Time. {And Time Again.}

On a raw and rainy winter day, two men are having lunch together at the Centre Street Cafe in Jamaica Plain. There's nothing remarkable about them. They are both black, both casually dressed. Sitting in a wooden booth near the front window, they eat their chicken wraps and talk quietly. Stephen Peevy is bearded and broad-shouldered, and he talks in a rapid staccato. Chris Cabey is gangly and soft-spoken. They could be brothers or maybe a father and son grabbing a bite during a break from work. In fact, a kinship has drawn them together - not of blood but of common experience. They're both ex-cons.

Just eight days before, Cabey was paroled, having served a year in the Suffolk County House of Correction for possession of a sawed-off shotgun. Peevy, a former crack-cocaine dealer, spent all but two of his years between the ages of 24 and 38 behind bars. He was convicted three times of armed robbery and once of carjacking.

These two men both want the same thing out of this lunch and the meetings that will come in the weeks and months that follow: to find a way to keep Cabey from landing back in jail. They live in Boston, a city that was celebrated in the 1990s as a model in reducing violent crime. Today, it is struggling with a rise in homicides while also trying to find ways to help the 20,000 men and women who are released from prison each year and put back on the streets of Massachusetts with few job skills and little direction.

Peevy, who is 43, is a mentor in the Boston Reentry Initiative, a program launched by the Boston Police Department in 2000. He helps offenders like Cabey follow his lead, though many of Peevy's clients slide back into criminal behavior within months of regaining their freedom; around the country, half of all freed inmates return to a life of crime. But Peevy brings to his work a religious faith and a reformed man's passion to help others - like his lunch partner on this day. "Just don't look back," Cabey says about how it felt to be free again. "Just try not to do anything that's going to get you back [behind bars]," he adds.

Cabey is 24, but he looks younger in a dark sweater and baggy jeans. He has a wool cap pulled over his ears. Suspended from a chain around his neck is a piece of gold-hued jewelry shaped like a mini-grenade. It's the same piece he was wearing, as a police report noted, when he was arrested on a disturbing-the-peace charge in 2003.

Peevy has high hopes that Cabey will stay out of jail. "His chances are very good," Peevy says later. "I'd say 95 percent, based on the fact that he's intelligent and refocused, and he has a stable family background and a job." Knowing the criminal mind as he does, Peevy possesses a sort of sixth sense about when his clients are lying to him. Like Peevy, two of the reentry program's three other mentors are former drug dealers. The fourth, the Rev. Christopher G. Womack, grew up on Pittsburgh's toughest streets but says he has no criminal record. "Let's just say I was in the streets, and I did it all," says Womack, who moved to Boston in 1990. Ordained a Church of God minister in 2000, he became a reentry mentor last year.

Boston's reentry program is a home-grown original, derived from the city's vaunted community- policing strategy. That strategy is widely credited with helping to produce the "Boston Miracle," the sharp decline in the city's homicide rate during the 1990s. One of the reentry program's innovative features is its reliance on mentors, guardian angels who are recruited by inner-city clergy and overseen by the Police Department.

The police, consulting with prosecutors and jail officials, screen the roughly 250 inmates who arrive at the Suffolk House of Correction every month and pick about 20 to participate in the reentry program. The inmates chosen are, in the police idiom, "high-impact players" - the ones authorities believe may commit the most serious crimes after release, often young men with ties to street gangs.

Back at the restaurant, Peevy and Cabey are talking specifics. "I could get you something up at Bunker Hill [Community College] and let you take electronics. Maybe even night classes," Peevy says to his client. The mentor had jumped on Cabey's comment that he had liked an electronics class in high school before dropping out in the 12th grade. One important aspect of a mentor's work is steering clients toward educational and job-training opportunities.

Cabey nods but says nothing.

"Remind me, and we'll make it happen," Peevy says.

With Peevy's encouragement, Cabey had enrolled in a course while behind bars to prepare for taking the test for the high school equivalency diploma. He then passed the test on his first try.

"That helps, you see what I'm saying," Peevy says, his voice soaring as he shifts into cheerleading mode. "You have something to show for the time you were gone. You have furthered your education and knowledge."

Being picked to participate in Boston's reentry program is like being tapped for a secret society. Nobody ever told Cabey why he was chosen. His background was not all that unusual for an inner-city kid. He grew up in Dorchester in a family of six children. His father, an adult education teacher, died when he was 14. His mother, a registered nurse, works at Boston Medical Center. At Madison Park High School, Cabey says, he was "always fighting and getting into trouble, running around and acting wild," eventually being expelled in his junior year. He started his senior year at South Boston High but dropped out. "School wasn't going too good," he says. He did low-wage work in a mailroom at Cambridge College and at a Stop & Shop before landing a $300-a-week job as a health-education trainee with the Boston Public Health Commission.

