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Father Young Luncheon Address
Speech by Father Young at the Department of Justice 1/29/01
OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS
SECOND REENTRY COURTS INITIATIVE CLUSTER MEETING
REENTRY COURTS: DEVELOPING STRATEGIES
FOR ADDRESSING REENTRY CHALLENGES
P R O C E E D I N G S
September 28, 2000
Father Peter Young, CEO
Peter Young Housing, Industries and Treatment, Albany, NY
MS. McBRIDE: Ladies and gentlemen, I want to encourage you all to continue eating but I don't want the lunch hour to go too long without introducing our speaker. He has lots to share. It's Father Peter Young. He represents what we call here in Justice a reentry program in New York State, in the Albany area.
I have to tell you, at the Justice Department, I have the good fortune of really living and breathing reentry for lots of hours and it's a joy for me because I know in my heart just how important it is in the potential for turning people's lives around. But I had this divine moment one day. I get lots of mail, as many of you do, piles of mail, and this tape came in. It was just in a brown envelope. It looked like everything else. But I opened it. Out of all the things I got this day, I opened this and in it was this wonderful videotape of Father Young's program. It wasn't just a few minutes. I have to tell you, I've looked at it three times. He has five copies with him. I tell you, it will be the hottest ticket.
His program addresses housing needs. It has work, jobs, industries for ex-offenders. He has women's programs. He has it all. He's been working at this for 43 years. So just in case those of us at the Justice Department thought we invented the concept of reentry and working on these programs, we know that it has come from people like him and, really, all of you.
So without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you someone who has inspired me, Father Peter Young.
[Applause.]
Perspectives on Reentry
FATHER YOUNG: Judy, I'm glad you opened that envelope. I want to thank you. I don't want to give you indigestion. Please continue to enjoy your good food.
I don't know how I got here, but I got a call from Judy one day saying, "I'm Judy McBride and I'm here in Washington." Uh huh. Hello. And she said, "I wanted to try to find out, would you be interested in coming in and attending a meeting?" Sure. I love to travel. And it's interesting. Here I am. I guess as you get over 70, you're invited here--I think I'm grand-fathered in today for the luncheon.
In being a bit of it, I know that my turf is--I have not done anything that I know takes any brains. It was an easy thing to figure out. The only asset, and Steve and others who know me well, the only asset I have is perseverance. I don't have the brains, I have perseverance. I'll stick with a thing and stick with a thing because I believe in it and I believe in this.
You know, I go back in, because I have made a lot of mistakes in my life and I'll probably make a few here trying, if I can, to share this idea. My final sermon, they usually give you--Virgil will understand--a little bit of a test here before the seminarians when you're going out and I had a big German professor, Father Thomas Plasban, and I got up there to give my farewell kind of sermon before going out into the ministry and I gave it and he said, "Young, I have three comments to make with your sermon. One, you read it. Number two, you read it poorly. Number three, it was not worth reading." That's true.
[Laughter.]
FATHER YOUNG: And I promise you I will not read anything. I just would want to share some of the things here that have happened and good things going on.
After that, I went back and went home and I had a brand new car. I was all excited about my brand new car, a brand new Pontiac, you know, ordained and now going out to my job that day, and a drunk came in and totaled my car that morning before going to work.
So I threw all of the stuff that I had packed in my car to go to work and I threw it in my father's car and I drove down to work. When I drove down to Green Street--if you're familiar with Green Street in Albany, it's a combat zone kind of spot. It was a spot that the rectory was surrounded completely by all houses of prostitution, so that'll give you a guess of what was going on. It was a place where the philosophy was by the city government that you've got to contain crime within these 12 blocks and that if you see a person going on the other side of the street, you arrest him. If he stays on this side and shoots up, fine. And that was a good learning experience.
So I had a chance to meet this lady. I was walking in and trying if I could to go in and say hello to the boss that I was about to work for and she said, "Are you the new priest?" And I said, yes. And she said, "I need to talk with you. You come with me." And I didn't know, but I said, well, this is all part of the job. So I went with her. We went over to the office of social services and she made a very nasty kind of presentation and she got embroiled into an argument. Now, all the way going over, she was nervous and she was smoking and I thought she had thrown her cigarette out the window, but it hit the window and bounced in the back seat with all of the stuff that I had been bringing down to my job.
So we're sitting there and I'm listening to this lady and she reaches over and she takes a swing at the social workers and I'm saying, oh, oh, where do we go from here? Well, it was a lady who then ran into the ladies room after she hit the social worker, ran in and tried to hide behind the door of the john and I didn't know what to do. I tried to reach in and say, come on out. Come on out. You'll be okay. And at that time, the firemen came in and they said, "Father, is that your car that just went up in smoke out there?" That was my first appointment.
I followed Mary--at that time, it was Martha, Martha Hosapple, over to the booking desk, and that was my first introduction to court. I went to court with her that day and they threw her at a 24040. I didn't know much about it at that time, one day on the job. A 24040, public intoxication, yes, Martha got in. She said, "I've got 238 of these."
So she was a turnstile kind of person, a person going in, going out, going in, going out, the recidivistic kind of person, in and out of the county jail, frequently as a trustee. But Martha taught me a lot about it. She said, this is what we need to do and this is where we need to go. So I listened as I became a friend of she and all the others and I began to every day go by way of an assignment to the court.
