2nd Chance Society Starts Here

“On half of you I see this angry bullshit on your face.”

Dan Jusino leans in over the head of a long laminated wood table, turning his head toward the 20-odd formerly incarcerated men and women looking back at him or down at their thumbs.

It’s orientation day for a hiring cycle at EMERGE Connecticut, what Jusino and his staff call a Transitional Workforce Development Program and which, in practice, functions as a holistic re-entry program combining part-time work, job skills training, and ​“behavioral development.” At a time when cities like New Haven are struggling to find ways to help a hundred or more ex-offenders reintegrate into the community each month, EMERGE has emerged as a model. On the first step toward stable lives, the workers have become familiar sights in town, planting new trees on Long Wharf and in Wooster Square the past few weeks, for instance, holding down jobs at places like Elm City Market.

Many of the men here at orientation day — they are mostly men — came looking for a job. That, they’re told, is only part of the point.

In a brick-walled room of a converted warehouse, EMERGE Founder and Director Jusino oscillates between apparent anger, sentimentality, frank assessments, and personal stories. He’s a big man, with a thick white mustache and a voice that carries (not that it needs to, given the size of the room and his audience’s attention). He tells them about the program’s structure. Employees work up to three eight-hour days of construction work a week, depending on the week and the weather — EMERGE is, in part, a contracting company, and their work depends on what they can secure — and two days of programming, which include a literacy lab (all crew members must work to reach a 12th-grade math and reading level), parenting classes, anger management workshops, and Real Talk, a form of group therapy on Friday mornings involving talking sticks and topics ranging from healthy relationships to childhood trauma.

The work, he tells them, is ​“leverage” to get the men, the vast majority of whom have been released from prison within the last nine months, to ​“do things you don’t want to do.” The programming Jusino and his co-workers have created as part of a program designed, in their words, to turn these men’s lives around.

Jusino punctuates his outline of the program with interludes in barking staccato.

“I was born and raised in the ​’hood in Harlem.” ​“I got in the habit of hitting people upside the head with a Glock.”

At certain points, he tears up: when he talks about his own release from prison, and the ability to get up in the middle of the night and get a glass of milk from the fridge — ​“Not a fucking cup. A glass. The way milk should be drunk.”

He asks the room to raise their hands if they’re addicts — many do — and then compares the feeling of doing community service to taking a hit of heroin, his old drug of choice. He talks about his first time in correctional counseling, where he was sent by his parole officer, and where the therapist asked him not, again, what was wrong with him, but what happened to him. He calls his old self a ​“professional victim.” After a while, his audience begins to nod along with him, with ​“mm-hmm” echoing his more emphatic points. An EMERGE crew member stands up to give his own testimony. He’s been at EMERGE three months, he says, and the staff have helped him both develop himself and find a full-time job in landscaping and excavation. He’s going to start next Monday. Everyone claps.

Eventually Jusino introduces Mark Wilson, the deputy director. (Wilson has since left EMERGE for reasons related to his personal health.) Jusino kisses the top of his shaved head. Mark, who the men tend to describe as ​“smoother,” takes a seat and looks out with a more even gaze. ​“I think you all came here because you heard ​‘work,’” he tells them. ​“At the end of the day, this is not about work. If you’re here strictly to get a paycheck, you’re not going to last. I’ll give you two to three weeks. If you’re about making things better for you, making things better for your family, we can help.” The presentation lasts an hour and 15 minutes. At the end, Jusino asks if anyone wants an application. Everyone does.

