Turning point
STRIVE/Boston has launched a program to ready ex-offenders for college - and success at work
Robert Ferreira spent six years in jail for assault with intent to murder, but the experience didn't inspire him to change his ways. Two years later he did another stint for selling heroin and cocaine.
The decision to sell drugs came down to money.
"I felt like I was desperate," says Ferreira, a 29-year-old Chelsea resident. "I couldn't get a job to make a sustainable living, and I felt pressured. I reverted to old habits."
Since his release from jail over a year ago, Ferreira has worked as a prep cook in Cambridge at Sodexo, a food services company, and dreams of opening a restaurant. Ferreira also envisions a future career working with at-risk youths. But he has only a GED, which offers limited work options, and he can't find a way to overcome the setback of his incarcerations. Every time someone considers him for work, his criminal background shows up in the Criminal Offender Record Information system, also known as CORI.
STRIVE/Boston Employment Services, a nonprofit that provides job placement and training for ex-offenders, has created a program to help people like Ferreira get into col lege. The idea is that a college degree could help offset the effects of a CORI check when a former inmate applies for a job. Also, ex-convicts with postsecondary educations could lower their recidivism rates because they would have access to jobs that are unattainable with just a GED or high school diploma. This fall Ferreira will be among 14 STRIVE/Boston participants taking courses at Bunker Hill Community College.
STRIVE - Support and Training Result in Valuable Employees - won a $58,000 federal grant to fund this program in December. By providing ex-offenders with a college education, the organization aims to reduce its recidivism rates by 10 percent. Although the funding is enough to cover the costs for only 10 men and women, STRIVE says it will find a way to help the other four people. Each participant will take two courses each semester, and most will have jobs during the day and take classes at night. Crissilla Parris, a coordinator of STRIVE's career clothing distribution program, will act as a mentor to the participants as they face the challenges of working and going to school.
When the first school year ends, STRIVE will ask the students to volunteer at an organization of their choice.
"You've got to give something back to the community that you may have been ravaging," says Benjamin F. Thompson, executive director of STRIVE/Boston. "Come back and do four hours a week of volunteer work, hopefully working with young kids who are on the path to incarceration."
Thompson reels off the list of statistics from a 2001 policy brief by Community Resources for Justice, a Boston think tank specializing in the justice system, that inspired him to create the program: Federal and state data show that about 60 percent of ex-offenders will go back into the criminal justice system. That recidivism rate is reduced to 24 percent if the person has a high school education, 10 percent if the inmate has two years of college, and 5.6 percent if he or she went to college for four years.
Convicts are generally not highly educated. According to a report issued in January by the state Department of Correction, two-thirds of the DOC population who reported an education level said they completed the 11th grade or less - 12 percent of the population declined to report an education level.
Ferreira earned his GED while at the state prison in Walpole. But specialists say those without higher educations will probably have trouble finding work after leaving prison.
"It's becoming more and more clear that some college is needed to get a decent job," says Steve Roller, director of grants development at Bunker Hill Community College.
Inmates do have opportunities in jail to get an education. Convicts at Bay State Correctional Center, MCI-Norfolk, and MCI-Framingham can take correspondence courses at Boston University. About 16 inmates earned bachelor's degrees from BU in June, says the DOC.
Former inmates have also attended college independently. Edell Howard, who received college prep through X-Cel Inc. Adult Education Services, which is preparing STRIVE's students for college, earned his associate's degree from Roxbury Community College in June and plans to enter the University of Massachusetts at Boston to study math this fall.
"This isn't so rare," says Kevin Burke, the state's secretary of public safety, "especially coming out of the house of corrections. They turn their lives around, get community college degrees, bachelor's degrees." The Executive Office of Public Safety and Security awarded the $58,000 grant to STRIVE because its efforts to educate ex-offenders fit in with Governor Deval Patrick's crime prevention program, Burke says.
Inside X-Cel's Roxbury office, Crissilla Parris tells Yolanda Baker what she will have to do to catch up with the other students in X-Cel's 14-week college preparation course, which meets Mondays and Wednesdays. Baker, Ferreira, and two others are last-minute STRIVE additions who are entering the course at its halfway point.
Three years ago Baker, a 28-year-old Mattapan resident, was accused of writing a bad check. She resolved the case by paying restitution.
"I thought it would be dismissed and I'd be done," says Baker, who cuddles her 4-month-old son as his twin sister coos in a baby carriage nearby.
Now the incident shows up on her records, which limits Bakers's abilities to get a job and public housing. Baker, who lived in a homeless shelter before the birth of her children, thinks the program is what she needs to regain control of her life.
But first, Parris tells her, Baker will have to write an autobiography as part of Wednesday's writing and reading comprehension portion of the course. They study math on Mondays. Parris also assigns six chapters of the nonfiction book "A Hope in the Unseen," about a teenager from the projects who goes to an Ivy League college, for Baker to read before next week's class.
X-Cel students don't get the book until they prove they're committed to the program, says Don Sands, executive director of X-Cel. Ferreira had just received his. For a while he had been on Sands' watch list.
"Every time I walked in," says Sands, "he was on the computer doing something else." Subsequently, Sands asked Ferreira how he did on a quiz that the students regularly take to test their reading comprehension. Ferreira received a grade of 91, and Sands gave him the book.
X-Cel's college prep course is demanding - only 60 percent of participants complete it, Sands says. "You have the same workload as going to college, taking two part-time classes," he says. But he says 80 to 90 percent of those who complete the program are successful in college.
During a break in Wednesday's class, Mark Gonzalez, a 33-year-old Roxbury resident in STRIVE's college program, doesn't want to discuss what he did to become an ex-offender. But he will talk about the struggles he's subsequently had finding a steady job.
Gonzalez received a certificate in administrative accounting at the Millennium Training Institute in 2005. Since then he's had three limited-term accounting jobs. He plans to study accounting or computer science at Bunker Hill.
"The certificate allows me to get in the door," Gonzalez says. "College will allow me to be an asset to the company." 