Every day, I wound up in court talking with the judge and getting a batting order of those who he thinks could or might participate with our program, and I put them in and he would stand them up. We had about 44 a day in the lineup on that 24040 count, the public intoxication. And in that 24040 lineup, he would say, "Do you want to go to an ACOD with Father Young or do you want to go to jail? ACOD or jail?" And those who wanted to go to an ACOD, adjourned in contemplation of dismissal, they said, "Line up over here and follow Father." And I every day had my little tour of 12, 14, 20, 25 that would so choose to come with me as an ACOD, as an ATI, and come down to the parish, which was only a block and a half away.
And then I would give them a bed, give them a pad, give them a roll of whatever I had by way of something to sleep on and put them on the floor, put them up in the school building, put them anywhere. We had an old kind of routine, an old inner-city parish, and it turned out to be an exciting kind of spot because it's a program that began to evolve, and that was over 43 years ago. So it was working as an alternative to incarceration with those that I would meet and greet every day in court. And every day, I followed them and they followed me and we began to do a lot of things together.
Now, I started with that with the idea that I needed desperately then to find a way to pay for it, so if I needed a way to pay for it, I had to find them a job. I had to try to find a way that they could make it and I could get some food on the table and pay the electric bill and to do all of the other necessary kind of stuff.
As the routine went on, then I found a friend or two in OGS and in OGS I found a lot of other folk who would hire our folk and I began to get them into a routine. We had a little employment kind of contract with them and then we went and hired them for our cemetery and they painted the fence again and again and again.
And then I got the bright idea, hey, here's a new law that's coming in, interstate traffic. It has to have minority representation, and, therefore, great. Here's an opportunity. They're putting in a new main railroad for the East Coast about one block and a half away and now I've got an opportunity. I'll get and I'll train people. So I bought tandems. I bought tractor trailers, and they were expensive. I buying them, I wound up training all of these guys who were basically a black inner-city driving school and they were getting 24 jobs every 16 weeks. I had 24 new drivers out on the road. I was happy. They were very happy because they were paid well, and that, to me, was a great kind of thing.
However, the union, the Teamsters union didn't like the idea. Then the competing driving schools didn't like the idea. Day in, day out, I wound up with sugar in my gas tank, my transmission dropped, and all of the other kind of things that went with it. And after then not being able to get the thing going and going into bankruptcy, I went up to the bishop and I said, "Bishop, I'm running into trouble. I'm about $200,000 in debt." And he said, "Well, you've got to find a way to pay for it." He said, "Let me try to figure out a way that we can get you a job where you'll be paid and you can pay off that debt." So I said, okay, I'll wait and watch.
He then called and said, we're assigning you to be a prison Chaplin. You're working and you're a Chaplin now in the county. We're going to transfer you and put you in the State and there you're going to get a regular State salary, full-time opportunity and full-time obligation. I said, great. I love that kind of work.
So I went in there with that kind of duty and that kind of responsibility and I enjoyed it, and that's why I tie into the conference here today. I tied into it by way of I was forced into the prison system, but boy, did I love it. I found out that those men and the women that I had a chance to work with, I tied in well with. I knew where they needed to go. I know what they needed to have.
We had in the parish about 150 walk-ins a day of people coming and asking for help, and every day they came in, I tried to find a way to get them a job and a place to stay. Those were the two things that I had to try to handle. Most of those were intoxicated. Most of those had difficulties with heroin at that time and I tried to find, too, that they could get into a treatment program, basically a 12-step program. That's what I was trying, if I could, to work with.
I know that I needed the mandated conditions, because I had some real tigers. I had tigers with me all the time that I would follow down from court or they would follow me and I knew that if they didn't have a mandate, if I didn't have something over their head, I had a lot of people that were potentially dangerous.
Now, when they got dangerous, I knew that there would be something before that that had to happen. I knew they had to get desperate, either for a drink or a drug, or if they didn't have a place to stay, if they didn't have food, if they didn't have something here that they could go to that would occupy their time.
So I began to develop at that time, and I've stuck with it, a three-legged stool, the old milking stool that you got the idea of treatment, housing, and employment. I knew that if they were desperate, I'd have them coming upside my head. So I really began to worry about that. How do I put that out there?
And I look at the agenda that we have here today and I said, this is the same thing, the same identical thing. And I'm reading right now from the letter that was sent out, developing effective ways of maintaining offender accountability and providing returning offenders with the support in securing employment, housing, substance abuse treatment, family counseling, and other services, we believe is essential to our ability to reduce the recidivism and keep communities safe.
Hey, we're on the same agenda. We're on the very same agenda. I was a pig in mud. I enjoyed the routine. I enjoyed all of that that went with it. I enjoyed the opportunity of saying, this is where I want to be and this is what I want to do and we started then to try to concentrate on that kind of path, and I call it a glide path to recovery.
