The Fortune Society

by Matt Kelley

Published October 06, 2008 @ 12:22AM PT

Budget $14 million

Location: New York

Years in Existence: 40

Funding Sources: State and Federal Grants, Individual Donors

For much of 2006 and 2007, I taught English as a Second or Other Language as a volunteer at the Fortune Society, a New York City non-profit providing alternatives to incarceration and services for released prisoners. In my first few classes, I was immediately struck by the dedication of my students. These weren't the picture of society's violent criminals and its dropouts. Almost all of the adult men and women in my classes were uniquely driven to improve their lot in life. They had made a mistake - or maybe they'd been caught in a trumped-up charge from a system that didn't hear them - and they were ready to make a change.

One of my students - we'll call him Humberto - was on probation from a minor charge stemming from a fight, worked 60 hours a week making sandwiches at a deli, and supported his family in Mexico with the few dollars he managed to save. After work, he was taking classes at Fortune. He was an intermediate English speaker and an excellent student - he came with questions each week about phrases he saw in subway advertising. One tagline that particularly baffled him was for an art school; it read: "How bad do you want to be good?" After some confusion (I finally gave in and translated it into Spanish) we figured it out, and he said he wanted to be good pretty bad. His improving English was going to open doors for him, he said, and I believed it.

By offering services to recently released prisoners, Fortune's programs are the best hope for reducing our reliance on bigger prisons and longer sentences by creating a path out of the cycle of poverty, substance abuse, and crime in New York City - and the group's success can be replicated elsewhere (in fact, the National Institute of Justice is considering doing exactly this). Fortune directly empowers people to build new lives after incarceration - through post-release housing at its Fortune Academy in Harlem, adult education (including G.E.D. preparation), job training, H.I.V./AIDS services, substance-abuse counseling, and parenting and family advice. Through high-impact local organizations like Fortune, we could decrease the recidivism rate in the United States and begin to heal our broken inner-cities.

Fortune, which recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary, provides direct services to about 4,000 clients a year in the New York metropolitan area. The group has about 200 employees, many of them formerly incarcerated themselves, and receives most of its $13 million budget from city, state, and federal grants. While the organization's direct services are local, the David Rothenberg Center for Public Policy has an impact on the state and national level by promoting alternatives to incarceration and working to remove obstacles to employment, housing and services for the formerly incarcerated.

And the group was founded because of a play. In 1966, David Rothenberg was working as a Broadway press agent when he received a script from a Canadian writer for "Fortune and Men's Eyes," a play about life in a juvenile prison. After being turned down by producers and investors, Rothenberg invested his $12,000 savings to stage the play off-Broadway. The show was a success, and it sparked a new interest in prison reform among audiences - and most of all in Rothenberg himself. The next year, Rothenberg founded Fortune, naming it after the play, to address the issues faced by former prisoners as they reentered society. He then served as the group's executive director for the first 18 years and shaped the mission it still holds today.

When I was teaching at Fortune, many of my students, including Humberto, were taking classes on judge's orders - their pending charges were delayed for a year and the judge told them to work on their English, or a G.E.D.  If they came back to court in a year with no new charges and proof that they'd been studying, their charges would be dropped or reduced to probation. Some of their charges were minor drug possessions or a battery that they described as a disagreement or a fabrication. I'm not a sucker - I know some of these assaults may have been serious fights or violent attacks - but I also believe in forgiveness and self-improvement. I was seeing firsthand how our society can handle the thousands of non-violent, first-time arrestees that we are too quick to lock up today. Visit Fortune's website to get involved.

Watch Fortune's Executive Director JoAnne Page discuss sex offender minimum sentencing with Bill O'Reilly.

Go see the new play, "The Castle," in New York City, as four formerly incarcerated people tell their stories.If you're outside of New York, invite the cast to come to your city or university.