Easing The Transition

I first started going to EMERGE in the fall of 2015, four years following its 2011 opening. Another volunteer and I would walk once a week the ten minutes or so it takes to get from Yale’s campus to the block on Grand Avenue where EMERGE is tucked behind a parking lot on a street dotted with corner stores, an Italian restaurant, lawyers’ offices, empty storefronts and boarded-up windows. The ​“shop” has a sort of patchwork urban warmth, how you might imagine a garage refurbished by socially-conscious construction workers: the porch outside is made of metal, and the red double doors were only recently installed to replace a sliding metal door you had to pull up from the ground. During orientation, Real Talk, Thursday tutoring (where staff members say ​“little old ladies” from First Presbyterian Church come help the guys with high-school level math work), and most of the rest of the programming, the participants sit under the solemn gazes of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Obama, who all watch from posters lining the walls.

On one wall someone painted, in all capitals, ​“THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING.” A printed-out image of ​“the man box” is pasted to an easel, lists traditional concepts of masculinity within a restrictive cube. ​“Demonstrate power and control (especially over women).” ​“Do not express weakness or fear.” ​“Do not cry openly or express emotion (except anger).” The idea is that the men can break out of the box.

I was there to help set up a program through the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, an undergraduate organization dedicated to work at local correctional facilities. Our goal was to assist some of the EMERGE employees as they attempted to modify their child support payments and debt, which can accrue over the length of a prison sentence if someone doesn’t know to call and stop them. It’s not unusual for back payments to leave the men thousands of dollars in debt. To pay it back, and pay the continuing fees, Connecticut typically docks the men as much as 60 percent of their monthly paychecks. We were trying to get the payments low enough that the men could afford to pay them at all, and not, as often happened, resort to the kind of money-making that put them in prison in the first place; or, at least, to connect them to professionals who could help more than we could.

Outstanding child support payments were only one of a long list of obstacles many of the former offenders faced in their first months following release. Near the top of the list was finding employment, often made more difficult by the criminal history application check-box, the blank years on a resume, or even details as seemingly easy to fix as the lack of a driver’s license or Social Security card, which are often lost or not returned following a former prisoner’s incarceration.

Then there’s housing. For those still on parole, many live in halfway houses, which are often described to me as more of a burden than a help — using the issue of ID as an example, when restrictive schedules make basic appointments difficult to maintain, and a long line at the DMV might mean a missed chance. The corrections officers at the houses, the men tell me, are trained to have the same mindsets as those working in prisons, so the residents are still treated as inmates, with only marginally greater freedoms and consistent attitudes of mistrust. Some in home confinement, another parole option, didn’t find their situations much better: officers would spend the day doing drive-bys to catch anyone ​“deviating” by leaving his house to, say, pick his kid up from the bus stop, and parolees still had to pay a 25 to 30 percent cut of their income as ​“rent” to the halfway house they weren’t even living in anymore. Add to that the leftover health and mental-health issues that often accompany a long-term prison sentence, as well as the general adjustment shock that comes with leaving an institution where many men hadn’t been able to open their own window in years.

At the moment, it’s estimated that approximately 1,200 prisoners are released into the New Haven area every year. With Gov. Dannel Malloy’s Second Chance Society initiative, passed in 2015, that number is likely to increase. Policies cheered on by advocates of criminal justice reform — expedited parole hearings for people convicted of nonviolent crimes, for example — will likely result in more people, released more quickly, than in previous years. Three prisons have already closed down as Connecticut’s prison incarcerated population has dropped from 20,000 to 15,600 since 2008. Halfway houses can barely keep up with the numbers of men and women getting released on parole, and EMERGE is one of a number of re-entry centers in New Haven attempting to help recently-released former offenders on their way back into their communities during their early, particularly vulnerable months. Studies have estimated that former prisoners are 3.5 times more likely to die within the first two years following their release than the average citizen; within the first two weeks, that number jumps to 12.7. EMERGE takes a holistic approach, where crew members get both part-time employment and full-time access to a staff committed to making sure the participants can take care of their basic needs.

