EX-DRUG DEALER GETS HELP IN KEEPING A LEGAL JOB

David Harris's drug-dealing friends knew they had a winner when he told
them he had never been arrested. They asked him to help them sell drugs and
assured him that if the police ever caught him, he would not go to jail.
"My friends said, 'David, you have no record,' " he recalled. " 'How would
you like to make some quick money and get high?' "

To Mr. Harris, a developmentally disabled man from the Bronx who had a
young son, David Jr., but no job, it sounded like a good idea, though he
had reservations. "I knew eventually I was going to get killed or get in
trouble," he said recently.

Eventually he did get in trouble, but his friends who told him that he
would not be given a prison sentence were right. When he was arrested in
1987 for drug possession, the judge gave him a few months' probation.

But he kept dealing drugs, and in 1989, when he was arrested a second time,
the judge sentenced him to eight months on Rikers Island.

And when he was arrested for the third time, in 1995, he was given two to
six years, which he began serving in prisons upstate.

"Every time I came home from prison, I always went back," Mr. Harris said,
"because I had no help."

A prison staff member told officials of the State Office of Mental
Retardation and Developmental Disabilities about Mr. Harris, and they began
to search for a program that could help him. They suggested that he be put
in the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility on Staten Island to be closer to
programs in the city and began telling nonprofit agencies about him in the
hope that one would volunteer to help him.

Information about his case came to the attention of Caryn Sicignano, an
intake coordinator for FEGS, formerly the Federation Employment and
Guidance Service. FEGS, which specializes in job training for the
unemployed, is a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of
the seven local charities supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

Ms. Sicignano visited Mr. Harris at Arthur Kill and told him that when he
got out, FEGS would help him get a job and guidance. "She was like a mother
to me," said Mr. Harris, 37. "For someone from the other side to come and
visit me, it was like a joy. I will never forget her."

He was released last June into the custody of FEGS, which put him in
supervised housing.

"They weren't going to let him out of prison into the street," Ms.
Sicignano said. "He needed a 24-hour -- or close to it -- supervised setting."

He was also enrolled in a short-term job-training program. It teaches
developmentally disabled adults the communications skills they need to get
a job and how to travel by subway and bus, and puts many in short-term jobs
working in soup kitchens and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the
Bronx. "David was a very big help to us," said Nigel Nero, the job-training
program supervisor. "He has a lot of abilities."

After days at the program, he returns home to a three-bedroom apartment in
the Norwood section of the Bronx that he shares with two other men enrolled
in FEGS programs. FEGS staff members visit daily to make sure the men are
taking the medications they need, teach them how to cook and help residents
get ready for work by waking them up in the morning and by supervising as
they eat breakfast and get washed and dressed for the day.

On Monday, Mr. Harris got a job as a Manhattan foot messenger. Now that he
has a job and is living in a stable environment, he can focus more
attention on David Jr., 18, a freshman at Columbia who lives with his
mother in Harlem. The two speak on the phone every day.

"I'm very proud for him to be the only one from the family that grew up to
go to college," Mr. Harris said. "I couldn't believe it until I went on
campus to see it myself."