Now, I heard the speakers today and I was impressed with what they were saying. I got a kick out of William Stewart, who was talking about what he did by way of the mirror. On my desk in my office, I have a mirror that faces me, not that I want to look at myself, but I have it there handy. So as soon as a guy gives me a poor me, poor me, pour me a drink kind of comment, I just turn it around and I say, hey, look here, you're in relapse. You don't know it, but it's happening. Here are the indicators. Look at the problem. And I stick that mirror, just as the PO did, Stewart was talking in the conversation this morning. I said I use the same kind of trick, so he and I, I think, are on the same wave length.
I enjoyed, too, hearing the idea of the support by the Boston police. I have to publicly say thank you to the Boston police because I was the kind of guy in all of those bus trips with Martin Luther King. We traveled around with all of the NAACP groups and made all those trips. We were here in Washington on the mall and I enjoyed that tremendously. That inspired me to do a lot of other stuff.
But one day, my mother was saying, "Where are you going?" And I said, "Mom, I'm going over to Boston. We're going over for a school integration meeting." She said, "Oh, that'll be nice. I want to go to Boston. I'll go with you." I said, "Maybe you don't want to go." She said, "Oh, no, I want to go. I'll go with you."
So she hopped on the bus. We went over together and we're going through the area and all of a sudden I'm getting pelted, she's getting pelted with tomatoes and eggs and she said, "What the hell did you get me into?"
[Laughter.]
FATHER YOUNG: But Boston police, I said, "Mom, relax. Relax. Just look around the corner there on that side street. There have got to be 300 cops down there. Nothing is going to happen. We're going to be okay." So the Boston police do, and I've traveled a lot of cities with the movement and I've always admired the way that the Boston police handled some of the hassles they had at that time.
Their concern is security. My concern working in the prison system for 33 years is security. I have to look at the difficulty that we're caught with the untoward incidences. If there's an untoward incident, it makes it a tougher life for me, for others, for all of the inmates. They lock it down, they throw the gas out, and it's not a happy kind of home.
I do know that with sanity, if you can develop a sane kind of program within the system, within the department, within the cell block, within the pod, within any of the prison systems, then you can create the kind of an environment that you need to try to give them the message of recovery and create the kind of a desire to make it all happen, and that's what we tried to do for a lot of years.
We started working in the prison system and began to work with call-out programs. I just heard someone talking about a Woodburn and I've been there and done that over 30-some years ago. We've been to all of the prisons. We started with five guys on a call-out and I'm now happy to say, when I retired, as the founder of the alcohol-drug programs in New York State and the prison system, we have 41,000 people in the treatment program each and every day. So we're kind of proud of that.
[Applause.]
FATHER YOUNG: You know, as we talk about that, though, it has to be a partnership. I do know that Jo-Ann was talking about, she was saying, hey, raise your hand if you're a defender. I'm certainly not eager to take any hands, but I know that we need to have another partner here and we need to have that kind of partner participating in the kind of dialogue and that's the parolee, the person who might be able to get here, whether it be on pre-release, and talking with them head-on what the problems are. They know what they want and I know that they need housing and I know that they need a job.
We have to be very careful as a we-thou kind of a group. We have to be very careful and keep our sensitivity ears open to know that they have something important to tell us and we have to then be sensitive to their need, and I know that that challenge will be a big one, because when we talk about partnerships, we need to make it a win-win.
It will be a win for the guy that might be in whatever color uniform you've got. In New York State, we have green. It's a very popular color in the prison system. And it's a win for the guy behind the bars because he's going to have a happier kind of house. He's going to have a happier kind of lifestyle within the population. And it's a win for the security and for the administration and it's a win for the economics.
Every day, we would try to stress with our staff, we would try to make it a life and death decision. Talk about alcohol. Talk about drugs. Talk about where they're going when they get out. If they don't do the right kind of thing, they're going to "choose death over life." We had to get that penetrating into their mind that it's a life and death decision in the prison that they're making about their outside after-care program.
And, therefore, if you can get that across, if you can get that kind of peer pressure on your side, where they're with you, where they're breaking an inmate code, then you can make an awful lot of good stuff happen.
We used a term Andre Nguyen [ph.] used at one time about people who were sick and then were in recovery, how they helped one another. We were just talking about a close relationship I had with Bill Wilson and others in Akron and how they taught me the idea of helping one another is so important.
We use a term in our program called wounded healers. Now, we prefer to use that because we try to get the people who are wounded to then in their changing of the negative to positive to be the healers and we really form groups, we form associations, we form ways that we can reward them. We try to, if we can, get them to each one teach one. We get them to carry the message. Now, that turned out to be a great happy kind of thing because it gives them a pride, a distinction, an esteem, and all of that that makes their recovery feel important.
I know that this does not happen easy. I know the problems we had in beginning in the correction system because we have naturally a different kind of--they had blue, we had green. We had green and blue. What was going on? That's all the reference was. Those were the COs and those were the animals and those were the kind of comments that were going on.
I often met with the COs, at that time represented by Union 82, and I met with them and I said, hey, you're going to come out a winner in this. You're going to have fewer problems in the facility if you guys can play ball with us and we'll play ball with you. We'll see that you're respected as a CO and you see that we're respected as inmates. And in that kind of way, it turned out to be a happier kind of home.
