with the D.A., she would see to it that the shooter would be sent to jail. She would also do everything she could to help him leave the streets behind. Where Aaron lives, the only thing worse than not retaliating is talking to the cops. “Snitches get stitches,” the saying goes. But something in Aaron responded to Lewis and he decided to take that terrifying gamble. Instead of hunting for the man who shot him; he testified. And now at 31, after selling drugs for half his life, Aaron is struggling - one day at a time - to leave that world behind.

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Since crack flooded-in in the 1980s, the corner of Terrace Avenue and Bedell Street had been the epicenter of drug dealing in Hempstead, Nassau County’s largest city. Dealers took over the block and a generalized lawlessness set in; along with drug dealing, gun violence, theft and prostitution became commonplace. Police chief Joe Wing says they tried everything. “We had undercovers go in, confidential informants, we partnered with the D.E.A., state police, sweeps,” he says. “We’d go in lock up 30, 40 people and you know within months, the vacuum, the void was filled.” In 2006, they ripped out the entire supply chain back to the source in Colombia. Hundreds of kilos of cocaine were seized. “It had zero effect,” says assistant district attorney Meg Reiss. At that point Nassau County’s newly elected D.A., Kathleen Rice, sent Reiss out to look for new approaches.

She came back with a model built around restoring relationships. It was devised by criminologist David Kennedy to dismantle persistent outdoor drug markets and the crimes that flourish around them. Named the High Point Model after the town in North Carolina where it was first implemented in 2003, the approach has been growing in popularity as more towns look for ways to work with neighborhoods where the war on drugs has not only failed to get rid of drugs, but turned large numbers of residents against the police. Residents of these high-crime neighborhoods have borne the brunt of this war. They get stopped and searched while coming home from work; their sons get sent away for years on tough mandatory minimum sentences and come home with few prospects. And despite all that, the streets are no safer. So increasingly many start to see the police and the courts as part of the problem, leaving them with no protection.

Kennedy’s underlying premise is straightforward: no amount of busts, arrests and convictions will get rid of drugs and crime wherever law abiding citizens are too afraid to stand up to the criminals and don’t trust the police. Once the majority has come to accept criminality as normal, and the criminal justice system as corrupt, there is nothing the police can do to restore peace. At its heart, Kennedy’s idea is about changing the triangle of relationships between law enforcement, law-abiding citizens, and criminals. In the High Point Model, police and prosecutors pledge to treat residents with respect and be more responsive to their needs. For their part, residents have to start taking responsibility for safety in their neighborhood and stop tolerating criminality. Finally, drug dealers who want to change need to be supported and offered viable alternatives to hustling.

Enter Risco Lewis. Since Kennedy’s model was launched in Hempstead at the beginning of 2008, she’s led a team of committed people, several of them ex-offenders, who work with dealers and offenders returning from prison, to help them learn new trades, get work and find a foothold in mainstream society. Sometimes she wonders how much she actually accomplishes. “What people don’t understand, one little person takes a whole lot of time. It’s like the story of the little boy and the starfish,” Lewis said. “You know that story?”

An old man walks down a beach that is covered in starfish. He comes across a little boy picking them up one by one and throwing them into the sea so they won’t die. “Why are you bothering?” the old man asks the boy. “There are millions of starfish, you can’t possibly make a difference.” The boy reaches down, tosses another starfish into the sea, and says, “It made a difference to this one.”

“That’s kind of what we do here,” says Lewis. Depending on her mood, some days the story underscores her belief in the value of what she is doing, others, the seeming hopelessness of the endeavor. Her job bears little resemblance to what most assistant district attorneys do and it’s not how Lewis started her career. For more than seven years she was a prosecutor, taking criminals to court and convincing judges to lock them up. Then she won the biggest case in her career and nearly quit.

The case involved four teenagers who’d gotten into a fight with a man in his 30s. After being punched, the man went home, changed into safari gear and came back to the corner with an eight-inch butcher knife. He chased the kid who’d punched him across four lanes of traffic, through the bushes and across a field. He caught up with the kid as he was banging frantically on the door of a house where he used to baby-sit. The man stabbed the 16-year-old repeatedly. As the young man’s friends caught up with him, he twisted the knife, pulled it out and said “what!”