His record shows three arrests, all in Dorchester. Two were minor, nonviolent incidents; but his first serious run-in occurred in the early-morning darkness of March 9, 2003, near an after-hours spot on Blue Hill Avenue. Two police detectives spotted Cabey hurrying away. He had one hand behind his back, the other one "up a sleeve," according to court records. A detective chased Cabey, tackled him, and seized a sawed-off, double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun loaded with two shells. Cabey eventually negotiated a deal with prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to possessing a dangerous weapon and received an 18-month sentence, with eligibility for parole in one year.

The Suffolk House of Correction, which Cabey entered on February 9, 2004, is a modern glass-and-concrete building the color of wet sand. It sits in Boston's South Bay area in a walled, 9-acre compound just off Mass. Ave. Since it opened at supposedly full capacity in 1991 with 892 inmates, it's become ever more crowded. Now it houses about 1,600 inmates. As its name implies, it aspires not just to punish inmates but to improve them. The maximum term for which inmates are sentenced to the HOC is 21/2 years. Reentry inmates stay an average of eight to 10 months.

Cabey and Peevy first met in March 2004, when Peevy was at the house of correction as a member of a panel that meets to explain the Boston Reentry Initiative to new participants. Cabey heard Peevy speak and remembers having this reaction: "I'm going to connect with this dude."

With his shaved head and greyhound-lean physique, Boston Police Superintendent Paul Joyce, at 47, has a Spartan, no-nonsense look. A boxer and ultra-marathoner, he ran nearly 50 miles across the Grand Canyon in 19 hours last October in a jaunt to support a friend who was sick with throat cancer. For most of his 18 years as a Boston cop, Joyce has worked on the streets of some of the city's toughest neighborhoods. The mentors in the reentry program, like True-See Allah, were not always his allies. In the late 1980s, Allah was with Dorchester's Castlegate gang, and Joyce was a young patrolman in the police department's aggressive anti-gang unit. Allah, who was convicted in 1991 for his part in a shooting that left one man paralyzed, eventually served eight years in prison. "We were both working in the same neighborhoods in different capacities," Joyce says of those days.

But Joyce became frustrated when the unit's dragnet against youths in Boston's high-crime neighborhoods backfired, turning the African-American community against the police. Its intended target, the gang violence fueled by crack-cocaine trafficking, only escalated, and Joyce kept seeing the same names pop up in crime reports again and again.

Joyce underwent a conversion of sorts, embracing community policing in the mid-1990s. He was instrumental in developing Operation Ceasefire, which brought suspected gang members together for meetings with clergy-sponsored street workers and law-enforcement officials, including police, probation officers, and prosecutors. Ceasefire was, in turn, a model for the Boston Reentry Initiative, in which government agencies, nonprofit groups, and clergy would all play a part. Eventually, it was inner-city clergy, notably the Rev. Eugene Rivers and the Rev. Ray Hammond, founders of the crime-fighting Boston Ten Point Coalition, who began to recruit the reentry mentors, and it was Rivers who brought in Stephen Peevy.

Joyce, sitting in his office in the elongated glazed-and-marble box that is police headquarters on Tremont Avenue in Roxbury, says the early indications of the program suggest that it's working. "But are we going to knock recidivism down to single digits? I doubt it very much." Still, he wants to expand the program and says, "Reentry is really going to be a core strategy of what we do." Part of the impetus, he says, is to reverse the spiral upward in Boston's homicide rate since 1999. In 2004, Boston recorded 64 murders, 23 more than the year before. So far this year, there have been 37 murders in Boston.

During the reentry program's first four years, the cost of running it totaled just $1.1 million, covering the salaries of caseworkers and administrators, as well as the mentors, who average $37,000 annually. The funds were cobbled together from various federal anticrime grants to the city. Of 113 inmates who took part in the program in 2002 and had been out of prison for at least one year, 55 had been arrested again as of December 31, 2004, according to police records. (No data on convictions were available.) That translates into a recidivism rate after release of 49 percent. Only 25 of the 55 rearrested were charged with serious crimes, such as assault with a dangerous weapon or drug distribution - a 22 percent rate.

