%26#8220;Seek the shalom of the city into which I have sent you into exile,%26#8221; he recited, from the Book of Jeremiah. He spread his arms and looked about. There was little to behold. But it was peaceful.The first time he heard that verse, he was in exile, inside Sing Sing prison, serving 20 years to life for murder. He had not even turned 17 when he shot and killed a man in 1979, during a street robbery gone wrong. He admits to having grown up in group homes and prison, eventually finishing high school and college behind bars. While at Sing Sing, he earned a master%26#8217;s degree in professional studies offered by New York Theological Seminary.He now presides over a small village in exile, the Redemption Center in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, where 17 recently released men and women are trying to find their way back into the world they left %26#151; sometimes decades ago %26#151; because of crime and drugs. It is a shoestring operation, and a frayed one at that. But it beats where they came from. Here, they have a bed, rules, support and a chance to find training or a job.%26#8220;What does shalom mean,%26#8221; he said. %26#8220;How do you find it in those depraved conditions of prison? How do we seek prosperity in this place now? We are people who exist in this land that is foreign to us.%26#8221;With the American prison population at its highest ever, there are increased calls to help ex-offenders ease back into their communities. Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has written on the topic and presided last week over a conference that addressed the issue.%26#8220;We have quintupled the per capita rate of incarceration over the last 30 years,%26#8221; he said. %26#8220;Many more people are coming back to a small number of communities and facing all these challenges. A very big one is housing.%26#8221;Mr. Graham, 45, still remembers his first crime. He was 12 years old and had recently moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant from East New York, Brooklyn. A neighborhood teenager named Theodore told him he knew how to make fast money. %26#8220;He showed me a building where a bike was in the hallway,%26#8221; Mr. Graham said. %26#8220;I held the door open and he rushed it out. He sold it and gave me $30.%26#8221;Before long, he was taking the train to 14th Street in Manhattan and shoplifting like a champ. He would sell what he stole for easy money back in his neighborhood. He learned to drink beer and smoke pot.He also learned that his mother refused to put up with his nonsense. She allowed the courts to send him to group homes, which were, to him, like finishing school for felons.%26#8220;We had all these guys from different boroughs who committed different offenses,%26#8221; he said. %26#8220;We%26#8217;d share stories and compliment each other on the lies we told.%26#8221;He had been out mere months when he went on a robbery spree in the fall of 1979. He and two friends accosted a stranger. Mr. Graham held the gun. The stranger tried to yank it away. A shot rang out and the man, Ivan Porter, was mortally wounded.A year later, Mr. Graham was serving 20 years to life. He said the first three years whizzed by. Then he realized that people can actually spend a lifetime behind bars. That was when he got serious about going back to school (and devouring the library%26#8217;s law books for a series of appeals that proved to be unsuccessful).Even during his seminary studies, he said, he had little remorse for what he had done. It was only in 1997 that the depth of his crime hit him. He was watching a movie about a drunken driver involved in a fatal accident, who realized he should have never been behind the wheel of a car. %26#8220;If I never had a weapon in my hand, this would not have happened,%26#8221; he said. %26#8220;That was when the healing began. I had to take responsibility for what I had done. I decided I would dedicate my life to the memory of Mr. Porter. I carry this man with me every day in my heart.%26#8221;When he was released on October 17, 2001, he looked up Julio Medina, a seminary classmate who had lived in the cell next to his at Sing Sing. Mr. Medina runs Exodus Transitional Community, a respected faith-based program that helps ex-offenders adjust to life outside. Mr. Graham spent four years as a case manager there, until he realized how hard it was for his clients to find housing. Through a series of lucky breaks and the help of his fianc%26#233;e, he found a beat-up row house in foreclosure. A benefactor helped with money, and friends from prison helped with sweat. Last July, he welcomed the first residents, who help defray costs with their $215 monthly housing payments from public assistance.He has not gone wanting for clients. 1 2 Next Page %26#x00bb;
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