Lewis, who had just been promoted to assistant district attorney, elevated the case from assault to attempted murder. Normally at that point the Major Offense Bureau would have taken over, but Lewis fought to hold on to it and won a conviction. It should have been her greatest day as a prosecutor. The D.A. came out and congratulated her, but Lewis left the court in tears. By the time the case had come to trial, two of the teenagers had been arrested for burglary, another one, her best witness, had been arrested for rape. Within a year, the victim himself was arrested for carrying a gun. When she pulled the defendant’s file she saw that he’d been in and out of the system since he was 10. He’d only been out of jail six months when he stabbed the kid. What if as a child there had been some kind of intervention, Lewis wondered. What were the teenagers doing on the corner on a school day? They’d been on their way to college and now they were in jail. “I was just tired of locking black boys up,” Lewis says as she sighs.

She went on maternity leave and thought about not coming back. But the D.A. offered her a job with a newly formed special unit. For a decade, she has roamed the streets trying to shepherd as many ex-offenders as she can on the daunting path out of hustling. For the past year she has brought all the skills and connections she’s gained in her job to try and help restore Terrace and Bedell. Every day is different, but her job is like that of the Hindu god Ganesh: she removes obstacles. A person getting out of jail who wants to find a job faces a mind-numbing bureaucratic maze. Lewis gets the process started before an inmate is released so they don’t have to start dealing again in order to survive. For Lewis this is more than a job, its her calling. “I really do see this as a movement; it ain’t moving as quickly as I’d like it,” Lewis says laughing.

As she calls on dealers and ex-offenders to heed their better angels, Lewis channels her own mother. Widowed in her 20s, she raised five children in the projects. Some days all they had to eat was a box of grits and her mother went without. But her mother instilled a higher standard; no matter how poor they were, lying or stealing was never permitted. In Aaron’s case, the mother-son dynamic is more than an analogy. “He’s my baby,” say Lewis. “I really love Ms. Lewis as a son would love his mom, cause she’s so sweet,” says Aaron, “and that’s more than my mom ever gave.”

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Aaron’s mom has been addicted to crack since he was a child. His father, whom he calls a “super thug”, was a big dealer a few blocks away on Terrace Avenue. His mother’s habit only left the family with a couple of hundred dollars a month to get by. Aaron’s older brother deflected some of the shame of poverty. When he was hungry, he had lunch money for him. When his cheap sneakers fell apart, Aaron came home to find a new pair waiting for him. The following week, his brother was dead. That’s when reality hit, says Aaron. “I never knew what he did and I never asked no questions.” His brother, who’d been made fun of at school for his torn up shoes, had dropped out and started making money by selling drugs. Sixth grade was the worst year of Aaron’s life. He had two outfits and no one to buy him lunch or a new pair of jeans. At school everyone laughed at him. So he followed his brother, his father, and many of his friends and began selling drugs. He started with weed in grade ten, then graduated to crack in grade 11. Life got a whole lot better. When he showed up late to class, everyone stopped to see what he was wearing. By late high school, Aaron looked forward to going to school. His grades improved. He sat next to the prettiest girl in school and when he asked her to lunch, she responded “Sure, I’ve been watching you for the last six months.”

At 18, his mom kicked him out. His grandmother had just died, leaving him a thousand dollars. “I gave it to the to the crack man and tripled my money in a few days,” he says. He found an apartment and the money started rolling in. Aaron says he was netting $6,000 to $7,500 a month. “I got anything I ever wanted in life,” he says. “Like Lebron James going straight out of high school.”As the older guys on the block got sent away, Aaron and his buddies moved up the chain. For every dealer the cops take out, there is always a hungry kid ready to take over his spot. Aaron was shrewder than most. He got a beeper number, and stopped selling on the corner. He never carried more than $100 on him and never had drugs in the car. When he got pulled over, the cops didn’t know him. He was always polite and after a cursory check, they’d let him go.

Eventually, Aaron screwed up: he sold to someone outside his small circle of trusted clients. It was a set-up. Aaron did a year. But it wasn’t jail that made him start thinking about changing his life. In Aaron’s world going to jail was a right of passage. “After 2000, the gangs started hitting, my friends started dying,” he says. The money no longer seemed worth the danger. Aaron knew what was waiting for him if he didn’t leave the game. “The streets will get you killed.”

When he came out of prison he found his first legitimate job. It was at a commercial sign company. He liked the work, driving far away from Hempstead to places in New Jersey and Connecticut to install signs for clients.

