For Timothy Thomas, “there’s no right way to do the wrong thing.”
After working over a year for Emerge, a New Haven nonprofit that trains ex-offenders in house demolition and property management, Thomas (pictured) fell again on hard times. Forced to leave his halfway house of 10 months and without a low-income housing voucher for an apartment, Thomas jumped from couch to couch, living with his friends and relatives. He was depressed, started drinking, and was eventually laid off from his job in February.
“I was feeling like nothing was working for me,” he said.
Three months later, Thomas (pictured) is building houses from the ground up. He leases his own apartment and is buying furniture for his four children.
Casa Residential, a home improvement company, offered Thomas a construction carpentry job last month. At 28, he is the youngest worker at Casa by 20 years, but he said he doesn’t feel like the “new guy,” thanks to a program that gives young men the skills and the work ethic to find jobs and hold them.
“[Emerge] prepared me so much for this new job,” he said. “The only way Emerge can help you is if you help yourself.”
Around 1,200 ex-offenders arrive back in New Haven from jail every year; and estimated 65 percent will return to prison. Emerge, by mimicking the high-structure, high-supervision environment of prison, has only a 16 percent incarceration rate among its workers.
“The men we touch leave us thinking differently,” Emerge Manager Mark Wilson said. “The majority of them are better decision makers.”
Thomas returned to Emerge because he humbled himself, said Wilson. For men of color, he added, asking for help can be extremely difficult. Wilson said Thomas had previously faced exorbitant child-support premiums, which Wilson helped Thomas lower to a more manageable amount.
Tim was part of Emerge’s first start-to-finish home demolition last year.
Life improves gradually so long as you are patient, Thomas said. His new job, where he works 40 hours a week, pays more than his old one —$13.50 an hour compared to $10.10 at Emerge. He received his housing voucher, and on Monday Thomas signed a lease agreement for a three-bedroom apartment in Newhallville.
There are still struggles. Around $350 of every paycheck funds child support for his four children, and he lacks a car to drive to and from work. Casa Residential is based in Southington and has worksites in Milford and Woodbridge. Last week he missed three days of work when his ride fell through.
Luckily, Emerge was there to pick up the slack, and gave him work in New Haven on those days. Wilson and Emerge Director Dan Jusino act as teachers and caretakers for the ex-offenders they employ. Working for Wilson and Jusino taught Thomas more construction skills than he needs for his new job, he said.
“Dealing with Dan makes my new boss seem like a teddy bear,” said Thomas, recalling the forthright manner and loud voice of his previous employer.
Wilson taught Thomas how to read a ruler, cut wood, and hammer roofing. Once Wilson gave Thomas a tool belt for no charge. While working for Emerge Thomas obtained a worksite safety certification that he needs for his job at Casa.
After Emerge laid Thomas off this spring for missing too much work, Wilson, Jusino and Thomas’s parole officer pulled him into the office and discussed how Thomas could get his life back on track. Emerge hired him back, and three months later Thomas found the job with Casa.
At Casa, Thomas learns new shortcuts from the older workers. “Every day I’m learning something new from these guys,” he said. “I like working with my hands.”
Thomas often escaped from his problems with alcohol. He lost his brother to gun violence; he said he held his grief inside for a long time. After talking about it in “real talk” sessions at Emerge, he is no longer depressed, and is daily aware of how proud his brother would be of him. Thomas said that because Wilson and Jusino had similar experiences, it is easier to explain his story to them.
“If I got the opportunity, I think I would try to do what they do, to pass on what they taught me,” he added.
As a young man growing up in New Haven, Thomas smashed windows and sold drugs on street corners, eventually spending two years in prison. Now he wants to repair those windows and build houses in neighborhoods where he sold drugs, he said. He hopes to join a union within five years.
Whatever the future brings, the bottom line for Thomas is consistency.
“You can’t have a job and still think it’s okay to hustle,” he said. “You can’t do the right thing today and the wrong thing tomorrow.”
Great article! Congratulations Tim, we're all rooting for your continued success.
Point of clarification for the writer and NHI readers: it's not that EMERGE mimics "the high-structure, high-supervision environment of prison". That's incredibly misleading and just wrong. The EMERGE program was designed using best evidence and best practice from the workforce world specifically as it relates to the formerly incarcerated. That evidence shows that returning offenders do well in (1) an environment where they are quickly connected to a job and an income; (2) provides an opportunity for financial incentives (overtime and promotions); (3) are in a structured environment that occupies the majority of the workday with employment-related activity; and (4) puts them in a tightly supervised environment with immediate feedback that promote learning. These are the ingredients for effectively serving low-skilled adults with employment training services, because that is what they need during training and ultimately to be successful in the workplace. I'm sure the writer didn't mean to imply anything negative, but I did not want readers to misunderstand why EMERGE has had the success it has had to date. EMERGE has not achieved such a low recidivism rate (almost 40 points lower than the state of Connecticut) by making its members comply (as is the case in prison); it focuses on behavior change and personal development as the article on Tim Thomas illustrates.
Full disclosure: I have worked with EMERGE since its startup and continue to volunteer my services to them.