“Social Venture Enterprise

But EMERGE operates differently from the rest of the re-entry centers. It calls itself a ​“501(c)(3) with a social venture enterprise,” by which it means that unlike typical nonprofit re-entry models, it earns approximately half of its operating budget through the revenue-generating side of the operation, rather than fully operating on donations or city, state, or federal grants. At the moment, 48 percent of its operating budget comes from contracting work, primarily through construction projects for Neighborhood Housing Services, a New Haven-based organization focused on affordable housing, as well as contracts with Urban Resources Initiative, which hired EMERGE’s men for a city-wide tree-planting initiative, and some moving work with Liberty Community Services.

Typically, the men take home $10.10 an hour after EMERGE gets its standard contractor’s cut, (normally $2.90 per man, out of an original $13.00 per man — their typical cut to the contractor is 30 percent), which is exclusively used to pay for tools, insurance, and other fees related to the contracting jobs. The program doesn’t turn a profit.

The remaining 52 percent of EMERGE’s yearly budget — meant to cover Jusino and his staff’s salary, as well as the costs of programming and maintaining their site — currently comes from a collection of private donors including United Way, the Community Foundation of New Haven, the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, and some smaller donors. This summer, the organization applied to Connecticut’s Depatment of Labor and Department of Economic and Community Development for $250,000, which they hoped would help with costs left uncovered by their private donors; the state, however, was only able to contribute $70,000. And while EMERGE was recently selected as one of four Connecticut organizations to participate in YouthBuild — a program dedicated to serving at-risk youth, for which EMERGE will receive $960,976 of federal funding over the next three years — the money will not explicitly fund the organization’s primary mission: offering re-entry services to formerly incarcerated community members of all ages.

According to the most recent numbers for the state of Connecticut, 40 percent of male offenders are convicted on new charges within two years of their release. For those who have participated in EMERGE, the comparable number is 16 percent. Maybe more important is the 70 percent rate, out of all those who participate in the program, who complete ​“successful exits”: they move on to employment or further education within 60 days of participating in the program, which is designed to last six to nine months (though, the staff tells me, participants can stay as long as they want). Of that 70 percent, normally about fifty men per year, 76 percent are still working or on their education tracks a year later. The statistics include anyone who’s ever participated, no matter the terms by which he left the program — if he ​“self-terminated,” or was fired — with the understanding that however much time a participant spent with the program, he likely picked up training and skills relevant to his subsequent job search or employment. No matter how someone leaves the program, EMERGE remains a resource: alumni are welcome back any time, to get help looking for a new job, to get more skills training, or just to say hello.

Many of the formerly incarcerated men participating in EMERGE stress that the part-time pay and the skills training, which includes various construction and safety certifications, were both the initial incentives and, finally, almost secondary components of the program. ​“I thought it was just a straight job,” said Holmes, remembering his own orientation. He came to the program almost immediately after he was released from federal prison in February, following a four-year sentence. He snorts remembering his first impression, when he sat down for Jusino’s presentation: ​“What the hell did I get myself into?” He shakes his head. ​“But then, as he talked, and I really soaked everything in, absorbed everything, I realized that he cared. So if this guy that I don’t know from a hole in the wall actually cares, why shouldn’t I really care about myself?” Before the program, Holmes told me, his ​“attitude was the worst I’ve seen.” Asked about the most effective part of EMERGE, he first cites the trauma-informed programming.

“I feel like the pay is a plus,” says Drew Dozier, who initially came to EMERGE after spending two months struggling to find employment while living at The Chase Center, a halfway house in Waterbury. ​“We’re getting trained, it’s helping us stay focused, it’s helping us find better work and get new skills, and we’re getting paid on top of it.”

“Trying To Do Something Different”

He and I were sitting on the porch of EMERGE with another crew member, Carmelo Lopez, who joined in the same orientation group as Dozier. Like many, Lopez came for the training and safety certifications, and the part-time pay — he’d been looking for work, but doors kept on closing, he said, because of his record. ​“For my whole life I’ve been in and out of jail, doing installment plans,” he says, turning at Dozier to chuckle at his own language. ​“I’m tired of that. I come in, I come out, do a bit of time. I’m trying to do something different.”

