Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. First of all, I want to commend our leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, the gentlewoman from Detroit, Michigan, who engages us in such a way that we are able to do a number of…
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
First of all, I want to commend our leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, the gentlewoman from Detroit, Michigan, who engages us in such a way that we are able to do a number of different things as she provides opportunity for different individuals to display leadership. And so having Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones convene each Monday a Special Order, an hour, where the Congressional Black Caucus members come and discuss issues, I tell you it is a pleasure for me to be here with my Delta sister from Cleveland, Ohio, a distinguished jurist, having been a defense attorney, a judge, a prosecutor, legislator, who understands this issue from every angle, any way that you look at it. Individuals who are being defended, individuals who have gone into the system, having to pass judgment, in a sense, and having to bring charges. It is just a pleasure to be here and to commend you because you do this every week, every Monday night. I mean, I was struggling to get here because my plane had some difficulty, but I am so delighted that I made it.
And to have the opportunity to work with individuals like Representative Barbara Lee, listening to Barbara with all of the things that are going on in the Oakland community, the neighborhood, it almost makes you dizzy.
But the interesting thing about it is that you know that it's real because you get the opportunity to see it. I mean, just imagine that number of individuals that you all have helped clear their records so that they can get a job, so that they can go to work, so that they can have a chance. And to know that that's only one of the issues, because you're leading internationally in creating awareness about the AIDS pandemic, generating resources and money, bringing to the forefront health issues that people kind of forget about.
Barbara, it is just a pleasure and an honor to have the opportunity to serve in the same body with you at the same time and to be inspired and motivated by the work that you do and by the spirit that you have and the energy. I mean, Members of the caucus trying to keep up with you and Sheila Jackson-Lee, with your energy levels, I mean, it's almost impossible. You can't do it. And so, you know, you just do the best that you can and follow along and follow suit. Because it has been a combination of all this work that has raised this issue to the point where I'm holding in my hand 17 pages of paper that the Chicago Tribune did last week on this issue, beginning last Sunday with a front page story, and then following through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And the first story was three pages.
You know, the Chicago Tribune is a big newspaper, and they highlighted the work of the North Lawndale Employment Network that has a project where they're teaching ex-offenders how to make honey and how to tend to bees. And they've actually developed a business. And these individuals are able now to actually go to work every day, earn a living. Some of them have already been able to max out of that program, go into other areas and get jobs, as people have seen what they do. And so, we are making progress.
But even so, the progress that we're making is awfully small compared to what is needed. And I thought it was just so important what you said about Booker Washington in terms of looking at where people have been and where they've come from. And so when we look at the history of this country and we recognize the travail, the difficulty that some population groups have had, that African Americans have experienced, and now we're trying to make sure that these individuals who have fallen off the path, who have succumbed in some ways to the difficulties of living in a tough environment, who are trying to find their way back, every day I come into contact with a story of somebody who is on the way up, on the way back, who found a way to get themselves a job.
I agree with all of my colleagues who have talked about this being National Bible Week. And I was thinking, as I listened, that we all get awards and we all get plaques and we all get things given to us. And the greatest thing that I have ever had given to me was something called the Gutenburg Award, which came from the Chicago Bible Society, which is a group of theologians and Bible scholars who analyze work. And on the basis of one's work and whether or not the work that they're doing is in keeping with the principles of the Bible, they give awards.
And so, when we talk about redemption and the need to redeem, there are more than 650,000 individuals who come out of jail and prison every year in the United States of America and they need to be redeemed. And so, if you want to be redeemed, you don't have to just go down by the Jordan Stream, you can go to some of the community programs that exist. You can help make sure that we provide resources so that those individuals who come home from jail and prison have some place to go, so that they have somebody to help them. Because if they get help, the chances of them recidivating are much less than if they don't.
The statistics show that 67 percent of the individuals who don't get help are more than likely going to do what we call ``re-offend'' within a 3-year period of time. More than 50 percent of them will be reincarcerated. But the recidivism rate goes down contingent upon the amount of help that they get. Some programs has it down as low as 18-20 percent. Well, that's just doing a great job. And I would hope that before the week is over, and we're expecting certainly before we adjourn, that the United States Congress is going to see the wisdom of reclaiming lives, of helping put people back on the employment rolls so that they can pay taxes.
