NEWARK — Over the past two years, Peter Santos has hired 40 ex-convicts to help him build and renovate apartments here; 36 did not last, many of them doing unacceptably sloppy work or simply disappearing after a few weeks — or a few days — on the job.
Murray McNair, the son of a drug dealer, returned from a Goodwill mentoring session to tell his family he had found a $9-an-hour job. It was 20 miles (two buses and a taxi ride) away.
One worker, Ronald O’Reilly, 41, had spent more than half his life in prison, for burglary, drug sales and weapons possession, when Mr. Santos last summer gave him not just a job but a cheap apartment and the furnishings to make the place feel like home. He even paid to repair Mr. O’Reilly’s neglected teeth. “I gave him my all,” Mr. Santos said. “I really thought Ron would be different.”
But within five months, Mr. O’Reilly had rekindled his love affair with crack cocaine, said Mr. Santos and others who knew him. He stopped coming to work, ceased paying his $500 monthly rent, and by the time he was evicted, had not only sold off the contents of the apartment, but also the items in an adjacent storage space that belonged to his erstwhile patron, they said. He was arrested soon after and charged with sexual assault.
The situation epitomizes the way Newark’s two leading problems, crime and unemployment, are intertwined with the huge number of ex-convicts in the city. Some 2,300 men and women pour into the city from prison each year, and 65 percent are rearrested within five years. One in six adult residents of the city has a criminal record.
With Newark’s unemployment rate stubbornly stuck at twice the state average of 4.9 percent — and criminal history and lack of education leaving many chronically unemployable — Mayor Cory A. Booker has tried to make prisoner re-entry a signature issue, aware that his twin promises of safety and economic vitality depend on it. He is part of a growing national movement of local and state politicians trying to tackle the problem; earlier this month, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, allocating $165 million annually to their efforts. “Up until now, the focus has been putting ex-offenders back in jail,” complained Fred Davie, president of Public/Private Ventures, a nonprofit group based in Philadelphia that has created prisoner rehabilitation programs in 15 cities and advised the Booker administration. “We need a national approach to what has become a national crisis.”
Even with crime at historic lows, the number of people behind bars in the country is 2.3 million, its highest level ever, according to the Pew Center on the States; last year, there were 7 million people in jail or prison, on probation or on parole.
Most of the prisoner re-entry programs around the country are too new to have been evaluated independently, though the Manpower Development Research Corporation in New York is midway through a three-year study of employment and recidivism among 2,000 male ex-convicts in Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Chicago.
Here in Newark, Mayor Booker has recruited 50 local companies to hire ex-convicts screened by the city’s workforce-development agency, rewarding them with tax breaks, and persuaded 300 lawyers who had volunteered on his campaign to donate their services to felons facing legal obstacles to employment. He is selling city land at a discount to developers willing to employ former prisoners on their construction sites.
But many of Mr. Booker’s initiatives have been stymied. He created a new post at City Hall dedicated to re-entry, but its first two occupants did not work out. He has lobbied legislators to take down some of the barriers ex-offenders face — like rules preventing those with criminal records from working at the Port of Newark — but many are loath to appear soft on crime. A threadbare municipal budget upended the idea of providing sanitation jobs to parolees.
“We’re making progress but it’s like running on the beach,” the mayor said in a recent interview.
Mr. Booker is invariably approached on Newark streets by young men with tattooed arms, newly released from prison and desperate for work. He explains that City Hall is not hiring and then, after assessing the person’s seriousness, whips out his cellphone and dials Kirsten Giardi at Goodwill Industries.
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