We wound up with a lot of difficulties, though, because the system penalized us. When we had fewer incidents, when we had fewer problems, fewer stabbings, fewer fights, fewer kinds of confrontations, we lost our double coverage, we lost our rovers, we lost our SWAT team, we lost the ten percent bonus. And, therefore, the COs were saying, hey, Father, we went along with you. Now look at what we've lost. We've lost money. That's my kid's tuition. That's my mother in a nursing home. We really have to sit back and find out a better way to make this happen. So a lot of that. You have to have the cooperation of the facility itself working with you and the kind of folk here that can make it all happen.
When you get the guy thinking in the right kind of path or woman thinking in the right kind of path, then you try to then transfer them into what we refer to as a recovering tenants' association. Now, there's where the partnership comes in. We work in a partnership in different cities. We are scattered in many different cities and in the city, say, of Albany or Troy or the turf in Syracuse or other locations, we work with the police partnership, with the housing authority, and with the senior citizens. Now, that's an interesting kind of combo but it's been one that's been working.
A long, long time ago, the housing authority had a building, a 300-apartment building for 300 senior citizens and they had 70 percent of the building vacant. I was desperate for space and I said, I need housing. I'll do the supervising. Give me the chance to move our guys in. Let me move in 60 people that are now coming from prison, that are now doing what I feel the right kind of thing and making a lot of good stuff happen, because now they're beginning to work in this industry. They're getting on the union list. They're beginning to get the kind of jobs in the kitchen or out in the maintenance, the kind of routine that we needed to have to get the dollar bill coming in to pay the rent. And I said, they can afford the $153 a month that includes the electric and the heat, and that was a great thing. It was a great move.
We then grabbed the apartments. We went from one housing authority to another housing authority to another housing authority because the seniors in these different cities that heard about our program, we could take control, then, of the building. We had our guys stationed at all the doors. Our guys would say, look, men, don't come in here. Don't come in and try to jam the elevator and then force the senior up the stairs and then bop them over the head, especially at the first or third of the month. This is not your house. This is our house. This is where we live. We've got to respect it.
And that began to penetrate. The neighborhood left us alone, didn't bother us, didn't cause any hassle, didn't have any argument, didn't have any fight. The kids just backed off and we had a strong posse in there that took control of the housing authority and it's been a marriage made in heaven. The seniors have been so supportive, so cooperative, it's been a happy kind of home for our guys and for the seniors.
Now, we've done that repeatedly in many other cities. So that's been, to me, a winner because our guys qualify who are AD, alcohol and drug, therefore qualifying as a disabled person, therefore qualifying for Federal housing in the disabled kind of application that we knock on the door with and the housing authority then gives us a chance to fill that house with whatever we want to put in.
We maintain the rent. We give them one check at the end of the month and they're happy and we're happy because we've got good housing and we don't have to worry about a leaky roof.
You know, we keep thinking of a comment, too, that I hear about the guys and the gals who come out and they say, you know, I have a desire and I can't do it from the street. I have to have a place to live. I keep finding in some way the only answer for me is to try to do it in a clandestine kind of manner.
We don't advertise where our places are. We try to keep them pretty low key, and in that kind of way, I go through a city, look at the idea of what they have as boarding houses. I then try to find out what the boarding houses are, get from the housing authority or wherever I can opportunities to put people in a block, and in that way try to put a counselor with them, try to give a counselor a job and give them assignments and try to then kind of create the log and information to keep me informed. And I put them in and try to see that they're in a CO that I won't get caught with by way of any hassle.
Now, if you were looking at the news this morning when you got up here in Washington, I get a kick out of the NIMBY is alive and well. There's a dog walk not too far from here that the people were out demonstrating against. They don't want the people to walk their dogs in that area. And I said, well, I know that many meetings I've had in many different cities where people would invite me to the parking lot when I would walk in and say, wouldn't it be nice to have a program for recovering people who are coming out of prison? It's a tough road to hoe.
But with the idea of going into a CO, then you're cleared. You don't have to go through the planning board. You don't have to go through the zoning board. You could walk in and you could avoid a lot of the hassle.
And I think we have to be careful, too, about how the money comes, because if we get a Federal contract and the contract calls for just a reimbursement, then I can go to a CO and I can get that certificate of occupancy and I can put the people in without any kind of community hassle. And once we're in, we're not a problem. We're okay. There's no problem after we're there, time and time and time again. The community is very grateful and appreciative and they then call on us to do a lot of the community service work, which we're eager to do to create the kind of good legwork that'll make us a solid kind of citizen.
And as we do that, I keep thinking about how we wind up with the problem of the CON. If I go to NIAAA, I wind up with a certificate of need. The money comes from the local--I mean, from the Federal to the State to the local government unit and then the hassles begin. You can't do it within three years. You have to go through hearing after hearing after hearing. You have to go through the community board. You buy buildings and you try to find out then can you get them. You have to go through the entire political circle of the senate, the assembly, the local council, the different board of supervisors, and then you have to go through the community hearings and you normally get shot at by way of verbal comments and then it becomes an embarrassment and you walk away after a lot of wasted time and effort.
So I try to fear when they say, you've got to do a CON, a certificate of need. I know that I'm probably preaching here something people don't want to hear--we're in the bureaucracy--but CONs are a problem if we're trying as we can to get people a place to stay at night. CONs, because of the NIMBY, will normally shoot us down.