It didn’t last long. He brought a friend to work at the company. His boss would give him a job at the beginning of the week, but then his friend would ask for help with a task and then he’d go on the road for a couple of days installing signs and by Thursday the task still wasn’t done. After a couple of months the boss fired Aaron. He went back to electrical school and completed a program he’d started before going to prison. But then the school sent him a bill he thought Sally Mae had paid. Until he paid it, the school wouldn’t give him his tools or his certificate.

Like all ex-convicts, another persistent obstacle was his criminal record. “It comes up every time,” says Aaron. They always want details. “That’s what kills me to have to explain to them that I was selling crack. There is no easy way to say that.” After getting fired from the sign company, he went through two interviews for a job at a delivery company. By the third interview he thought he was in the door, then they asked him what kind of drug he’d been arrested for selling. Aaron started sweating so much he had to wipe his face with a napkin. When he got through answering, the interview was over.

His second job, at a liquor company, lasted as long as the previous one. The company had hired him and several other former convicts. When some of the employees were caught stealing, the company cancelled its contract with the temp agency that hired Aaron and the other ex-offenders. Aaron was floundering, he was dealing to get by but he was desperate to stop. “I was rock bottom,” rather “I thought I was rock bottom,” Aaron corrects himself as he remembers how things were about to get worse.

He heard his parole officer talk about an assistant district attorney, her name was Risco Lewis and she wasn’t your typical A.D.A. Aaron typed up a resume, put on his best clothes and headed over to the African American Museum. When he got there, he saw news cameras. “I thought it was some kind of police thing going on,” Aaron remembers. “I thought this isn’t for me.” So he left without speaking to Lewis. But Aaron knew a regular at the meetings and he encouraged Aaron to come back.  He did, and he and Lewis bonded quickly.

Soon after, the strength of that bond was revealed.

In May of 2008, Aaron was driving his best friend’s car when he saw a familiar looking guy who everyone called Bus. Bus offered to go to the store for Aaron. Instead he went and got his friend, a fellow Blood who had a beef with the owner of the car Aaron was driving. A few minutes later as Aaron stood outside his building rolling dice, he noticed a man coming up behind him. The two made eye contact as the man pulled a gun out of his jeans. Before he could shoot, Aaron hit him. They began to scuffle. Aaron reached for the gun with one arm as he elbowed his attacker in the face with the other. The man got off a shot and it pierced Aaron through his left side. Aaron fell and the man took his wallet, phone, and keys.

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Inez Dingle heard gunfire all the time on Terrace Avenue. But she never got used to it.

Dingle moved into 100 Terrace Ave in 1980. The seven-story brown and white brick apartment complex occupies an entire city block. It’s a like a very tall building turned over on its side. Inside, 417 apartments line institutional beige corridors that stretch on forever.

As crack swept-in in the 1980s, Dingle watched dealers take over the street and her building. Like many of her neighbors, she worked hard to raise her three children on a terrorized block. But unlike most she would not tolerate the crime and the violence that surrounded her. No matter how lawless a neighborhood becomes, there are always those, often grandmothers, who refuse to accept it. They keep watch on the street from their windows and won’t avert their eyes when a dealer tries to stare them down; elders, who when they smell crack being cooked in a neighboring apartment, will knock on the door and say cut it out.

As head of the tenants’ association, Dingle fought to improve conditions in the building. When neither the building’s security nor the police could stop the rising tide of drug dealing, she marshaled a group of tenants. Every night, armed only with their moral conviction, as many as 15 women sat on folding chairs in the lobby of 100 Terrace and confronted buyers and dealers who walked in the door. “We dared them to come inside of this building to sell anything,” Dingle remembers. She says many turned back but there were plenty of people willing to buy or sell right outside the glass doors and the problem just grew. The problem was there were too few Dingles on Terrace and too many Aaron’s.

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Risco Lewis’ work with dealers is only one part of the Terrace and Bedell Initiative. The key to restoring Terrace Avenue is for its law-abiding residents to demand its return from the dealers. In many cases this means confronting one’s own son or daughter and standing up to criminals without any feeling of protection from the police or faith in the court system which has sent away generations of black men. It’s a situation repeated in neighborhoods all over the country, one which David Kennedy describes as “the end of civil society.” For the streets to be safe again, residents and the police needed to start learning to rely on each other.

