By: Samantha Melamed
Published: February 12, 2017
At age 35, Jermaine Myers has spent most of his adult life incarcerated.
The cycle started when he was 16, charged with armed robbery as an adult. He got out at age 21 with the idea of getting a commercial driver’s license. Instead, he said, “I went back to drugs and guns within two months.” He was locked up again at 22. Then, at 24. He got paroled at age 28, but soon was locked up on a violation. At 32, he caught another case: drug possession, two more years.
Each time he left prison, Myers said, he had good intentions. “I wouldn’t say I didn’t have the desire to change. It was just, I didn’t know how or have the right people to advise me.”
But when he was released last October from Chester state prison, it was different. This time, he was part of a mentoring program, including classes, group meetings, and one-on-one sessions with a mentor that began well before he left prison and continue to this day, months after his release.
Mentoring is an old-school solution to a historically vexing puzzle: how to manage prison reentry in a state where 60 percent of people are locked up again within three years of being released.
To read more, go to http://www.philly.com/philly/living/recidivism-reentry-mentoring-Philadelphia-prison-program.html.
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