I'd like, if I could, to mention that there's always an excuse a guy will give or a gal will give, and I spend my time just listening to the excuse and then trying to say, okay, they've got one on me. Now, how can I avoid that in the future? I try to find out how they can then get that excuse responded to by anything that we as an organization or as a program can do.
I hear all the time, and especially if you've been working in the department, and I heard it today, too, from A.G. Leary, the Attorney General who spoke this morning. She was talking about the inadequacy of the supply and yet the demand is increasing and increasing and increasing kind of thing and yet we don't have the resources to meet their need in after-care.
And the same thing I hear at the front gate. When you're at the prison working every day, you're reporting in about seven o'clock. You met the guy or the guys that are going out and they're going out now with a bus ticket, and you meet them at the gate and the constant comment after years and years of going out, talking with them, trying to say, now make it happen, is, "Father, I'm all dressed up and no place to go." That really gets to you. That really gets to you.
I retired a long time ago now and have been volunteering ever since to try to make that kind of thing happen, to get them an opportunity of where they need to go and what they need to do.
In our effort of trying to make that happen, I just keep thinking of do they or don't they. As I would listen to the guy, listen to the girl who might be in green and now for the first time since they've been out, now they've got their polyesters on or a pair of dungarees that they now issue instead of the polyesters. They now talk about a third tradition, and I listen. Do they have a third tradition?
The third tradition in the fellowship program is do they have a desire to stop, and I try to then go back into the paperwork and I look at the paperwork, because I'm only going to go so far as they're going to go. If they have not made any effort inside to try to get their life together, not made any effort, I'm not going to waste my time. I'm going to try to say, here's what you need to do, here's where you need to go, and here's what steps you're going to have to make happen in order for me to cooperate with you.
So I try to find out those who want to work with the program, hey, the door is wide open. And, therefore, we're doing a little creaming, I admit. And, you know, I'm trying, if I can, to say I'm trying to get the winners. I'm trying if I can to get those that want to do something about their lives. There are people that we just can't seem to turn around, and that's not new to you or new to me.
I'm aware that you have to evaluate those who need it and those who want it, and I know that you do that all the time in your job and I listen to the ideas of those that are needing it, but they don't want to put the investment into the idea of the need. They just don't want it enough and, therefore, they're wasting your time, effort, and energy when you try to then try to work with them.
I know that POs are very good and I know our New York State boss is here today and he evaluates a lot of that because I get a lot of calls from institutional POs. I get a lot of calls from the program POs. I get frequently caught because all of these people keep wanting to come into where they can get the needed care and they don't have it in their county. They want to come to one of our programs in a county other than their own, and then the door closes because the regional difficulties come in.
The regional PO is sensitive to the hassle he'll get from the commissioner of social services saying, you're allowing these people to come in from another county and we're not going to allow it and, therefore, he's getting hassled and he understands that.
Our local POs love it because every night when they come in, we'll have 60 or so guys lined up and he'll sit at the table and he'll say, okay, next, an he'll have the record. We'll have all the piles, all the files right there, where they've been, what they've done. We've got the log book right there. So the PO just looks at the log book, looks at the file, looks at the idea of his folder and, okay, you're getting a job, you've got a job, you've been holding a job. Okay, good. Next.
Therefore, the local POs, the regional POs might have a difficulty because they're caught dealing with a DSS department that will hassle them, but the local POs that are dealing with our programs love the relationship. They don't feel overworked. They've got heavy caseloads but they're happy because we've got the way that they're reporting in a very organized manner.
Now, in that, we're happy to have them aboard because we meet with them before the fellows do, before the parolees do, and we say, we think we'd better put this contract then talk with the man and see if he's really wanting if he can to sign the new contract, the new agreement, which means that we're going to move him back a little bit. We might put him back into a rehab. We might put him back into a cadre here with a stronger kind of component. We have an entire network of services, beginning with detox, rehabilitation, 28-day rehab, and then halfway houses, three-quarter-way houses, after-care houses, supportive living, certified, uncertified, and then we have special housing for those who have the virus and we have housing for women and housing for men in a variety of independent kind of situations.
We try to do that by way of building blocks and blocks of recovering areas, where we can go into a blighted area where it's been decimated, get the HUD funding and put the HUD funding together, give our guys that run a contracting company the jobs, put the jobs, the same thing, I think, as other places have done. I know that different programs do that, too. They create a contracting company and the contracting company will rehab and hire many of the men who have that kind of gift and that kind of talent.
And it works because we get new contracts for guys that are not doing it and the PO is eager to say, hey, you've got to listen to what Father is saying. You've got to go back up on the hill and chill for a while and get your life together. You're not showing up for work. You're late. You're not responding to the therapy.
Therefore, with the cooperation, the partnership between the parole officer and the clinical staff or the housing staff, we've got the guys and the gals in a management kind of situation where they're behaving and they're not E over I. When you get the guy that is emotions all the time, his first relationship or his kind of love of life now has been rekindled. He's back out and he's not showing up where he needs to be and he's not prioritizing his treatment plan, he's not doing what he needs to do, we have to get the I back over the E. We have to get the intellect over the emotions and try to settle the guy down, and sometimes you have to chill a guy out a little bit so he can, or the woman a little bit so they can get their life back where it needs to be.
