TRYING TO BREAK CYCLE OF PRISON AT STREET LEVEL

HOUSTON -- Corey Taylor, a convicted drug dealer, recently got out of
prison and moved into his grandmother's house in Sunnyside, a south
central Houston neighborhood of small, tidy yards.

During his first days home, Mr. Taylor, 26, got a sharp reminder of
the neighborhood's chronic problems.

"Out of 10 of my partners, only one is doing anything different," he
said, referring to his former drug-dealing companions. "I have some
friends I haven't seen for 10 years because either I was locked up or
they were locked up."

Last year, 32,585 prisoners were released on state parole in Texas,
and many of them returned to neighborhoods where they live among
thousands of other parolees and probationers.

Sunnyside is one of 10 neighborhoods in Houston that together
accounted for 15 percent of the city's population, yet received half
of the 6,283 prisoners released in Houston in 2005, according to the
Justice Mapping Center, a criminal justice research group.

The group, which is based in Brooklyn, has done work for the Texas
Legislature that helped lead to a $217 million expansion of
rehabilitation services.

Neighborhoods like Sunnyside can be found in virtually every big city
in the nation. Even as violent crime statistics trend downward,
incarceration rates throughout the country remain at a historic high
of 750 per 100,000 residents. Each year about 650,000 prisoners are
released on parole, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Mapping studies in neighborhoods as distant as the Phoenix suburb of
South Mountain and the Newhallville area of New Haven show
incarceration rates far higher than the national rate.

The parolees are almost always coming back to areas where support
systems, like schools and public assistance programs, receive less
money and attention than incarceration does, the studies show. In an
effort to break the cycle, Texas this fall began its expansion of
services for former inmates, including job training classes, drug
treatment programs and psychological counseling.

The approach, based in part on legislative presentations by the
Justice Mapping Center, is a sharp departure from the state's
longtime criminal justice focus on retribution.

The shift is intended to save the state money by slowing the
revolving door between state prisons and neighborhoods like
Sunnyside. The parolees released last year cost the state $100
million over the course of their prison terms; the 85 who returned to
Sunnyside, population 21,000, accounted for almost $8 million of
that, according to data by the mapping group.

"It's not uncommon for children of criminal justice system clients to
themselves go into the criminal justice system," said State Senator
John H. Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chairman of the Senate
Criminal Justice Committee.

"Certain lower socioeconomic areas produce clients for the criminal
justice system in a way that is analogous to the way that the welfare
system created a cycle of first- and second- and third-generation
welfare recipients."

Despite declining crime and lower arrest rates, Texas's adult prison
expenditures have grown to $2.8 billion a year, tripled since 1990.
Decades of tough-on-crime legislation and low parole rates have
quadrupled the state prison population since 1985.

The prisons are about 4,000 inmates beyond their legal capacity,
according to prison officials.

A variety of groups, including the Council of State Governments and
the Open Society Institute, are investigating the economic cost of
communities with high rates of prison admissions and releases and the
effectiveness of incarceration policies.

Eric Cadora, a founder of the Justice Mapping Center, said high
incarceration rates hinder government efforts to turn around troubled
neighborhoods by taking people out of the work force, compelling
families to rely on government assistance and scaring away investment.

The Fifth Ward, an east Houston neighborhood, has one of the city's
highest concentrations of former prisoners. At least 125 state
parolees resettled in the neighborhood in 2006, according to the
mapping studies. Their prison terms cost Texas $9 million.

Mark Wright, 31, stood outside a house in the Fifth Ward recently
selling drugs just weeks after completing a prison term for drug
possession. Altogether, Mr. Wright said he had served 10 years for
four drug-related convictions and one parole violation.

"I was bred into this life," said Mr. Wright, who said he still made
his living selling drugs. "It's survival of the fittest out here."

Mr. Wright said that "damn near 99 percent" of his friends had served
prison terms, mostly for drug possession, including his younger
brother, who is currently in prison.

"Half these dudes dropped out of junior high," he said, pointing to
several friends standing with him sipping from plastic foam cups of
"Purple Drank," a brain-battering draft of prescription-strength
codeine cough syrup cut with soda. "Some of them dropped out of
elementary school. All they got is this hustle. They got no backup."

In east Houston, another of the city's troubled neighborhoods,
Marilyn Gambrell, the founder of No More Victims Inc., a support
group for students at M. B. Smiley High School with incarcerated
parents, said that more than half of the 1,250 students there have
relatives in prison or who have done time in the past. Ms. Gambrell
is a former parole officer who supervised many of the parents.

Each day, several dozen of the teenagers gather in a carpeted
classroom with plush sofas and cushioned chairs to talk about what it
is like to have a family member in jail or prison.

During a recent discussion, drugs, violence and poverty were running
themes. One boy said he had accompanied his stepfather on drug runs,
and most of the students said they themselves had already had run-ins
with the police.

Tangenea Miller, 20, is considered a graduate of the support group.
She works as a corrections officer at a Houston lock-up. "I see a lot
of people there from my old neighborhood," Ms. Miller said.

The situations described in the high school sessions were front and
center one recent day in the Houston neighborhood of Kashmere
Gardens. Weeds curled out of broken windows and open doorways in
abandoned homes. Mounds of trash sat in empty lots flooded with stagnant water.

Young men, most of them unemployed, stood in front of shotgun houses
sipping Purple Drank. Others dealt dope in front of strip-malls and
on side streets in broad daylight. The Justice Mapping Center
estimates that Texas taxpayers spent $10 million to incarcerate the
117 state prison inmates who were paroled to Kashmere Gardens last year.

Al Jarreau Davis, 26, was released back to Kashmere Gardens five
months ago after serving less than a year in state jail for drug
possession. It was his second jail term. Mr. Davis and his older
brother, Bay Davis, also a recently released drug offender, support
themselves by selling marijuana and crack cocaine.

A third Davis brother was shot to death a year ago during an argument
after a traffic accident.

"There ain't no jobs out here for someone like me," said Al Jarreau
Davis. Both brothers said they fully expected to be arrested again, or worse.

"I'm probably going to stay out on the street until somebody murders
me," said Bay Davis, matter-of-factly.

And new parolees keep coming. Every few weeks, several dozen inmates
assemble in the chapel of the state prison in Huntsville on the eve
of their release for a two-hour orientation program by Christian
outreach workers. The prisoners are offered phone lists of clinics,
churches, shelters and drug treatment programs. Then they file out of
the chapel and back to their cells for one more night of restless confinement.

It is a shoestring program and most inmates do not participate, said
the Rev. Emmett Solomon, a prison minister who leads the classes.
"Most of what they get to prepare them for their release, they get
right here," Mr. Solomon said. "But it's probably too little, too late."

Mr. Taylor, the Sunnyside drug dealer, was in a recent class. He left
for the bus station the next morning, with about 40 other men,
wearing tattered, unfashionable donated clothes and carrying their
possessions in mesh bags.

As Mr. Taylor got off the bus in Houston later in the afternoon, a
passing stranger who called himself Ice welcomed him home.

"Hey man, I know how it is," he told Mr. Taylor. "I just got out, too."