You know, I would much rather help a person pay taxes. There is an old saying that if you give a man a fish, he can eat for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, he can eat for a lifetime. And so, if we help the individuals learn how to re-enter and function, then they're going to help further develop our Nation.
So, I just thank you so much for your leadership and the great work that
you've done on this issue and how you tie in the Ways and Means functions with the needs of these individuals. And we talk about, you know, people can't get food stamps.
Well, there are so many barriers, when you sit and look at it, and you wonder, for example, the person who wants to go to college can't get a Pell Grant. And many of the individuals who are incarcerated are young individuals who got caught up maybe in a place where they were smoking cocaine or they may have gotten picked up and had some controlled substance on them. And now they're out of school, they can't get a Pell Grant. And fortunately, we're beginning to seriously look at that. And fortunately the Supreme Court is looking seriously at the sentencing disparities that have existed relative to the difference between the sentences that you get for a conviction of having crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.
And I think what we're really saying is that these issues have to be brought to the forefront, and that's why these Special Orders are so important. I've always been told that awareness brings about dissatisfaction, and that the more people learn about the way things are, the more dissatisfied they become. And then if you can take that dissatisfaction and organize it into some action, now you've got a chance for some movement.
And therefore, we want to thank all of those many groups who have been in support of the Second Chance Act, all of that coalition, The Working Group, individuals who work with criminal justice issues, individuals who work with drug courts, individuals who know that there is a better way and a different way, we just have to see that road.
And, you know, the Bible has just so many great experiences. You know, I remember the story of Paul, you know, Saul of Tarsus on his way to persecute the Christians, but something turned him around. He met something and somebody along the road. And from being a prosecutor, he became the greatest advocate for Christianity that we have known, other than Jesus the Christ himself.
And so, we hope that there are people who will change their opinions about what to do with individuals who have fallen off the path. And again, it's just a real pleasure to be here with you and to share this time.
Let me do this before you do. I would like to have this document included in the Record, because I think they are such a great indication of how mass media is beginning to understand the issue and beginning to recognize it as a problem. And I would like to include in the Record this document from the Chicago Tribune.
[From the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 28, 2007]
The Beekeepers
(By Louise Kiernan)
The men opened the hive and bees swirled up into the sky
like sparks from a fire.
Bees flew through the weedy yard and past the chain-link
fence. They flew into the alley, where a woman braced herself
against the hood of a police car.
Bees flew toward the gas station, where the calls of
hustlers selling drugs sliced the air. And beyond where the
men could see them, bees scattered into the vacant lots and
back-yard gardens, parks and parking lots of Chicago's West
Side, searching, as always, for nectar.
This sunny morning in September 2006 was warm, but a bite
to the breeze signaled fall. A boy walked by, dressed in a
white shirt and navy pants. School had opened today. It was
time for a new start, time for what the people who work at
the non-profit agency on this corner in East Garfield Park
had decided to call Sweet Beginnings.
The three men standing at the hive were learning how to
become beekeepers. None had any experience at this job or,
for that matter, much significant work history at all.
Tony Smith, a pug of a man with a broad face, moved with
the graceful, contained gestures of someone accustomed to
negotiating small spaces. At 30, he had spent half his life
in prison.
Hovering uneasily behind him was Shelby Gallion, a 22-year-
old former drug dealer. In an oversized T-shirt and jeans
that blurred the outlines of his body, his expression
unreadable, Shelby looked a little out of focus, as if he
might eventually drift out of sight. He lived in a halfway
house, still on parole.
Gerald Whitehead, the oldest member of the trio at 49, had
been released from jail just a week before, after being
cleared of a heroin-possession charge, the most recent
stumble in the struggle to turn his life around after decades
of violence and addiction. Gerald seemed intimidating, with
his heavy-lidded eyes and thrust-out chin, but when he
smiled, his face cracked open wide and bright.
The three men and 17 hives in this yard were the makings of
a small experiment, an attempt to address one of the most
stubborn and destructive problems in Chicago and other cities
around the country: what to do with the hundreds of thousands
of people released each year from prison.