And a lot of that is done with us by way of peer pressure. We try to have our older guys that are in the program for a while sit down, talk with a guy and say, look, man, you've got to do it this way. This is the way I did it and this is the way you need to do it.
I know I'm rambling rather quickly because I know Judy's watching me and I'm trying, if I can, to get as much in as I can. I feel an urgency to get the message out.
I just want to say that there are things that we just enjoy happening that are happening here because it's going to change our entire ballgame. We're running into a lot of problems. We're getting paid for 48 percent of our clients. That's about a $3 million loss per year. We're getting paid for 48 percent of our clients.
Therefore, we're caught, because they come to us, but the county DSS, we get for a woman and maybe four children about $300 a month. Now, we don't get that because they county they're from--we'll say Saratoga County. I'll pick on Saratoga. There's no one here from Saratoga County. Saratoga County, there's a river between we and Saratoga. They'll put them on a bus and say, oh, you need this kind of program. Here. Here's a bus ticket. Go to Father Young. And they wind up and then as soon as they walk in, the county will say, Albany County will say, well, you don't have any residential proof. Give me six months of rent receipts. Well, you've been disenfranchised from Saratoga County and now you're not wanted by Albany County and, therefore, you're at our door and you seem to have an intention of making it happen so, okay, grab a bed and then we'll try to find out a way to make it happen. But we're losing and we just had to renegotiate this before coming down, a $5.5 million loan to try to keep it alive.
But with the kind of thing that's going on here, we're going to be confronting by this kind of an effort the court order that will in many ways enable me to go then to DSS and say to the CMU, the central monitoring unit for DSS reimbursement, or the Office of Treatment Management, or whatever that HMO might be that your county has identified to work with this, that we then can say, here's a court order. I have a court order for this program for this client signed by a judge. That carries weight. That might give me some more money to try to keep our program out of debt.
I'm excited about that because I hate being in debt. Every bit of work we've done for 43 years, all of the investment, all of the idea of buying and volunteering and every year I would get paid, I'd just put the money into this pot of money that would buy halfway houses. All of that, we've lost all our equity. The banks that are now carrying our mortgages are getting nervous. I'm getting nervous. It's not a very happy kind of life.
Other funding sources for jobs, we try to knock on the door of VESID. VESID has been probably one of our good programs. We've had a lot of fun with that. However, you walk into VESID when you're getting out of prison and you say, I need to try to get into the VESID program. Okay, we're going to give you an orientation meeting in six weeks. And then after the orientation meeting, in another six weeks, we'll give you an evaluation and appraisal meeting, and that's 12 weeks down. We're running a 16-week program so we get paid for four weeks. We'll get maybe $1,000 at most for the training and the placement of the client and then the job coaching and supervision that goes with it. So we really lose a lot of money trying, if we can, to use the VESID program unless we can find a way to get that steam-rollered into a neater package for the guy that might be in prison, coming out and then getting reentered into the society.
I know that we work with a lot of other stuff, too. We keep knocking on the door at DOL. We keep going into the TANF situation. We go welfare-to-work. We go WHIP. We go OJT, targeted job tax credits. We keep knocking on any door we can, but our basic line is, we try to make money with industries, and in industries we found a very happy relationship with this industry, with this industry. This is our primary effort.
We buy hotels. Why do we buy hotels? Because they have a transient occupational. Our hotels are 50-50. We have 50-50 commercial and 50 percent population for the guys coming out of program, and in that way we have a happy kind of home. We train. We have these men now identified as students. They're in black and white, as our waiters were today. They walk around with a bit of an esteem and they haven't dropped a dish and it's really a nice kind of thing to have happen. The guy feels good. He's on a union list. We have a marriage made in heaven.
I'm so happy about that. The union apprenticeship program, the deal happened a long time ago when we came out and I began to go to the Labor Department. I went to the Department of Ed. I said, I need jobs by the year 2000 and where am I going to get them? They said, go health or go into the hospitality business. Okay. Can I get them in health? No. They don't want drug addicts in health.
So I went over to the hospitality business. No one argued with anyone today about, were you in prison. Any of these guys, did anyone take inventory? You walk into our kitchens. We are a big omni-provider, almost entire staff in Albany, whether you like it or not, are all from our program. They are all in now major positions and they're doing very, very well, and all of the Marriott's and all the other hotels. The hotel industry is desperate for help, and if we can train and make them qualified, boy, do we have jobs. We have jobs that are coming out our ears.
So I know that we're happy with them and they're happy with us. The union meeting, I get a kick out of because I shared something out of school. I went to the president of the union and I said, I want to start--this is about 15 years ago--a culinary training program. He said, okay, that's my turf. What do you want to do? And I said, I want to be your apprenticeship program. Uh huh. And he said, I have two vice presidents. You'll have to hire one of them. I said, can I interview them? He said yes. That was the greatest thing that ever happened.
