Plan Offers New Hope for Ex-Cons to Make It on the Outside : 2 Council Members Volunteer as Mentors to Parolees

The Lancaster City Council has officially given its blessing to the Lazarus Project, which is described in the accompanying article, and two council members have volunteered to back up their votes of confidence with action by personally becoming “mentors” to parolees.

“The object is to give them the tools to deal with life on their own,” Councilwoman Deborah Shelton says of the former prison inmates. “I met one man who is 20 years old who has never had a driver’s license or a job. Yet he has a wife and daughter.”

Shelton and her husband will work with one ex-inmate, as will Councilman Henry Hearns, according to Ron Deady, the project’s founder. A third has expressed an interest.

Councilwoman Shelton is a member of the Lancaster Rotary Club, which is providing the staff for the effort. She has been involved with planning for the training of the 20 mentors who will start the program.

“It’s challenging and exciting, but also scary, because there is the potential for things to go wrong,” she says. “It’s not going to be an easy task.”

The plans are designed to head off problems. The parolees have been picked carefully, Shelton says, and the weekly counseling sessions are to take place in public places so the mentors and parolees have arms-length relationships. Ex-convicts are never supposed to ask for money. Mentors are supposed to listen, ask questions, make suggestions and offer job referrals when they can. This will all be spelled out in a written “contract” signed by both the mentor and the parolee.

“We’re going to get them thinking in a different direction than they have before,” Shelton says.