In the fall of 2007, Police Chief Wing, Lewis and fellow A.D.A Reiss began the painstaking work of regaining a neighborhood’s trust. They met with community leaders, businessmen, pastors, social workers, teachers. They asked them not only to serve as surrogates and urge residents to trust and work with them but also to contribute their ideas. Dingle thought it could work. As they explained it, this was about much more than locking up dealers; it was about addressing the root causes of crime. “They was going to work hard at cleaning the streets up,” she said. “Some people would do time, some wouldn’t. They was going to advocate for training, schools, jobs, housing; in other words whatever a person needed, they was going to try and fulfill that for them.” Over the fall, Wing, Reiss and Lewis, along with local leaders, held weekly open forums at the Salvation Army church on Terrace Avenue to explain the plan and learn about the community’s needs. Still, there was a lot of mistrust to overcome. For those not ready to show up at a meeting with the police chief and prosecutors, Dingle held sessions in her building, “I stood out in that hallway sometime til three, four o’clock in the morning,” she said. They were laying the groundwork for a new era.

Starting in 2008, there would be at least one police car stationed on Terrace Avenue at all times. Every month, the police chief and members of the D.A.’s office would hold an open meeting at the Salvation Army church to hear from residents about their concerns and keep them apprised of what they were doing. Gradually, as peace returned to the street, the hope was that the police presence would be scaled back and residents would feel secure to call for help at the sight of trouble. Meanwhile, the D.A.’s office would oversee a team that would direct programs and services at residents of Terrace and Bedell, starting with non-violent drug offenders who agreed to stop using and selling. Over time, the services would expand to all who needed them. But before the new era began it had to be ushered in with a ceremony.

A critical component of Kennedy’s model is a town hall meeting where for the first time, in a public setting, residents come together to face the dealers squarely. The meeting serves several purposes. As a kind of public shaming, it seeks to shatter the culture of fear and silent acceptance that has allowed rampant crime to take root. Residents can safely say what they have wanted to say for years. It also allows the police and prosecutors to change their image as both ineffective and indiscriminate. By offering certain dealers a second chance, they show they have a heart. But in promising to aggressively prosecute any future offense, they are telling both the community that they are serious about protecting them and dealers that the game is over.

In 2007, the police filmed dozens of under-cover drug buys in Terrace and Bedell. They built strong cases against dozens of dealers, but didn’t arrest anyone initially. Instead they separated the dealers into two categories, those with prior arrests for violent crimes, and those without. D.A. Rice wrote all the non-violent offenders a letter letting them know they’d been caught selling drugs and inviting them to a gathering on January 8, 2008 at the African American Museum around the corner from Terrace Avenue. If they showed up they would be offered a second chance; if they didn’t they’d be arrested. Whether or not they would dare to come was the big question. After countless meetings and weeks spent looking for all the dealers who were suddenly lying low, the day of reckoning had arrived.

When people started showing up early to save seats, a nervous Lewis breathed a sigh of relief. By 6:30 the largest room at the African American Museum was packed with 300 people. Seated near the front were Mayor Wayne Hall, Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, Chief Wing and D.A. Rice. And the dealers caught on tape? “Every one of em showed up!” Dingle says with a mix of disbelief and joy. Many had told Dingle there was no way they’d been caught on tape and they weren’t selling anything. The gathering put and end to the silence and the denials.

After a short prayer, the lights dimmed and a movie started. At the front of the room, 13 men and women sat in specially designated seats. They looked up at the silent film, in which they were the unwitting lead actors. It was footage of undercover drug buys. On the street, in hallways and staircases, they exchanged Baggies containing little rocks for five and 10 dollar bills. Then the lights came up and the D.A. stood before them. “You have been caught undeniably, selling drugs in the community,” Rice said. “We could arrest you at any moment and we’ve chosen not to.”

Then she made them an offer – stop dealing and we will give you all the help you need, from education, to job training, to assistance with healthcare and housing. Sell another ounce, and we will use the evidence already gathered against you and ask the judge to deliver the maximum sentence. To drive home her message, Rice pointed at a row of chairs in front of them. They were empty except for 8x11 photographs - each one the picture of a person caught selling drugs in Terrace and Bedell. They were among the 40 dealers identified in the previous summer’s undercover buys who, because of their violent histories, were not given a second chance. As she spoke, police cars drove by the museum and turned on to Terrace to arrest them. When Rice’s speech was over, residents stood up and finally, in front of the police and the assembled community, told the dealers, “Enough. We love you, we will support you, but you have to stop destroying us.”

