Work Zone

He fought the drugs for two years -- yes, you can get as high as you want in prison -- and finally got the jones out of his system. He converted to Christianity, that jailhouse cliche, but he was pretty sure he meant it. He prayed, and felt something stir in the darkness inside him. He began to have the idea that he might want something different for himself. He wondered what that might be.

"I learned to be alone," he says. "I learned to deal with Kenneth. When I got those ill feelings, I had to talk to somebody. Had to get it out of me. A lot of guys don't want to do that. They think, you know, it's less than being a man."

This was all grand, really, Kenny the Sensitive Convict, but the fact is: Nobody cared.

Hard? That's making it legit on the street. That's working a grunt job out in the heat and the cold, earning a few dollars by the hour, because that's all that most guys who come out of prison are qualified to do. Ex-cons like Glover, they're about 75 percent of the city's homicide victims , never mind the perps. Two-thirds are unemployed. Forty percent score high on personality disorder scales. They read, on average, at the level of a fairly bright 13-year-old. Nearly three out of four have "severe" addiction problems.

When Glover was released on March 13, 2002, he was one of 2,000 such men and women who return to D.C. from prison each year. Vegas wouldn't have given odds on him lasting a month.

He was 34 years old. He didn't have a dime. No job skills. No high school degree. No credit. No place to live.

How does a man survive such a circumstance of his own making? How does someone whose life is riddled with such abject failure and irresponsibility begin anew?

He broke it down to days. To hours. Work. Church. Family. Groceries. Again.

"Most guys don't come out and figure they gonna rob a bank," he says. "They come out, they got good intentions, they get that first paycheck, though, and it goes right up their nose. I didn't want to do that. I already been arrested 1,500 times."

Kim, ever the good big sister, made some calls and found a program called the East of the River Clergy, Police, Community Partnership. It's run by Donald Isaac, who ministers to "the least, the last and the lost." A lot of those are former prison inmates, and he has a thorough and world-weary knowledge of the scams and hustles ex-offenders play. The nonprofit is based in a refurbished crack house in the 4100 block of First Street SE, near the Prince George's line, and it was here that Glover walked in one day, looking for help. He offered to clean the place. He went out and started raking leaves, for free.

"Kenny was figuring out so much about how to just live life," Isaac says. "He was like a lot of guys, so much in a hurry. They've been planning, all this time in prison, and they want to get out and make it happen now, and it's not just going to happen like that. They don't realize the level of their literacy skills, their inability to show up every day, the wages they're going to earn."

Isaac put Glover to work at the office, emptying garbage cans and the like, giving him a token salary of $6 or $7 an hour. Isaac also set him up in an apartment next door, a grim building devoted to housing former inmates, but a place that kept him off the street. And, without much hope, Isaac sent Glover to a construction job, part of a social services program to help ex-offenders get back to work.