Over the last three decades, harsher penalties for drug
crimes and stricter sentencing laws have helped fuel
explosive growth in the nation's prison population and,
inevitably, in the number of inmates returning to society. In
Chicago alone, roughly 20,000 ex-offenders come home each
year.
Most end up in neighborhoods like this one, where
unemployment is high, opportunity scant and the temptation of
drugs and crime rarely more than a corner away. They don't
stay long. More than half the state's prisoners find
themselves back behind bars within three years of their
release.
Finding work can reduce someone's chances of returning to
prison. Although getting a job with a criminal record is
difficult, checking the conviction box on an application
poses only one hurdle. Many former inmates face other
problems, from poor education and little understanding of
workplace rules to drug addiction or a lack of stable
housing. And behaviors that help people thrive on the job--
teamwork, communication--are often the opposite of those that
ensure survival in prison.
For five years, the North Lawndale Employment Network, or
NLEN, had helped ex-offenders find employment. With Sweet
Beginnings, the agency decided to create its own jobs, in its
own neighborhood, where people could learn how to work and
build an employment history before they moved on. The idea
attracted the attention of major philanthropies and
companies, among them the MacArthur Foundation, Boeing Co.
and Ben & Jerry's, each of which donated expertise or money
to the effort.
Now, what may have once seemed like little more than a
quirky venture--using former prisoners to produce honey in
the ghetto--stood on the verge of transforming itself into a
high-profile business.
Whether it would succeed depended in part upon the three
men in the yard. The men measured success in starker terms.
Failing, they feared, meant going back to the streets, going
back to prison or getting killed.
During the coming year, through the bees' final foraging in
fall, the threat of winter, promise of spring and richness of
summer, the men and the enterprise of Sweet Beginnings would
attempt nothing less than their own reinvention.
This morning's lesson was about survival. John Hansen, the
beekeeper training the workers, showed them how to tilt the
hives to get a sense of how much honey they contained. A
heavy hive meant the bees had stored enough to make it
through the winter. A lighter hive would need help.
The hives, with their unevenly stacked wooden boxes, called
supers, looked like tipsy filing cabinets scattered among the
clumps of goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace and clover.
The men moved among them, gently leaning each hive back and
opening the lid to peer inside.
An elderly woman stopped at the fence. ``What ya'll got in
there? Bees?'' she asked.
``Yep,'' John answered, still bent over a hive.
``Oh, Lord, think I better get back.''
After a minute or two, Shelby disappeared inside the
building. John continued to make his way around the yard,
Gerald and Tony in tow.
``Look at that,'' John cried out at Hive No. 2, lifting a
frame thick with honey, each cell a stud of gold. At Hive No.
6, bees crowded the entrance, but the supers felt
suspiciously light.
When they finished, John delivered his verdict.
``I think,'' he said, ``we can bring them through the
winter.''
Second Chances
``To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,--
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.''--Emily Dickinson
In this pocket of the West Side, the past may fade or burn
or erode almost to dust, but it persists. It holds on.
Like the Star of David that adorns the front of the
Independence Boulevard Seventh Day Adventist Church, a
remnant from the time when Chicago's Jews lived and worshiped
in the neighborhood. Or the cracked patches of concrete in
the overgrown lot at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave., where Martin Luther
King Jr. lived for a short time in a rundown apartment to
protest the way Chicago's blacks were housed.
Or, in the conference room at the North Lawndale Employment
Network, the blotch of greenish ink on Tony Smith's right
forearm, visible as he took notes in a narrow,
slanting script. It had been a tattoo of a cobra until he
removed what he could with lemon juice and a sewing needle.
The cobra is a symbol of the Mickey Cobras street gang, as
is the ``MC'' inked on Tony's left shoulder. Police records
say Tony belonged to this gang. He won't say much about that
or anything else in his past.
What he will say is this: ``I was a naive, snotty-nosed
street kid who didn't care about himself or other people.''
His first arrest came at age 9, for disorderly conduct. By
the time he turned 13 he had been convicted in an attempted
murder and was, according to a police officer who knew him,
one of the most violent and feared gang members in the
Cabrini-Green public housing complex. He marked his 16th
birthday awaiting trial for beating three men with a gun and
torturing two of them with a heated ice-chopper. That crime
earned Tony a 30-year prison sentence.
