New Haven Independent

“We heard you,” New Haven State Rep. Toni Walker (pictured) told more than 40 residents at Tuesday night’s Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hill (WEB) management team meeting regarding their concerns about the average 25 ex-offenders being dropped off weekly at the Whalley Avenue jail with nowhere to go, including many who aren’t from New Haven.

People have repeatedly expressed concern both for their own safety and for the well-being of people being released from prison who are homeless.

Department of Correction District Administrator Mark Strange (pictured) and New Haven Correctional Facility warden Robert Correa said that after hearing the concerns at last month’s WEB meeting, they revisited their discharge procedures, and put some new elements in place. Correa said he is working with community organizations to let former inmates know about existing services, including soup kitchens, shelters, counseling and substance abuse treatment. “We need [more] community contacts,” he added.

Janis Daniels (pictured) is one member of the community who has taken the initiative to work with inmates, offering them one-on-one help in what she calls a “pre-program” to prepare them for life on the outside. She said many inmates have been receptive, asking her what they can do to turn their lives around. “I tell them to just do the opposite” of what they did to get them into jail. She teaches etiquette, among other things, “and they love it,” she says. Click here to hear more.

Rep. Walker said that after last month’s WEB meeting, she met with fellow New Haven state legislators Pat Dillon and Toni Harp to consider what they could do to ease the situation. After meeting with DOC Commissioner Theresa Lantz, they came up with a proposal for a pilot program they’re calling a community health center, “one that provides social services, health care, has prescription access, and contacts for placement in shelters, as well as adult education connections.” She said the lawmakers are trying to work out how to pay for it with the commissioner, and will also be in touch with the aldermanic representatives from the area, “so they don’t feel we’re moving it from one neighborhood to another.

“So, we heard you and we’re trying to resolve it.”

Other visitors to the meeting included the head of New Haven’s Street Outreach Team and three of his staffers. Tryone Weston (pictured) introduced his three workers, wearing their big, bright red winter jackets with Street Outreach Team emblazoned on the back.

The team, which works out of the New Haven Family Alliance, was set up after several teens were killed by other teens in 2006. Weston said their initial target population was 200 at-risk youth; they have now reached out to more than 400.

“We’re trying to connect them back to resources that they have walked away from or feel that they don’t have a part of,” he said. The team helps the kids get jobs, stay in school, and they take them on lots of field trips outside the city, “to have a chance to show them that the world is bigger than the blocks you’re fighting and dying on.” The team also negotiated truces among teens from different neighborhoods; click here to read about that.

Weston said many New Haven teens have told them they carry guns for protection, and they’re working with them on that. “We see a lot of weapons, and our main thing is making a relationship with the kids, and then making them feel a little safer.” They’ve been able to diffuse some potentially violent situations. Click here to hear outreach worker Doug Bethea’s anecdote about how a beef between youth from Dixwell and Newhallville led to the negotiation of the first truce.