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A year later, a handful of Terrace residents are scattered throughout the pink upholstered pews of the Salvation Army church. The brightly lit sanctuary is still full of red and green Christmas decorations. An older man walks in. “Can’t we force people to come to the meetings,” he says as he takes a seat. “I spent four hours putting 400 hundred flyers and only 25 show up!” Lewis remarks that when someone is focused on moving up and out of a neighborhood, they aren’t likely to want to come to a community meeting. “We have some of those here,” the old man sighs.

Every first Monday of the month since the initiative began, Chief Wing, Meg Reiss and Lewis have met with residents at the church. It’s a way for them to get the pulse of the neighborhood and to let people know about the work they are doing to help the community. The larger purpose is to keep chipping away at the wall between residents and the police. Rev. Reginald Benjamin who ministers to youth in the Nassau County Jail, many of whom come from Terrace and Bedell, is the first to speak. He thanks Lewis for helping to get money for a toy drive he organized for hundreds of families before Christmas.

Then Chief Wing stands up. A stocky middle-aged man with a salt and pepper crew cut, he’s got a sympathetic smile but there is also a no-nonsense air about him. “I’ve heard complaints of people in the hallway dealing,” Wing says to residents of 100 Terrace. “I’m going to encourage anybody who hears something to call us.”

“I tried to call,” says a woman from the back of the church. But she says police were slow to respond. She describes a recent incident where a man took a baby hostage. “The security guard was on the phone with his girlfriend. Security is terrible,” she says. Reiss promises to set up a meeting with building management and invites all residents to come.

It’s three days before the one-year anniversary of the initiative and Wing says that the crime rate in the neighborhood is down 75 percent. “Congratulations to everybody,” he tells the residents, “you really have done the impossible…we still have a lot of work to do but you should feel proud.” As he wraps up, Wing announces that New York State wants to implement similar initiatives in a number of cities.

After the meeting, Lewis is not as excited as one might expect about the news. She likes Kennedy’s model but she believes it’s being perfected in Hempstead because of the emphasis on providing training and services. “You can’t just shut down (the street) without giving people opportunities.” And then she smiles as she points to Marcellus and Jamar standing in the aisle talking to Meg Reiss. Both men were in jail a little over a year ago. Today they have honest jobs and are working with the D.A.’s office to help make Terrace free of crime. For Lewis, that’s the best confirmation that this “movement” as she calls it, is working.

After offering help to the 13 dealers who were given a second chance, the D.A.’s office has expanded its services. A job training program taught by the Building and Trades Union aimed at Hempstead residents with criminal records has graduated its first class. A staffed community resource center that will match residents of Terrace and the Village of Hempstead with the services they need, is set to open.

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The following day, around the corner at the African American Museum, a dozen men and women sit in a circle in a large grey-carpeted room. On the walls are framed images made of paper cut outs depicting scenes of African American history; slaves crammed into the hold of a ship, Rosa Parks sitting at the front of a bus, police dogs lunging at students.

One by one the people in the room share stories about the week’s triumphs and setbacks. Most of them have troubled pasts and they gather to support one another as they struggle to leave the streets behind. The bi-weekly meetings are freeform conversations open to all; a combination of rap-session, self-help meeting and networking circle. One woman, in her early 40s, who graduated from the job-training course in the fall, has some sad news. Her 19-year old nephew who was trying to get out of a gang was shot twice on Christmas Eve. He’s in the hospital. The shooter lives on his block. Lewis promises to visit the young man and bring Aaron to discourage him for taking matters into his own hands. As a middle class woman and an assistant district attorney, there is a limit to how much young hustlers can relate to her and she knows the voice of an ex-convict often carries more weight. She also says she’ll talk to detectives to make sure they book the suspect.

Halfway through the meeting, Aaron shows up. He’s wearing a Baltimore Black Sox jacket and his hair is in cornrows. He’s soft-spoken but smiles broadly as he thanks Lewis for convincing the electrical school to readmit him and fix his credit. He’s brought along a childhood friend, Dre, who’s stuck in a dead end-job trying to support his family. Lewis wastes no time. She gets Dre to commit to a meeting the following day with Kevin Robinson, a larger-than-life, former drug dealer who not only finds jobs for ex-offenders, but is in many ways Lewis’ right hand man. Then she tells Dre to come see her the day after.