He emerged almost 15 years later, having never used a cell
phone or filled out a job application. When he talked about
what he wanted to see for the first time with his own eyes,
he named--after Navy Pier and Millennium Park--a Jet Ski.
Across the conference table, Shelby idly twirled one of the
braids near his ear. Shelby's past was his shoes. The
butterscotch Timberland boots imprinted with tiny hexagons or
the candy-bright Bathing Ape sneakers. New shoes, like his
new watch and new cell phone, the leather ``Scarface'' cell
phone case--all accessories of the lifestyle he said he
wanted to leave behind.
He began selling drugs about the time he started high
school, and by his senior year, the money and all it bought
had easily trumped education. Then came two stints in prison
and, during the second one, nights spent lying on his cot,
wondering what would become of his two young daughters.
That was why he had come to Sweet Beginnings. But he still
thought about the old life. It took him a week at the agency
to earn what he could have made in a matter of hours on the
street.
And Gerald, standing at the kitchen window, staring out at
the hives?
Gerald's past was the hovel of a building across the alley,
where he had snorted $10 bags of heroin. And his
grandmother's house three blocks away, where he had stayed as
a child and sexually assaulted a young woman as an adult. The
bar around the corner where he once got shot on his birthday.
His past was the man crossing the street he knew from
Narcotics Anonymous and the cap-shadowed teenager who walked
in the door of the North Lawndale Employment Network and
addressed him as ``Brother Bone.''
Gerald's past was everywhere.
His earliest memory was of being bitten by a dog. He bit
the dog back.
Gerald wasn't sure whether he remembered this incident
because it happened or remembered it because he was told it
happened. It didn't matter. He became that story: the boy who
would bite back.
He grew up with two older brothers and 10 younger sisters,
a mother who worked as a live-in nurse and a father who was,
as he put it, ``kind of missing in action.''
Gerald struggled in school. He never learned how to read or
write well. The other children made fun of him. By 6th grade,
he had basically stopped going.
``I started out making a career,'' he said. ``Whatever I
could steal to make a hustle.''
At the same time, he joined the Unknown Vice Lords. In the
gang, he could force respect from all the people who had once
belittled him. He moved up to become an ``elite,'' a top-
ranking gang member and close associate of onetime Vice Lords
kingpin Willie Lloyd.
From the age of 20, Gerald bounced in and out of prison,
spending more time inside than out: armed robbery, home
invasion, criminal sexual assault, burglary, aggravated
battery, drug possession.
He was 43 before he decided he couldn't do the time
anymore. He has his conversion story. One night in prison, he
broke down. Was this all his life would ever be? Had God put
him here for nothing more? He wanted to die.
Then, in his cell, he sensed the spirit of his late
grandmother, who always gave him a meal when he was hungry
and a bed when he was homeless, and he felt at peace.
He could try to change.
It proved difficult. He lost a job working in maintenance
at a nursing home after a background check revealed his
criminal record, he said. There was an arrest for domestic
battery. He was using drugs too, crack and then heroin. He
became a dope fiend, a hype.
That went on for years, until his mother persuaded him to
check into a residential drug treatment program, where he
stayed for five months. Not long after he got out, in the
spring of 2006, he stopped by the fence at NLEN on his way to
sell loose cigarettes at the gas station nearby. He knew the
agency; the month before, he had gone through its four-week
job-training program for ex-offenders.
A couple of men were setting up hives. Gerald asked if he
could watch. Then he asked if he could help. He stepped into
the yard and began handling the hives, as though, one of the
men observed, he had been beekeeping all his life.
At first, Gerald worked for free. He did whatever needed to
be done: fixing the lawn mower, pulling weeds, picking up the
trash that blew in from the alley. It was somewhere to go
every day. Soon, the agency began to pay him, $7.25 an hour.
Every day was a fight. Stay straight, go to work. Failing
would be as easy as stumbling off the curb into the street.
``It's a wrassle trying to do good,'' Gerald said one
afternoon. ``You always got evil whispering in your ear.''