At the time we spoke, Lopez had been at EMERGE for about four weeks. In the past, he’d tried other programs, some of them because a parole or probation manager had forced him to. There, he said, participants were ​“there because they have to be there. Here, on the other hand, it’s like you want to be.” Dozier agreed. He’d been put into group therapy-type programs before, too, but nothing like EMERGE. ​“I wasn’t participating, really. I couldn’t get in it. A lot of people not being truthful about themselves. But here, every Friday, we have something called Real Talk. Sometimes I have to pick the topic, sometimes someone else. So far, since I’ve been here, we did a topic about relationships. A lot of people opened up. It was hard for them, but we like family.” Asked if they think everyone’s truthful, both men looked me in the eye and nodded. ​“I tried before,” says Lopez, on another time he went to a sort of group therapy session. ​“People don’t really talk about it like we do here. Inmates, we build up these walls like tough guys, and we don’t really feel comfortable talking about our feelings and whatnot, you know?” He smiled. ​“The first week I just observed. After the second week, I started seeing what the vibe was like, I started feeling comfortable.”

“Right now it’s hard for me,” he said, ​“transitioning from — the adjustment to society. So it’s good to feel like you’re not going through that alone, there’s other people going through the same things. It’s kind of that support I like about it.” He and Dozier both grinned when asked about Jusino’s intensity. ​“He’s his own character, but one thing I can say is he cares about this. I’ve been involved in programs before, but you don’t get the same feedback like you get here. There, you’re just a number. The dynamic here is different. When you’re around guys here, they’re like family. You actually feel like you’re between family, you know?”

EMERGE is a small organization. Currently, it has space for between twenty and forty participants at a time, and a staff of four: Jusino, Director of Program Services Alden Woodcock, life coach Nick Santana, and Jojo, the general organizer and office manager who’s often the only woman in the room. The staff holds orientations for new participants once every thirty to sixty days, depending on space, and participants are meant to cycle through and move on. The group is small enough for everyone to know each other, and for the space to feel communal.

The Monday following the orientation kicks off a week-long employability workshop for the potential participants. EMERGE’s staff view it as a sort of extended application. Admission depends less on already-developed polish — Day One includes a brief interlude on personal hygiene — than on an applicant’s visible motivation. Jusino addresses the group at the start of the day, sitting around the long table in the shop’s main room: ​“Today is your opportunity to turn from a victim into a survivor,” he tells them, then warns, ​“This program is not for everyone.” Then he apologizes for everyone who’s ever let them down.

Those who came back for the workshop go around the table, stand up, say their names, and give the reason they’re there. Most are variations on a theme: ​“For an opportunity,” ​“To get my foot in the door,” ​“To learn about myself.” On Monday, there were eleven people there. By Friday, the last day of the workshop, there are four people left in the room: one woman — one of the first Woodcock’s seen in his three and a half years on the job — and three men.

The ideal EMERGE candidate has been released from prison within the last nine months. Currently, 78 percent of the men participating are either living in halfway houses or on parole. He or she must be over 18, but there’s no age limit — they’ve taken guys as old as sixty — and while they will accept both men and women, the program skews towards men. Participants have to be in good enough shape to work on construction sites. They have to be living in the greater New Haven area, and transportation has to be manageable, both in terms of cost and time. Work starts at 7:15 AM, sharp. Some, including Dozier, travel over an hour on public transportation each way. Questions on the initial application forms include, ​“Do you have any child support orders?” ​“What is the highest grade you completed?” ​“What did you want to be while growing up?” ​“What would you like to change about yourself?” and ​“Please list any and all medications you are currently taking.” There are limits, Woodcock told me, to the sorts of issues they have the resources and training to address. If someone seems to need serious mental or physical help beyond the scope of the program, they will want to refer him to a treatment center.