I interviewed and I wound up with this woman, Jackie. I know Judy has been talking with her on the telephone. She is the gem of gems, the most dedicated person, the greatest person I've ever met, the most unflappable person. She used to organize hotels for the union, so she's not afraid of anyone and she's especially not afraid of other folk who might be wearing green pants. She is just a gem and she's our now chief of all operations.
I do have all the other people are--basically, 97 percent of the people are from the prison system that are in our organization. We have a few hundred employees. Ninety-seven percent are from the Department of Corrections. So we try to hire the guys and then promote them and put them into positions of responsible behavior and it does seem to work somehow. If we could only get the opportunity of 52 more percent, we'd be in great shape, of our folks being paid.
It's something that I'm excited about. I feel happy, of course, to be here. And I know we try to hire, too, people who have proven a dedicated and a commitment. We hire superintendents that are retired because a guy coming out after 20 years of service to the Department of Corrections, maybe not in a favorable position if the administration doesn't see any kind of bright road ahead. He comes knocking on the door saying, "Father, I really believe in what you're doing." Superintendent, okay, we're happy to have you aboard. We want you to be a job coach. We want you to go and check on guys, on whether they're doing or not doing what they need to do here in this facility as an omni.
We do the same thing. We have the guy going into the kitchen, talking with each guy, listening a little bit to what their problems might be, maybe not making a rent payment, maybe having a little hassle, because a lot of guys are getting hit, in New York, anyway, with $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 worth of DSS billing when they're coming out. I can't get over that. They come out. They go on a paycheck that hits the computer and the computer spits back, you owe $82,000. Good morning. I mean, how do you not get down? And our job coaches go out and knock on that door and talk with that kind of guy and try to find a way then to negotiate it with the Department of Social Services and we try to act as their advocate.
So we try to create a way that they know they need us, and that's the entire idea of we're trying what we can to do. We try to see that they have a ladder, that the companies, the hotels, the restaurants we're working with, they have a ladder of opportunity. But we try to create a kind of a support network. You need clothing? Come on down to our clothing center. We'll give you whatever you need. You need other kind of things? A loan? Okay, we have a loan committee. You might need that. You need furniture to set up your apartment? We've got that.
You need to get on the union list for extra banquets, other kinds of events, working at the race track or stuff. We've got the list. Put your name down. We'll get you in and get you the job.
The key is in our house is to know that the guy coming out is going to run into a lot of needs. He'll need money for his cable TV, I know that, for his telephone, for his call waiting and all the other important stuff, and he'll go out probably to a rent-a-center if we don't give him the kind of furniture at a very, very reduced price.
So we take a lot of online stuff. We'll get the ambient stuff coming out of the hotel here and then give it to our clients, because they normally in an omni transfer out every five years and they buy new furniture every five years, so these chairs, I don't know, they look about three years old. I'll be looking for them in three years.
But if you feed them and don't forget them and create the kind of, they need you, you need them. I need them to keep an eye on the guys because they've got to cover my back. I know that I'm going to be embarrassed as hell if I wind up and I see a guy on TV at night and he's one of ours, and I know the chief of police, they've got them all listed, who we have and who we don't have. And I know if I run into a guy that's going to cause--I'm going to go into a community meeting and trying if I can with an embarrassed red face to explain his negative behavior and why weren't you there to stop him. So I have to have the guys and the gals in our program do that for us.
We're in 70 programs in 40 locations in New York State, so we've got the State pretty well covered, but we've got that kind of an idea. Make it happen. Don't ruin it for anyone else. And that's a very protective kind of feeling to have.
An interesting kind of thing, we have the entire idea of Demming in our organization. We try to get the little focus group to find out how we can do it better, and then we try to then pull up the people who are not doing it. We call them in. We give them a little pull up. We have team leaders, group leaders, small group leaders, coordinators, administrators. We have AV kind of folk who take care of the microphone and that kind of thing like you were over there.
I know that it has to happen. You have to have a team behind you, and that's why we have a partnership with the inmates that is, I think, unbeatable and I think you're going to be very grateful if you look at those men and women as your partners, too. I beg you to.
Now, one of the very important things--I keep running around. I try to keep quality control. I try to get the idea of empowerment. I try to get them to be aware of what they can be, to try to get them to be able to give respect to everyone. That's why we love the hotel and hospitality business. You've got to smile to be in this business. You can't walk around with a sour face, and we keep impressing that.
We do have now boutiques, cleaning and contract services, construction company, maintenance company, GED programs for those that might need a little more. We've got convenience stores and the hotels, the banquet rooms. Some of our banquet rooms are much larger than this.
So we do enjoy it. It's been a challenge. We try to do it with the ACA guidelines that'll help us to try to make it inmate-owned but civilian- supervised. We try to give the person who is giving us a little bit of a hassle a little choice here and there, as we did in the prison system. I'd sit down at my desk and I would say, you seem to be a little out of pocket. I'm going to give you a choice. Do you want to go to SHU, do you want to go to GP, or do you want a letter to the board that'll give you a favorable recommendation? I know which way they're going to go and I say, okay, then this is what you must do. I have conditions, conditions, conditions. The same as parole, I have conditions. We have a lot of these contracts, contract after contract that we keep rewriting for each individual program.