But much of the meeting is spent on Kadeem. While most of her work is with ex-offenders, Lewis also tries to catch people before they fall. The 17-year-old lives on Terrace Avenue. The son of a long-time dealer who died last year, Lewis saw promise in him. She sent him and his twin brother on a tour of colleges and the D.A.’s office set up an internship for Kadeem at a photography studio in Manhattan. But he blew the internship, he’s been getting suspended at school and recently he stole a palm pilot from the museum. Still he shows up at the meetings. One by one, people in the circle take turns trying to reason with him. Marcellus, a big man in his early forties, implores Kadeem not to make the same mistakes that got him sent to jail at Kadeem’s age for ten years. Lewis is a lot less charitable. She tells Kadeem he’s heading for jail. As the meeting draws to a close, Lewis tells the group there are two trains. One is well financed; it’s loaded with guns, dogs, laptops, prosecutors and all the money in the world. The other just has a bunch of people who care. “Which train are you getting on,” she asks. “Right now you are going back forth.” “You are going to have to choose,” she tells Kadeem pointedly.

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The following day, Aaron’s friend Dre meets with Kevin Robinson. Many of the dealers who were offered a second chance and many of those who come to the meetings at the museum end up in his office. He works on the fourth floor of the Suburban Tech building, a modern, grey, concrete block at the foot of Terrace Avenue. To get to Robinson’s door you walk through several corridors past a metal detector.

It’s a rainy afternoon. In the lobby, waiting to meet with Robinson is Michael. He’s only been out of jail for a couple of months. Though he’s not from Terrace, he knows the block well. For years he sold drugs in various parts of Long Island and North Carolina. Terrace Avenue was one of his best spots. “It’s just one big strip of apartment buildings with thousands of people. Hundreds of people drive through there every day,” Michael recalls. The buyers came from all walks of life, doctors, lawyers, even judges.  “In an hour or two you could come up with maybe $1500, $2000.”

Robinson sits behind a cluttered L-shaped desk. On the walls are printed motivational sayings. One reads, “Serenity is not freedom from the storm, it is peace within the storm.” Another, with a heart on it says, “I love my dad.” Robinson is an exuberant man with a round belly and tinted glasses who sometimes refers to himself in the third person. Until he was released from prison in 2005, Robinson spent two decades dealing drugs, going in and out of prison. The final straw came when he got a letter in jail. It was from his young son telling him he’d been sentenced to life in prison for murder. When Robinson got out, he vowed he’d never go back. Now he helps ex-offenders not only find jobs but new ways of living.

Robinson asks Parker about the kind of work he’s interested in and what training he has. He warns Parker that it won’t be easy. “You got to be ready for the no’s,” he says. “Some people get jobs quick, some people take a while but we’ll go through mock interviews.” Then he goes over basic ground rules, “We don’t give up a job until we got another one,” Robinson insists. “We always give two weeks notice. We also don’t lie about our felonies. It’s too easy, I could pull all your information here.” Besides he’s not interested in employers who wouldn’t give felons a chance to prove themselves. He speaks from personal experience, after he got out of jail, Robinson says he got hired six times in 35 days and failed every background check. “I didn’t start any of the jobs.”

Before Parker leaves, Robinson promises to stay in his corner. And he invites him to come to the meetings at the African American Museum. “It will help you in your transition back out to the street’” Robinson tells Parker. “We need help but we don’t know it.” That’s Robinson’s mantra. He preaches a doctrine of constant self-improvement no matter where you are in life.

After Parker is gone, he walks over to a corkboard covered in photographs. He points to some of the success stories. One’s a supervisor at a state park, another is the head of maintenance at a building in Manhattan, another works at a law firm. Next to the board is a filing cabinet. He opens a drawer. Letters in their opened envelopes burst out of files. They are from inmates who’ve seen him speak in jail and say they want to go straight when they get out.