Participants must be able to live on an average part-time salary of $150 a week. Some get additional part-time jobs on the side; some get support from the state. Some can lean on their families, or their girlfriends. For many, it’s more money than they would be making otherwise. For some, it’s not enough. Cameron Davis participated in the program for two and a half months before quitting because the transportation costs — he was traveling further than most, getting dropped off by his fiancée in the morning but paying $7.50 daily to take the bus home — made it impractical to continue. Talking to me on the phone a few weeks after he left, he still only had positive things to say, and sounded almost offended when I asked whether there might be any other reason he left the program. ​“EMERGE is still good,” he said. ​“It’s awesome. I love it. It’s a good tool for people to have.” But he has a son, he said. ​“I gotta pay bills, you know? It’s not beneficial for me to keep traveling that far.” Initially, he’d been living in a halfway house located closer to EMERGE’s shop, and appreciated Jusino’s approach as someone who, unlike most (or all) of those working at his halfway house, had grown up in an urban environment and had been incarcerated himself. ​“It’s just understanding,” he said. ​“Understanding where we’re coming from.” Davis had been in and out of prison and re-entry programs for about twenty years, and said EMERGE has been the best program he’d ever participated in. ​“What this does,” he said, when we spoke before he left, ​“is I come in every morning and I sit down and have Real Talk, or sit down and talk, and we’re off to work. It just gives a structure so we’re not off running the streets, whatever that might be. Selling drugs. Hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

“Some Guys Just Don’t Fit”

Davis now lives farther away than the average participant. During the application process, EMERGE’s staff tries to select for those living in the greater New Haven area, and who plan to continue living there if they’re currently living in a halfway house, so the program can be a consistent resource for support during the transition. So Davis’s reasons for leaving, he said, weren’t typical. ​“Some guys just didn’t fit the criteria,” he said. ​“Left after a week or two, got booted, whatever.” Sometimes, as with him, it’s the pay — the men earn a bit more than minimum wage, and usually work a maximum of twenty-four hours a week. In the few weeks since he’s left EMERGE, Davis hasn’t yet been able to find full- or part-time employment.

The final numbers on the last day of the workshop — four remaining participants — match the predictions Jusino and Woodcock gave me the week before. Around 40 people had signed up for orientation. They expected to see somewhere between twenty and thirty. For the workshop, they expected somewhere around ten to come back; every day after that, they expected the participants to be ​“dropping like flies” until the final count — hopefully between three and five, the number they can realistically fit into the program. Some people aren’t ready, they say, for the intensity, or the emotional demands, or Jusino’s language, or the 7:15 a.m. start time every morning.

Everyone, after all, chooses to participate. Some are sent by family, some are referred by their parole officers, some are recommended by their halfway houses, and many hear about the program through current crew members. But unlike other re-entry programs, courts don’t mandate men to participation in EMERGE’s programming. Both the staff and the participants told me that the fact that everyone, every day, is choosing to be there helps to set the tone of a committed community. The staff of EMERGE play a sort of double role: they’re both employers — the participants are on their payroll Monday through Wednesday — and counselors, or friends. They keep their phones on all night, and not infrequently, they tell me, have gotten out of bed to go drive around New Haven and find someone who has called, worried about a situation he’s found himself in. They’re there to act as a support network, and safety net; but they’re not afraid to fire participants they don’t feel is meeting their standards. Most of those who leave — either fired or, more frequently, ​“self-terminated” — do so within their first two months, typically because of ​“dishonesty or substance abuse,” says Alden.

At the end of the last day one of the newly-admitted participants, Michael Herrera, sat with me at the picnic table outside. He was wearing a white button-down, and sounded excited. He’d been released from Carl Robinson Correctional Institution three weeks earlier, after a two-year sentence following a conviction of possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell. Now, he’s living at the Walter Brooks House, a halfway house in New Haven. The transition had been surreal, he said. He liked that he could call or text his family whenever he wanted to, now. His 6‑year-old son likes to call before and after school.

