nothin Prison Reentry Through Fine Dining | New Haven Independent

Prison Reentry Through Fine Dining

Thomas Breen photo

EDWINS owner Brandon Chrostowski (center) with New Haveners Scott Lewis and Bobby Johnson on Monday night.

When Brandon Chrostowski was 18, he was arrested for drug possession and for running from the police in his home city of Detroit. He could have gotten 10 years behind bars, but a judge sentenced him to probation and no prison time instead.

Now Chrostowski owns and runs a nationally celebrated French restaurant where he teaches the formerly incarcerated to be chefs, waiters, and house managers, extending the second chance that he received decades ago to a population of diligent, aspiring culinary employees just looking for an opportunity to work.

The audience at the Anderson mansion for Monday night’s screening.

On Monday night, Chrostowksi visited the Elm City for a special screening of the 2017 Oscar-nominated short documentary Knife Skills, which tells the story of his founding of the EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute and of its first cohort of formerly incarcerated graduates.

Organized by Shabtai: The Jewish Society at Yale, the screening took place in the group’s old Anderson mansion at 442 Orange St. on the night before Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement when believers fast and ask for forgiveness from God. The building, which is owned by Shabtai Inc. and is still under construction, will be the Yale Jewish’s society’s next home base once renovations are complete.

Before an audience of around 100 mostly Yale students and Shabtai alumns, Chrostowski, who’s based in Cleveland, participated in a post-screening discussion with New Haven natives Scott Lewis and Bobby Johnson about their own stories of wrongful arrest, incarceration, exoneration, difficult reentry, and paths towards forgiveness.

Chrostowski.

This idea that you’re somehow less than human,” Chrostowski said about the most pernicious assumption that he sees facing people who have served time in prison. That’s the undercurrent that’s got to change. It’s that dog whistle. People don’t say it. But you know they feel it.”

EDWINS, he said, is his not-so-small step towards dismantling those assumptions.

The movie, which director Thomas Lennon made over the course of four-and-a-half years between 2013 and 2017, follows Chrostowski, his kitchen staff, and around 80 formerly incarcerated culinary students in the months before the grand opening of the EDWINS restaurant in Cleveland nearly five years ago.

Lennon cuts between courses that the new students take on the chemistry of wine and the history of southern French cuisine to the students’ hands on education in the kitchen making artichauts barigoule and potato-encrusted fish to intimate interviews with the former inmates about how they ended up in prison in the first place and the structural barriers to reintegrating into society now that they have been released.

I would take the rush of doing what I’m doing now any day over getting high,” says one student with a smile as she prepares a complicated French meal while reflecting on her struggles with addiction which landed her in prison just a few years ago.

After EDWINS’s frenzied but successful opening night rush, another student expresses pride and disbelief that he alone made 60 meals over the course of one night. Even more amazing, he said, is that he feels like he can make 20 to 30 more meals per night if he has to.

The story is not one of unconditional progress and self-affirmation.

A tiff over who has to fill a humidifier with water leads to a student leaving the restaurant due to a dispute that has more to do with wounded pride than actual work obligations. Chrostowski also said that he opened the restaurant with just $10 in his bank account, on the razor’s edge of poverty, and how he constantly has to adapt to roughly half of student body dropping out of the program before the intensive six-month intensive culinary program is up.

But in general, Chrostowski said during the movie and after the screening, the mission of EDWINS, which has been born out through nearly five years of popular and critical and financial success, is that the formerly incarcerated have the work ethic and intelligence of the best that the American workforce has to offer. All they need, he said, is an opportunity to succeed.

The strong have to help the weak,” he said about society’s obligations to the most vulnerable, to those who whether by their own fault or not have had everything stripped from them and must begin life anew as adults. If you ever harbor that information, then shame on you.”

Education cannot teach you perspective,” he said. You have to go through something to really find yourself out.”

You Have To Have Opportunities”

Mayor Toni Harp.

After the screening, Mayor Toni Harp, who stuck around for the 40-minute movie and hour-long post-screening discussion, said that she and the city are aligned with EDWINS’s mission to provide quality education and work opportunities to those reentering society from prison.

This movie provides an affirmation that no misdeed is forever,” she said, that no life is too far gone to be reversed and reclaimed. I believe the promise built into every human being is God given. That we as human beings must tread lightly when it comes to making judgments about other human beings. And I have heard this about forgiveness: that it’s far more liberating to those who do the forgiving than it is for those forgiven.”

She said that the city currently runs two prison reentry programs, one federally funded and one city funded, and that both share the same goals as EDWINS: to restore formerly incarcerated people to their communities and to provide them with training, skills, experience, and opportunities to be productive.

Scott Lewis.

After Chrostowski outlined his own determined path from learning to cook from a big, portly Greek chef on Woodward Avenue” in Detroit to studying at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), landing sous chef jobs in Paris and New York, and then opening EDWINS by sheer force of will in Cleveland, Scott Lewis and Bobby Johnson reflected on how much the struggles and opportunities visible on screen in Knife Skills resonated with their own first-hand experiences getting out of prison (in their cases, for crimes they didn’t commit) and trying to build their lives afresh in New Haven.

My prison experience is one of endurance and work,” said Lewis, who served 20 years in prison after being convicted of a double homicide that he did not commit. Lewis spent years filing his own appeals in state and federal courts, eventually securing his release in 2014 and a $9.5 million settlement from the city.

Now, Lewis said, he has his own real estate practice, with offices in Wallingford and Avon. In Wallingford, his office manager is still on parole and is someone Lewis met while in prison. His client base, he said, consists of the formerly incarcerated, whom he helps become home owners. He said he recently helped a parolee and first-time home owner close on a $350,000 house.

In prison, they try to rob your identity if you’re not strong-willed,” he said. He said that his path towards exoneration and reentry hinged upon his confidence in his own intelligence, as well as on his ability to forgive those who have wronged him and on the opportunities presented to him.

If you have the spirit of forgiveness,” he said, there will be avenues of truth that prevail.”

You can change your life,” he continued, but you have to have the opportunities.”

Bobby Johnson.

Bobby Johnson, who was sent to prison at age 16 and released at 25 for a murder that he did not commit, said that even exonerated ex-inmates have struggle to find work and housing after they are released from prison because of the work and education opportunities they’ve lost while behind bars.

To not hold that strike against them,” he said to Chrostowski about EDWINS’s policy of not asking students or employees about their criminal records or employment histories, that’s beautiful. A lot of people who come home and are exonerated, not having a work history is like a strike against them.”

Shabtai co-founder Shmully Hecht.

Shmully Hecht, one of the co-founders of Shabtai and the organizer of Monday night’s screening, offered his thanks to Chrostowski, Lewis and Johnson for sharing their stories by telling a story from the Kabbalistic foundational text of the Zohar which upheld the forgiveness of strangers as the greatest, and most difficult, of virtues.

To forgive society for having wronged him,” he said about Lewis. We’re the criminals. Twenty years [he spent in prison]. The fact that Scott has forgiven us, all of us, is so much more powerful. And he not only forgives us, but he’s committed his life to being good and to giving back to society.”

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full post-screening Q&A.

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