Robinson knows well that the work he and Lewis are doing is more than helping people find jobs. That’s just the first step. What’s needed is a transformation in how people see themselves in relation to society, a shift in values and a letting go of a criminal’s code that served them on the streets but is also a ticket back to jail. “I see the rebelliousness, I see the bitterness, I see pain and I see hurt,” says Robinson. He’s also come to see success as a process. “A guy that didn’t graduate, a guy that’s been going to prison, a guy possibly getting high, never having a father in his life, never having a job…to come home and to go look for a job is success,” Robinson says.

                                        **********

As he looks back on the last year of his life, Aaron sometimes wonders if he’s made the right choice in listening to Lewis. After he got shot, Aaron lay in the hospital unable to eat. His best friend, who’d started the beef, was nowhere to be seen. “He did the best for him, I was on my own,” Aaron remembers. Instead, the one at his side was Lewis. She liked Aaron, had hope for him, but now she was terrified he would do what everyone expected as soon as he got out; exact revenge. “She actually sat there and cried,” Aaron says. “It showed me how much she cared.” Lewis promised him that if he didn’t retaliate, she would see to it that his attacker would be prosecuted and be sent away for a long time.

Aaron was reluctant. The streets, he says, are like a jungle. “It no different than if you are a lion and you are looking for deer in the wild. You see one with a broken leg; you are not going after a healthy deer. I got shot and I never did anything about it so I’m a target,” says Aaron. “They are going to think I’m one of those deers.”

After he got home, he saw his assailant drive down his street several times. He’d call the police and tell them, “He’s here come pick him up.” But each time, they were too late. Aaron was beginning to lose his mind. It was all he could do not to take matters in to his own hands. When the urges got too strong he’d call up a member of his church and they’d pray together. One Sunday, his pastor told him to expect a sign that would let him know God was in his life. Later that day Aaron was driving when he saw the shooter. “I lost my head,” he says. He’d had enough; it was time to settle matters. Aaron slammed the breaks, whipped the car around and went chasing after him. By the time he caught up with his attacker, the cops had arrived and were arresting the man. Aaron said it was a sign from God, telling him to have more faith.

But life is still testing his faith.

“I cooperated with the police and he only got five years,” Aaron says with anger and disbelief. He is livid that a man he says is a member of the Bloods with a violent rap sheet, who shot him in cold blood, could be home in three years. It’s a mistake he plays over and over in his mind. “I should have said nothing. I should have just done what I wanted to do and I would have done five years,” he says with palpable frustration. Now every slight reminds him of how he got played. “When someone even gets over on me, it feels like I’m getting shot again,” Aaron says. There is also the serious matter of his safety. “The guy who shot me is in jail saying that I told on him,” says Aaron. “Ms. Lewis is saying he would never find that out. He’s saying he got paper work.”

But as he thinks about how he could have settled the score, Aaron catches himself. “I’m a man of God right now,” he says, he shouldn’t be talking this way. Besides, he knows the streets have their own karma. Bus, the guy who set him up, was bludgeoned to death not long after in a prison riot. Several inmates thought Bus was an informant whose testimony had sent them away; under the cover of chaos, they acted. “That’s how it goes,” Aaron says. “You can’t play like that, you can’t be grimy.”

Aaron is caught between two worlds. One minute he’s wishing he’d shot his attacker, the next, he says he’s learning to pray for him. He goes to church every Sunday and is striving to put his life in God’s hands. He’s going to the meetings at the African American Museum, meeting with Lewis for coffee. He’s taking refresher courses at the electrical school. But when he looks in Newsday and sees only two jobs for electricians or when he turns on CNN and hears about mass layoffs, he starts to despair. Aaron knows he can’t compete with most job seekers. “I’ve only had two jobs in my life, I don’t have too much experience. Most people start working at 16, I started hustling at 16.” The longer the economy stagnates, the more his skills as a criminal seem useful. “A lot of people is doing bad except for the people in the street,” Aaron says. “It’s no recession to them, everything is moving just like it used to.” He’s living on savings from his street days but he knows the money will run out eventually. And so to make ends meet he still deals from time to time when a friend calls, picking up a hundred dollars on a weed sale here and there. He’s not back to selling crack, he pauses, “yet.” If it weren’t for that income, he says he’d probably be in front of the Hempstead bus terminal accepting quarters.

As he reminisces fondly about the good old days when he was flush with money, he stops. More than poverty, more than losing his reputation on the street, Aaron has a bigger concern.

“I just don’t want to disappoint Ms. Lewis.”