-
Chapter 4. Nothing’s Changed but Me. Reintegration Plans Meet the Inner City
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
77 Chapter 4 “Nothing’s Changed but Me” Reintegration Plans Meet the Inner City Tony, nineteen, was light skinned, thin, and quiet. We met in the cafeteria at Mountain Ridge, where he approached me about being part of my study. His culinary arts coworker, Sincere, had told him all about me, and he was hurt that I had failed to contact him. Although I realized that a clerical error had prevented him from being on the list, I soon learned that Tony often felt overlooked and left out, and for good reason. His mother had smoked crack for the past twelve years and was still an addict. He and his sister had different fathers, neither of whom was present in their lives. During his childhood, they teetered on the brink of homelessness, moving from one house to the next. His relatives took him in for a week at a time, only to return him. “They dropped me off, literally on the street” at the drug house where his mother was at the time. He felt a fierce loyalty to family, even those who didn’t care for him in return. His sister Gniesha, also a former drug seller, got her life together and become a nurse. Clearly, she was a role model for Tony. He planned to go to nursing school when he came home, viewing it as a way to pay society back for the harm he had caused while selling drugs. Shortly before he was released from Mountain Ridge, he told me, I feel, for me just to think how I was so dumb, that school really is power, right? The more education you got, the more power you have. I wish I was still young, like I wish I could do it all again. Drugs made me forget about school but if I woulda just stopped using drugs, man, I woulda been better off. School is so much, so 78 F a l l i n g B ac k good.That’s all I think about right now, go to school, stay in school, I wanna stay in school for at least six years of my life, the next six years of my life.The more school I get, the more power I have, the more money I have, not even the more money, but the more success I will have.And that’ll feel so good, like I don’t have to worry about nothin’, like lookin’ over my shoulders or nothin’. And if I wanted to go to my neighborhood and see my friends, and I could look at them sell drugs and look at them like “Oh that’s petty, look what I got.” Like even if it’s a fourteen-hour job I know I got at least eight hundred dollars or ten hundred dollars comin’ to me or even fifteen or twelve hundred dollars comin’ to me in the next two weeks. I can just look at ’em or tell them like y’all gotta go to school or somein’ like that.Basically my letter writin’[to friends] be about,Go get your GED, get your diploma. Tony appeared very anxious to continue the cognitive momentum he started at the facility, revealing a fear of “forgetting”to pursue his goals when he got home. I asked him at what point in the program his thinking started to change: When I was on the verge of getting my diploma. Before, I was only lookin’ this far ahead of myself, I never looked . . . all the way down the road, like it feels so good to look all the way down that far. Like it feel real good inside.When I’m in here sometimes it take away that [feeling], but every time I think about my far future I think, well, I be outta there, I be this in a couple more years, it feels good. And if [only] I can just start it now, ’cause I get the tendency to get lazy and not do it. Tony was released after fifteen months at Mountain Ridge with plans to join Job Corps, a no-cost education and training program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. Part of the appeal of Job Corps was that it had a residential component; it would provide him a stable, rent-free place to stay and require him to move toVirginia, away from his criminal networks. Two weeks after his release from Mountain Ridge, I visited...