He felt comfortable around the bees. He liked them. If you
didn't know bees, he thought, they might scare you. But once
you knew them, you came to respect them.
Gerald understood bees.
Finding sweetness
The building that housed the North Lawndale Employment
Network, near the corner of West Flournoy Street and South
Independence Boulevard, had once been a duplex and still felt
like someone's home.
Walk in and you might find a worker bouncing a toddler on
her knee while she interviewed the child's mother or an old
woman grumbling about delays on the Pulaski bus.
Most days, the center hummed with people who came for one
of the agency's job-training programs, a computer class or to
get help writing a resume. Amid the bustle, the Sweet
Beginnings employees set up beekeeping class at whatever
table happened to be free and began to learn about bees.
They learned there are three types of honeybees: the worker
bee, which is female; the drone, which is male; and the queen
bee, which mates with the drones and lays the colony's eggs.
They learned that a worker bee lives for about six weeks.
They learned that it takes the nectar from 5 million flowers
to make 1 pint of honey. They learned that pollen mixed with
nectar is called bee bread.
During these lessons, Tony took notes on a yellow legal
pad. Gerald tilted his chair back or leaned forward, head
propped on his arms, always restless. Shelby occasionally
cleaned his nails with a public transit card.
Their teacher, John Hansen, was 76 and white and jangled
the change in his pocket. He had begun keeping bees 31 years
before, after he saw a sign someone had posted on a bulletin
board at the suburban publishing company where he worked,
offering to sell two hives. He went on to become president of
the Illinois State Beekeepers Association, and in his
retirement, he still kept bees, sold honey and ran a small
business managing hives and removing bees from people's
homes.
Of everything John taught the men about bees, they found
nothing as interesting or amusing as what they learned about
drones.
When drones hatch, the worker bees help them out of their
brood cells while the worker bees must emerge on their own.
Drones that mate with the queen on what is euphemistically
called the ``nuptial flight'' die because the act rips their
sexual organs from their bodies. When winter approaches,
worker bees drive the drones from the hive, to certain death.
One morning, Tony walked in with his heavily underlined
copy of ``Beekeeping in the Midwest,'' the book they were
assigned to read.
``It said male drones are like human males,'' Tony told
John. ``They don't do no work. I kid you not, that's what
they said.'' The book doesn't compare men and bees; that was
Tony's analysis.
In the beginning, the men's hands-on instruction mostly
involved learning how to care for the hives and prepare them
for winter. While they worked, they used a smoker, a metal
can with attached bellows, to blow smoke into the hives to
distract the bees. The smoke causes the bees to act as though
their hive is on fire, and they eat honey to fortify
themselves to flee, ignoring intruders.
Honey bees usually sting only if they feel threatened. Tony
had never been stung, so John plucked a bee from a hive and
stung him with it to make sure he wasn't allergic to the
venom. Gerald hardly seemed to notice stings or care beyond
issuing the occasional epithet. Shelby seemed the most leery,
often hanging back while the others worked. But when Tony
asked if the bees scared him, Shelby denied it.
In the early fall, the men learned how to extract honey, to
harvest it from the frames where bees build the combs.
Because the Sweet Beginnings hives didn't contain enough
honey to spare, John brought in eight frames from his own
apiary. The frames, stacked in the kitchen of the resource
center, looked a little like wood-frame screens, except that,
instead of wire grids, the panels held hundreds of hexagons
filled with honey.
As the men crowded around a large metal tank, a lone bee
banged against the kitchen window.
``Do we have to actually do it?'' Tony asked.
``Yeah, you guys are going to do it,'' John replied.
To extract honey, a beekeeper uses a knife to cut open the
wax caps that seal the individual cells of honey in the
frame. Then, the frames are placed in an extractor, which
spins them to release the honey. The honey drips down the
walls of the extractor and exits through a tap.
Slowly and delicately, Shelby slid the knife against the
frame. Wax curled off in strips. A slight scent, sweet and
floral, filled the kitchen.
``Just swipe it,'' Tony advised.
``Let it ride even and flat,'' Gerald said.
``You're doing fine,'' John said. ``Just watch your
fingers.''