The results look promising, says Anne Morrison Piehl, a public-policy professor at Harvard's Kennedy School. A study by the US Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics of people released from prisons in 15 states during 1994 showed a rearrest rate of 44 percent within one year, 59 percent within two years, and 67.5 percent within three years. Piehl is advising a Kennedy School researcher who is studying recidivism data related to Boston's program, but that study is incomplete.

"If you could reduce recidivism for these hard-core offenders by 4 percent to 5 percent," Piehl says, "that would be something to celebrate."

On December 15, the day of the last reentry-panel meeting of 2004, Peevy is hoarse from laryngitis. He's sitting apart from the panelists in a black, double-breasted suit, white shirt, and maroon tie, with two diamond-studded gold rings on his fingers and his dreadlocked hair up in a ponytail.

Seated on folding chairs in three rows opposite the panelists are the 22 inmates selected to begin the reentry program last December. They are wearing prison jumpsuits or smocks of varying colors - royal blue, DayGlo oranges, and khaki - reflecting their security classifications. They range in age from 18 to 31.

Most of what is said by the panelists is little more than a recitation of drug and firearms-related crimes and the harsh penalties that repeat offenders face under the law. There are references to mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders ranging from five years to life, add-on years for drug sales in school zones, and the possibility of commitment to federal penitentiaries as far away as Indiana and South Dakota.

Federal prosecutor Marianne Hinkle (she has since become a Dedham District Court judge) wags her finger at the inmates as she talks. "Please reach out a hand to the people who are reaching out," she says, "because it's not too late. But if you go back to what you were doing, we will meet again."

When the panelists throw the meeting open for questions, a burly inmate complains: "All of us [facing] the panel are minorities. There are white guys locked up with gun violations. Why aren't they [here]?"

He's right. Eighteen of the 22 inmates picked for the December reentry group are listed as African-American and four as Hispanic. That proportion of African-Americans differs sharply from the recent racial makeup of the HOC's population. At the end of last year, the facility had 1,530 male inmates, of whom 816, or 53 percent, were African-Americans; 364, or 24 percent, were Hispanic; 293, or 19 percent, were white; and the remaining 57 were Asian, American Indian, or unknown.

Although the great majority of reentry participants are usually black, the groups in some months have included a sprinkling of whites and Hispanics.

"I can touch the black question," True-See Allah says back to the inmate. "The root of the answer is: We don't love ourselves enough. Most of us are in here for black-on-black crimes. It could get us to reflect. It's a good question, because it's us killing us, and it's us pitching crack to us."

Another inmate does not so much ask a question as launch into a rambling lament, bemoaning his sentence, complaining that, even though he had stayed out of trouble for three years after his arrest, he had been convicted nonetheless. This is something Peevy has no time for. He rises from a chair in the back of the room. "Dude told on you, man," he shouts. "Suck it up. Come on, man, stop crying."

Peevy never knew his father, who was never married to his mother; the stepfather whom he knew as his father divorced his mother when Peevy was 13. With his mother working as a postal clerk, Peevy, the oldest of the children, had to get his deaf sister and four other siblings off to school in the morning and feed them at night.

By 15, he was hustling drugs and had his first handgun, a .38 special. He dropped out of Jamaica Plain High School in the 11th grade to deal drugs in earnest, and soon he was peddling several thousand dollars' worth of cocaine a day, using it himself and mugging other dealers at gunpoint. He was stabbed and shot, and finally, in 1994, he was convicted of armed robbery for a third time, and a judge officially branded him a "habitual criminal."

If Chris Cabey lapses, the same label could attach to him. Whether he will instead become a shining success story of the reentry program remains an open question. He was one of the program's first participants released this year. On the crisp morning of February 2, when he emerged into the bright sunshine outside the prison's front door, his mother was there to pick him up and drive him to her house in Dorchester.

Compared with the typical inmate in the house of correction, Cabey has lots going for him. His mother has stuck with him. He got his job back at the Boston Public Health Commission. As of six months after his release, he had not been arrested again.

Realistically, Cabey might have to reach the same point that his mentor in the reentry program did when he gave it all up. When Peevy talks about his own rebirth as a law-abiding citizen, the theme is intensely religious but also down to earth, especially as he talks about his epiphany during a prison self-help program.

"You have choices," the program facilitator said. "And henceforth you're going to be responsible for the choices you make."

That got Peevy thinking. But ultimately, he says, it was something far less deep that helped him walk away from the only lifestyle he had known. "I got tired."

Joseph Rosenbloom is a freelance writer in Newton and a senior correspondent at The American Prospect. E-mail him at joe.rosenbloom@gmail.com.