An Excellent Candidate to Succeed...

In the movies, it’s poignant—and easy. The warden hands the departing inmate a suit of clothes and some money. He shakes the inmate’s hand and wishes him luck. The music swells, the doors swing open and the beaming inmate sails off to a productive future.

But in the real world, a newly released prisoner is seldom a candidate for a positive future.

What will he do about a job? A place to live? Clothing? Toilet articles? Health care? Bus fare?

If those needs are not met right away, the former inmate may be a future one.
But a 26-year-old program called Prison Outreach Ministry is combating prisoner boomeranging in the Washington area.

The program operates in the District of Columbia, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties. It supplies limited-value vouchers to end-of-sentence inmates to cover immediate needs. Then it pairs each inmate with a volunteer mentor, who helps the inmate find work, locate a place to live and navigate a world that can often be very hostile.

Each former prisoner can stay in the program for one year. Each is tested regularly for drug and alcohol abuse. Prison Outreach Ministry has a caseload of about 80 former inmates—90 percent of them male. The program is affiliated with the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, but inmates of all faiths are welcome.Is it a success?
“It’s almost too soon to tell,” said Sister Susan Van Baalen, the acting executive director. “There’s hardly a need that they don’t have” the day they leave prison. “You can’t expect everything they need to fall into place in less than a year.”

But Sister Susan adds:
“Anecdotally, we have a very small percentage returning to prison.”
Ella Wiggins, of Accokeek, Md., is hoping that applies to her.
She was released from a prison in Upper Marlboro almost six months ago. She served six months for misuse of a credit card. It was her fifth conviction—always for crimes involving relatively small sums of money.

“But the real story is, I was into crack cocaine,” said Wiggins, who is 50. “It cost me 20 years of my life.”

Wiggins says she was the type of addict who “hid it very well. I thought it couldn’t be no better than this.”

She worked here and there at fast food restaurants and big-box retail stores. But she continued to use cocaine, and to seek it all the time.

“I didn’t learn anything,” she said. “This time, it’s different.”

Via her mentor, Brenda Hester, Wiggins has stayed drug-free since she entered the POM program. Meanwhile, she has continued to look for a job. She calls Hester at all hours of the day and night—often for a simple booster shot of confidence.
“She’s my best friend I didn’t have,” Wiggins said.

Wiggins is an excellent candidate to succeed in the POM program, according to program supervisors.

She graduated from Northwestern High School, attended Prince George’s Community College for 18 months and spent six years in the U.S. Army. Her eight brothers and sisters live nearby. One sister has given her a place to live, free of charge. Wiggins has lived in Prince George’s since she was two.

“I got a family that prays for me,” she said. “It makes a big difference.”
Much of POM’s funding comes via United Way of the National Capital Area. “Without funding from the community, we would not be able to function,” said Sister Susan. “It’s really very important to us.” And to Ella Wiggins.
How is she doing, all in all, after six months in POM?
“I’m scaring myself how much better I am,” she said.

She Begins to Apologize...

Alice Lipton opens the back door of her Clinton, Md., home slowly. She walks slowly. She talks slowly.

She begins to apologize.

"My husband is sick and in bed," she says. "He's half-blind. We had to give up the car because he couldn't drive any more. If relatives don't come to help us, I'm lost."

But thanks to Top Banana, she's found--every Wednesday morning.

A truck owned by this Prince George's County-based non-profit brings four sacks of groceries right to her door once a week. The delivery costs the Liptons $15 plus the cost of the groceries.

As Top Banana driver William Pickeral loaded her order into her refrigerator and pantry on Wednesday morning, Alice Lipton smiled and said:
"Top Banana is a lifeline."

Top Banana serves about 500 clients a year. They live in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Most--but not all--are elderly. Some are disabled.

But all would be in serious danger of health or nutrition problems if Top Banana did not arrive, right on time, with its stuffed brown bags.

Top Banana was founded in 1982 by the woman who still serves as executive director, Jean Guiffre. Her mother sparked the idea.