Tony and Gerald each took a turn. The knife, as it drew
across the wax, made the
thick, wet smack of a cartoon kiss. Sunlight warmed the honey
in the frames to the color of amber, glowing against the
black shadow of the blade.
``That honey look good, don't it?'' Tony asked.
As the extractor spun, the air began to smell sweeter and
sweeter. Thin streams ran down the inside of the tank.
Minutes passed. A nickel-sized dollop of honey pooled on the
filter atop the white bucket under the tap.
``There's the first drop,'' John said.
While the extractor whirred, the men went outside to check
on the bees. Brenda Palms Barber, the exuberant black woman
who served as the North Lawndale Employment Network's chief
executive officer, joined them.
``I want to see how the babies are doing,'' she called out,
standing at the hives, perfectly at ease in her gray suit
while the others wore jackets with netted hoods.
More than two years before, Brenda had come up with the
idea for Sweet Beginnings when she decided that the
employment network needed to do more than help people find
jobs; it needed to create them.
She considered a landscaping business or delivery service
but worried that customers might be reluctant to allow ex-
offenders in their homes. A friend suggested a honey co-op.
Brenda knew nothing about honey, but the idea intrigued
her. She liked it even better when she learned that some
people consider urban honey more flavorful than its rural
counterpart because the bees can gather nectar from more
varied flowers within a shorter distance. Imagine creating
sweetness out of the asphalt and hardship of the West Side.
The agency launched Sweet Beginnings in the spring of 2004
with a grant from the Illinois Department of Corrections. Two
years later, after parting ways with the original group of
beekeepers working with the agency, the program started over
with fresh bees and a new idea.
The bees came from Wisconsin, picked up and delivered by
NLEN's chief operating officer, who had to roll down the
windows of his Jeep Cherokee on the way back because the
30,000 bees generated so much heat and noise.
The new idea came from a business plan created by
volunteers at Boeing, the chairwoman of the board of Ben &
Jerry's and others. It called for Sweet Beginnings to shift
its focus from selling honey to selling honey-based products
such as lotion and lip balm. They hoped the move would
increase profits and, with the expansion into manufacturing,
packaging and marketing, the job prospects of its workers.
When Brenda and the beekeepers returned to the kitchen,
about 4 inches of honey stood in the 5-gallon bucket.
She passed out plastic spoons and everyone dipped in to
taste.
``Yum,'' she said. ``It's really, really good.''
She continued to talk, in a stream of words as smooth and
unbroken as the honey pouring into the bucket. She talked
about biscuits and business competition and hosting a honey
cook-off and social purpose and making lip balm.
When she was almost done, she said, ``That's some of the
stuff we're thinking.'' Then she paused and said something
else, slowly, as if the idea had just struck her.
``Our demographic,'' she said, ``is the opposite of the
people working on it.''
Under suspicion
``There is a Thief Amongst Us!'' the signs announced.
``IS IT YOU!''
One sign was posted above the sink in the kitchen of the
resource center. Another was taped to the bathroom door. More
hung on the walls next to inspirational quotes from Eleanor
Roosevelt and Gail Sheehy.
The signs went up in late September, after someone stole
the agency's digital camera from a cabinet in the downstairs
conference room. It was only the second theft in the two
years since NLEN had moved into the building, and it hurt.
The agency prided itself on being the kind of place where
visitors wandered back to the kitchen to help themselves to
coffee and bought candy for school fundraisers by dropping a
dollar on a desktop.
No doors barred the offices; no cameras peered down from
the ceilings. The clients who came here already felt as
though the world treated them like criminals; the people who
helped them didn't want to do the same.
That trust disappeared with the discovery of a dented
cabinet door.
Brenda felt betrayed. She didn't like thieves. She could
find a job for a murderer before she could find one for a
thief. Stealing was a crime of opportunity, and every time a
thief saw something to steal, he had to decide not to steal
it.
If the signs shouted the crime, other conversations in the
building occurred in whispers.
Who would know the camera was kept in the basement
conference room, in the cabinet with the VCR? The beekeepers,
who watched videos for their classes. And Gerald? Well, he
had been an addict, and everyone knows that hypes steal.