Convicts Learn the Straight and Narrow at Delancey Street Center

Headed back to prison where he had spent 13 of the last 15 years, convicted burglar Gerald Miller jumped at the offer from the district attorney’s office.

As part of a plea bargain, instead of another 12 years in prison, Miller was given the option of spending three years at the Delancey Street Foundation, a private organization that for 26 years has helped turn around the lives of ex-cons, drug addicts and the homeless.

For Miller, a heroin addict, the choice was obvious.

“I said I wanted to change my life and that I wanted to do something different,” Miller said. “I told them exactly what they wanted to hear. I just didn’t want to go back to prison. Mine was a mathematical choice, pure and simple.”

That comes as no surprise to Mimi Silbert, Delancey’s founder and president.

“We don’t care whether you mean it or not,” she says. “We believe that while you’re trying to manipulate us, we’ll eventually out-manipulate you.”

Today, Miller is one of Delancey Street’s success stories. Because of his decision six years ago, he’s close to earning a bachelor’s degree. When he’s not studying, he visits California jails and prisons, interviewing potential new residents.

And there are many others who, despite having to overcome illiteracy and a lack of job skills, go on to a future that doesn’t include a jail cell.

“I jokingly compare us to Harvard, except that we have the bottom 2% of the population,” Silbert says.

Delancey Street houses ex-convicts from nearly every major gang in California, but Silbert says there are few problems. Fights are rare and only a few residents are thrown out each year. Sex offenders are the only people denied entry.

After they leave, a much smaller percentage of Delancey Street graduates get in trouble again when compared with the average ex-convict.

Delancey Street’s headquarters fill a 370,000-square-foot four-story complex along the city’s Embarcadero with a stunning view of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The 500 residents live in 177 lock-free dorm rooms.

Another 500 are at Delancey Street facilities in Brewster, N.Y., Greensboro, N.C., Los Angeles and near Santa Fe, N.M.

There are about equal numbers of whites, blacks and Latinos. About 25% are women.

The average resident has used drugs for eight years, been incarcerated four times, and is functionally illiterate and unskilled.

The San Francisco complex has the look of a modest country club, with a Mediterranean-style courtyard, swimming pool, recreation room and dining hall.

The foundation operates on money earned from five of its 20 training areas, including a moving company, a first-class restaurant, a printing firm and Christmas tree sales. The finishing touches are being completed on a combination art gallery, bookstore and cafe.

Most residents stay two to four years before moving on, although some stay longer. The restaurant’s maitre d’ arrived 25 years ago.

Not just a job-training program and certainly not a prison, Delancey Street also teaches residents responsibility and social survival skills. Among the outside activities are trips to the symphony, ballet and San Francisco Giants games.

Silbert boasts that Delancey Street is self-sufficient and accepts no taxpayer money. Except for her position, there is no full-time staff. Helping her are longtime members who supervise new residents.

“I think it works because it’s self-built, self-governed, self-run, because we’ve given real responsibility and ownership of not only their own lives but made them needed by each other,” she says.

The foundation’s name is borrowed from a street on New York’s Lower East Side, where many turn-of-the-century immigrants ended up after arriving in this country seeking a better life.

Kary Mitchell wanted just that when he came to Delancey Street three years ago. Until then, he thought he’d either be in prison the rest of his life or dead, like most of his former gang friends.

Now a headwaiter at the Delancey Street Restaurant, Mitchell spent nearly all his adult years behind bars.

He’s polite, thoughtful and soft-spoken. Absent is the rage he says he felt growing up on the streets of Monterey and later as a gang-banger in Sacramento. The only obvious evidence of his past are tattooed letters, one on each finger, spelling out the name of his gang then--C-R-I-P-S.

One month after completing a 10-year drug sentence in 1993, Mitchell was arrested for cocaine possession. A parole officer suggested the Delancey Street program.

“I had been gang-affiliated my whole life,” Mitchell says. “I honestly wanted to change, but I didn’t know how. Until then, I felt like I was neglected and pushed aside.”

When they arrive, residents are taught social skills that most people take for granted: how to make a bed, tie a tie, have dinner conversation.

“What most people learn how to do at 13 or 14, I had to learn at 35,” Miller says.

Residents who commit or threaten violence or use drugs or alcohol are expelled.

Twice a day, residents study a vocabulary word and concept of the day. They learn the basics of money management, consumer awareness, how to dress and even group speaking.

Miller, one of 25 residents working on a bachelor of arts degree, said the idea is to get the ex-cons to learn to use their free time productively.

“If you just took me and said, ‘I’m going to make him a welder in two years,’ what you’d have is a nasty, vicious welder,” Miller says. “We want them to learn how to do things that most people do instead of hanging out on a street corner.”

Mitchell, like all new members, was given odd jobs to keep him busy. When he first arrived, he couldn’t understand why he had to mop the floor over and over.

“At the time it seemed crazy,” he says. “But mainly it was to get us to become responsible, to keep us from thinking about ways to get in trouble.”

In time he was given more tasks, and eventually became a baker before getting his current job. For the first time, he has a normal life. He’s allowed to go home to Monterey every few months. And he’s dating a woman he works with.

Mitchell already has earned his high school equivalency degree at Delancey Street. He dreams of opening his own restaurant.

When he leaves next year, he will join the approximately 12,000 men and women who have passed through the program. About 90% have gone on to lead productive lives, Silbert says.

In the latest survey of California parolees, nearly 56% returned to prison two years after their release. A similar national study found 43% of parolees in 17 states were arrested on felony charges within three years after release.

A cross between a school and an extended family, Delancey Street provides a last resort for the fringes of society. All residents receive a high school equivalency and are trained in three different marketable skills before graduating.

“We’ve always been classified as losers,” Mitchell says. “This makes a very powerful statement that we might be down, but we’re not out.”