“I think this was built exactly for me. It’s crazy to say it,” he said. ​“What really touched home base was at the orientation, when they said this is a work program, and also you have to do programming as far as education and looking into yourself. And that was big for me, because while incarcerated I had nothing but time — all I had time to do was reflect on myself. I was already trying to work on that, on myself, to make myself a better person and a better father, and lover, husband, boyfriend, whatever.” He told me about his eventual hope of opening his own businesses within the next few years, which many of the men echo. ​“I just feel like I got through the toughest time in my life, and I can’t go anywhere but up from here,” he said. ​“This is proving that.”

He appreciated EMERGE’s full-bodied approach: that they talked to you about filling out an application, and building a resume, but also how to apply for food stamps, health insurance, a driver’s license. Getting to practice interview skills was ​“huge.” ​“I tend to get nervous a lot,” he said, ​“especially when they ask the conviction question.” EMERGE has a format for that: HARD (honestly, accurately, responsibly, directly) KISS (keep it short and simple). Give your conviction and date, and follow it with a sentence: ​“Since my release, my only focus is on my career and my family.”

Jusino created the program after he was fired from his last job, at STRIVE, a job-training and employability program he participated himself after his own release from prison, and which parts of EMERGE’s employability workshops are modeled after. (“BAH!” he exclaimed, to punctuate his remembered disappointment at the first and only time he’d ever been fired.) He had been scheduled to have a meeting with a contact, John Padilla, before he lost his job; given that he was no longer employed, he had to cancel. At the time, Padilla was the Associate Director for Workforce Development at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, where he managed the national charity’s portfolios on community re-entry for former offenders. Jusino gave Padilla a call, feeling devastated; Padilla asked him to hold on, and hung up. Twenty minutes later he called back with an offer: how would Jusino feel if Padilla matched his salary, hired him as a ​“technical consultant,” and brought him along as he traveled for the year to visit different workforce development programs across the country?

Over the next year, the two went all over — to San Francisco, Boston, Indiana — examining components of successful programs. They looked into mental health treatment, literacy programs, ​“cohort-based models.” After a year they came back to Connecticut and ran focus groups in Hamden, Bridgeport, and New Haven with both former offenders and supervising officers. Between them, they came up with three necessary components for a successful program: it should be highly structured; there should be some kind of sharing, feedback, or participation; and there should be some equivalent of a life coach, mentor, or sponsor. ​“All right,” Jusino remembers Padilla saying. ​“What if I give you half a million dollars to start it out?” 

The deal, said Jusino, was that the half a million dollars from Annie E. Casey would begin as 75 percent of the operating budget, with the remaining 25 percent covered through contracting work they’d come up with. Every year over the next five years, the percentage covered by the revenue-generating business side would have to increase until it reached what they agreed would be a sustainable, feasible level: somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the operating budget. Over the past few years, the contracting work has covered, on average, 50 percent of the organization’s costs. 

But funding continues to be a challenge. At the moment, deconstruction and reconstruction work for Neighborhood Housing Services accounts for about 65 percent of their contracting work. Tree-planting for the Urban Resources Initiative makes up another 25 percent, with the remainder going to assorted smaller projects. The jobs are consistent, and the men perform well, sometimes even producing unexpected benefits, as with the Neighborhood Housing Projects jobs, which often take place in the neighborhoods of some of EMERGE’s participants. Before EMERGE started work on the homes, NHS struggled to deal with recurring instances of vandalism on the rehabbed units. After EMERGE’s workers got involved, the vandalism stopped — people saw men from their own communities doing the work, and either chose or were told to leave the houses alone.

Jusino expects their current projects to carry them through 2017, though the men are working through the jobs faster than the contractors expected. The staff is always looking for new contracts. Like any contracting business, their survival depends on the market. Like any other contractor, they have to bid, and they can’t always compete. The men are new to the work, and while no one’s been hurt on the job since EMERGE’s inception, Jusino has to pay high insurance rates to cover the men’s relative inexperience, cutting further into the program’s annual costs.