So it's been a fun kind of thing. I fear--the worry I have is the tenant kind of thing versus the client. I try to prefer that they're clients because in the client kind of relationship, I can say, now, sign the contract. You are not really an official tenant until you complete the program. When you complete the program, then you're then free to have a tenant contract. But right now, you're a client and you're going to maintain that kind of client kind of responsibility of staying free and clean of drugs and doing what you need to do to get your life together and go to the meetings and treatment programs, and, therefore, you have to become a solid member of the recovery tenants' association.
I just enjoyed reading a little bit, before I conclude, about the statement that Janet Reno said, and I saw in the paper this week a very nice kind of notice that Janet Reno made by the bulging prisons lead to crisis and challenges, everything we heard churners. You've got all these people that have churned around and around, in a job, out of a job, in a job. We've got to get them on the career ladder. This is a great industry for a career ladder. Our folk love it.
So if you have any opportunity of connecting with the labor union back home and getting into an idea of getting them into a black and white situation, getting them into the kitchen, they move and they move well through that kind of routine.
I do know that the other item that I wanted to bring to your attention is again something that was put out on September 25 about the comment--I've got the e-mail here from Judy, so I just wanted to read this. The second consequence is that we are sending more people back to prisons because they have violated their parole. Thirty-five percent violated in 1997 and were reincarcerated.
That's our target. How do we stop that? How do we give these people the kind of dream that can be accomplished? We can. I feel it's eight to ten to 12 percent per year that we're now looking at by way of our reincarceration rate, and when we're looking at it for the national rate, I know with the treatment, the housing, and the employment, we've got people that are becoming winners. We need to work with the winners, and to me, it's something I'm happy to be here with, to be with you because you're on that mission.
I do have a little bit of favor, too, because when I'm aware with this national PBS show that Judy has mentioned, it's gone national and I'm getting letters from Alaska, Nebraska, California, and I don't know. I mean, the letter is always saying or the call is always saying, "Father, can I get my son in your program? Can I get my son in your program? He's getting out of prison." You know, he's in Nebraska. How am I going to get him in? Marty will go crazy if I have 300 interstate parolee referrals, so I have to be careful and write back, we don't have any but I will try to find people that might be willing to help you, and I'm looking all the time.
I need names of people in this country where I can refer people to because we're getting a lot of calls, a lot of kinds of ideas of where do I go, what do I do, what do I do about my son, what do I do about my daughter. She's coming out, he's coming out of prison, how do I help them? Therefore, there's a need and we have to see the need and we have to try to work with it.
So again, as I call upon the guys and the gals in our program, if we're not part of the solution, we're part of the problem. I beg we're all going to be part of that solution as a partnership team. Thank you.
[Applause.]
MS. McBRIDE: Thank you. You know, I think I gave him an unreasonable assignment in about a half hour's time to share 43 years of extraordinary hard work. I want to thank you again.
[Applause.]
MS. McBRIDE: Is there a question or two? Is there a question or two? We want to get back to our other discussions, as well, but I want to give you an opportunity to ask any questions of Father Young. Great. He's going to be with us this afternoon. Yes?
MR. : Absolutely great. Absolutely great. Would you just say a word or two about the critical differences between your operation and Delancey Street?
FATHER YOUNG: Yes. We're much more community-based. We try to get them very involved in all of the union with the opportunity of jobs, with all of the community. We try to get them out every night to group meetings in their fellowship, whether it be NA or AA. We try to get them involved in the community, because if we try to get them into a TC thinking, there aren't enough TCs in small towns in America. Therefore, if they have a very clustered or closed idea of where they got the recovery, they have to be able to go to the local town, church, community, and find a place where they can get the kind of help that they need.
So we're wide open and we try to involve them in the community, get them out and get them involved and get them rooted. Thank you, Virgil.
CO is certificate of occupancy. For me to house you tonight, if you're moving in with me, I need to have a CO on the door saying, yes, you're one of 16 people that can live here. COs are very vital for housing. If you don't have them, you're in trouble, because the inspectors come through and they count the bed sheets and if you don't have enough on there to cover the bed sheets, then you get a violation and you get then your building closed. So we respect the housing inspector who tells me how many COs I have and how many people I can put to bed at night.
Now, I'm looking at CO. When I talk about prison, I talk about correction officer. But when I talk about the housing, I'm talking about the certificate of occupancy in deference to a CON. A CON goes as part of the linkage that when you get Federal or State money, they want you to go to the community and say, here we are. You're going to be very lucky to have these drug addicts, these people coming out of prison, these people that have the virus in your community. Now, all in favor, vote.
And that's why we go underground, because we need to get people into beds and we don't tell people everywhere, every place that we have. We just try to put people to bed at night and say, you've got to learn how to behave. So when there's Federal dollars involved, when the LGU gets the money, they put you on Front Street. When you go on Front Street, it's a humbling experience. People don't like you. If you think that they had trouble with the dog walk here in town, I've been shot at, I've been beaten up, I've been cut, I've had chairs over my head. A lot of times, you run into some community resentment and it amazes me, because we've never had really the problem. We've never created problems. We don't have any history of negativity behind us to get beat up all the time.
MS. McBRIDE: Any other questions? Well, thank you all. Thank you again, Father Young. We appreciate all your work.
[Applause.]
[Recess.]