"It was 1979, and I had the shock of my life," Jean recalled.

"She was living in Hyattsville, by herself. I'd been out of town on business and I went to visit her. I asked for some coffee. "She said, 'Jeannie, I don't think I have any coffee.'

"So I looked in the pantry. She literally didn't have enough of anything to last the day."

The reason: "Severe arthritis and congestive heart failure. She couldn't get to the grocery," Jean Guiffre said.

"So I woke up one morning and said to my husband, 'Ben, somebody's got to do this.' " Guiffre borrowed $2,000 from her mother and Top Banana was born. Twenty-eight years later, the agency has an annual budget of about $750,000, 16 employees and eight regular volunteers.

Top Banana is headquartered in a former post office in the Southern Prince George's town of Brandywine. Clients call in their orders, and staff members fill them from shelves and coolers.

"This is not necessarily about being poor," Jean Guiffre said. "It's about people who fall between the cracks."

One such person was Acie Brown, of Temple Hills, who was William Pickeral's third stop of the day on Wednesday.

Brown has been disabled for two years. But he hadn't heard of Top Banana until he moved into a senior citizens high-rise last month. He lives there alone.

"Since I'm disabled, it fit right into what I need," Brown said, as Pickeral offloaded his order of grape jelly, bologna, sausage, eggs, black-eyed peas and condiments. "If I had known about it sooner, I would have signed up sooner. I think it's great."

United Way of the National Capital Area is a major funder of Top Banana, and has been for several years. Jean Guiffre says that without the community's support, she would have closed the doors long ago.

"This is needed in every low- and moderate-income community in America," she said. "After 28 years, we're just beginning."

Irony County

If Fairfax County is ever looking for a new name, it might choose Irony County.

In this corner…the swanky shops of Tyson’s Corner, the magazine-cover homes of Great Falls, the high-end car dealerships along Route 7, the throbbing commerce of the Dulles corridor.
And in this corner…… 48,000 county residents at or below the federal poverty level, a large and growing disparity between the richest and poorest residents, steadily increasing social problems among families at the lowest end of the income scale.

As Verdia Haywood put it on Monday morning:

“We’ve got a county that doesn’t fit with its image.”

Haywood retired in January as Deputy Fairfax County Executive. For 30 years, he was in charge of human services programs in Fairfax, which is the most populous jurisdiction in the Washington metropolitan area (about 1.1 million residents).

On Monday, he was one of three speakers at a CEO breakfast organized by United Way of the National Capital Area.

In a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation, Haywood sketched a Fairfax that has changed dramatically since he arrived in 1978.

The county now has a minority population of 42 percent, about five times what it was when he started. Although Fairfax’s median household income is twice the national average, the poverty rate is growing at an “explosive” rate, he said.

Proof of the pudding:
• In 17 percent of the county’s public elementary schools, more than 50 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches.
• In the last seven years, the mean household income of the lowest-fifth in Fairfax has shrunk by more than 11 percent--while the mean income in the highest fifth has grown by more than six percent.
• Phone calls to the county government seeking emergency services were up 14 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009, and up 44 percent from fiscal 2007 to fiscal 2009.

These callers were seeking emergency food, jobs, food stamps, emergency utility assistance and subsidized housing.

Meanwhile, Haywood told the breakfast, binge drinking among Fairfax teenagers is a growing concern. So is gang involvement. Those problems and similar ones are worst in parts of the county where young people are not involved in community service or extracurricular activities, he said.

Haywood’s final slide dealt with dollars.

According to his figures, funding of nonprofits in Fairfax has dropped alarmingly since 2005. So has the “leverage value” of every social services dollar funneled to non-profits from the Fairfax County government.

Is there an answer? Haywood said that United Way of the National Capital Area comes closest.

He serves as a member of the Fairfax-Falls Church United Way Regional Council. In that role, he helps to direct community impact funds to local agencies and problems.

“Without United Way,” he said to me.

But he never finished that sentence. He could only shake his head.