And since the business side is only set up to sustain itself, with contracts exclusively covering the participants’ salaries, insurance, and equipment, the remainder of the program has primarily depended on private donations, excluding the state’s recent donation of $70,000. The New Haven branch of Annie E. Casey closed down two years ago, and their funding dried up. Since then, keeping the programming side of EMERGE afloat has meant a yearly scramble for other funding. Their resources, they say, aren’t sustainable. In the past, months of low funding have required EMERGE’s directors to cut the program services that make the organization special — the educational and emotional counseling beyond the contracting work.

For those months without programming, EMERGE’s participants kept going to the construction jobs. They were doing well, and outpacing Neighborhood Housing Services’ expectations. ​“But the impact of program service became so evident,” says Jusino. ​“Behavior was terrible. People were getting high, people were failing drug tests.” The men were making more money, because they were working more — workdays replaced the Thursday and Friday programming services — but attitudes, says Woodcock, tanked. By the time Jusino and his staff could re-implement the program services, many of the men were resistant: they’d gotten used to their inflated paychecks, and didn’t want to cut two days back out of their workweek for literacy training and parenting classes. Some quit. Others stayed on. By the time Jusino was able to pay his staff, and himself, again, he only believed more in the significance of EMERGE’s non-employment-based programming to achieve the impact he actually wanted to have on the former offenders who choose to participate.

“People leave because they don’t really want to change,” said Holmes. ​“I used EMERGE to really find myself, better myself, through their groups and certain things they have going on. It really helps you evaluate yourself, evaluate your life, what you want to do. Not go backwards instead of forward. Are you going to take the same paths that got you in trouble? Or are you going to find a new path? Basically I look at it like, if you’re going to take a new path, then you’ll stay, and find out what they got to offer. But if you choose to go the other way then you’ll just leave right when everything starts.”

There were 26 people at Holmes’s orientation. Most dropped out during or before the workshop, or in the first few weeks. Three months later, there were only three left. At the time we last spoke, Holmes had kept track of some of those who quit early. ​“They’re not doing anything,” he said, sounding frustrated. ​“Some of them are back in jail. Some of them are just looking for work, if they can look for work.”

Woodcock seemed on edge the last time I went to EMERGE. One of the participants, Darren Brown, had a meeting later in the day with his probation officer. He’d been going through a tough breakup, and had gotten in a fight the night before. Woodcock was disappointed. He and Brown had talked just the other day and come up with a plan to avoid potential triggers. Healthy relationships, said Woodcock, are often some of the hardest challenge for the guys. It’s best when he and the rest of the staff get to be in touch with the men’s networks outside of EMERGE — in some cases, they get regular phone calls from a participant’s family, or partner, with everyone on the same page about keeping the former offenders on track. This wasn’t one of those cases. Woodcock left our conversation to go talk to Brown when he came in the door, carrying an uneaten sandwich in a plastic bag and looking at the floor, then sitting down in front of Woodcock’s desk. Woodcock asked what happened. Later, when Brown left, he asked him to call after meeting with the officer.

And Woodcock was worried about his job. Jusino cycled through three people in 14 months before finally finding Woodcock, whose calm competence and obvious personal investment in the program’s participants have earned his place within a staff the men just call ​“good people.” If he had his way, he’d stay at EMERGE indefinitely; but his employment depends on his boss’s ability to pay him. If more funding doesn’t come, he, Jusino, and the rest of the staff will have to re-think what they can do with the funds they have. The William Caspar Graustein Fund’s donation is ​“the reason we made it through the summer,” said Woodcock; but, he said, ​“we’re still short.”

While he talks to me, the new round of participants finishes filling out their final applications at the long table behind us, and current crew members walk in and out in their yellow construction vests, clapping each other on the back.

Crew members’ names have been changed for this story.