www.cecintl.com

Name
Contact:


Profile in Redemption: The Ronnie Grant Story

Roseland, NJ, May 3 -

By Lisa DiLeo Fretz

Streets like Brownsville’s predict our future. Of the 32 guys Ronnie Grant ran with, 26 are dead. Of the remaining six, only one hasn’t served time.

“That’s because his folks had some money,” says Grant, an ex-convict with a knowing smile. Of all people, he understands the workings of the criminal mind and how to arrest them. President of the Alumni Association – a group of ex-convicts that rehabilitates current prisoners at a lock-up in Trenton - clean for seven years now, he returns to prison twice a month determined to change the incorrigible. His incarceration and personal epiphany there give him the needed conviction.

“If I reach just one of the 300 that are in that room, that’s one capable of coming out and doing something that I’m doing. And that’s what’s healthy to me,” says the tall, wiry man with a nobly-chiseled, shaved skull. Impeccably dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, beige sport jacket, and fine leather boots, Grant tackles every question on reform, ready to talk indefinitely to

convince "that change is inevitable for those who want it." For him, treatment made the difference, a cognitive-behavioral approach that made him see he could change if his thinking changed.

“What I was suffering from,” he explains from a plush chair in an administrative office at the Albert M. "Bo" Robinson facility, “was a state of insanity. Because when you’re not looking at life in terms of what life’s truly structured about – working everyday, making an honest living, being a parent, and a friend to your spouse – something’s wrong. Whether you realize it or not.”

For most of his life, Grant suffered from that state of insanity, which still runs at large. It subjected some of his 32 friends to death from drug abuse; others were killed in the line of criminal duty. One of his five brothers, two years’ younger than he, was shot to death “in the face over an argument” in front of a Brownsville arcade in 1985 at the age of 24, an event that happens “all the time” in urban ghettoes. Another brother, “mentally disabled,” died at the age of 12 “from some disease.

“That’s just the way life is for us,” he explains. “A lot of people don’t understand that circle of life if they haven’t experienced it for themselves” - the round of poverty and violence that people like Grant are born into. And while friends died from conditions akin to those of third-world countries or war zones within the ghetto, they exported its products – theft, assault, drugs – into more affluent communities before their demise. Along with fiscal cost - of robberies, convictions, prisons, reform - comes physical, emotional, and spiritual wreckage, a terrorizing and impoverishing of every community across America. No one is left untouched by racism-incited rage, cultivated in urban ghettoes, unconfined by invisible slum walls.

One could say that Ronnie Grant’s crimes were almost bred into him, like the broadness of his nose, or the fullness of his lips, or the bittersweet chocolate color of his skin, a hypothesis he would adamantly reject, just as he denounces poverty, oppression, and rage as reasons for committing crime. These are the reasons criminals give, but Grant knows that the criminal mind can be trained to reject them.

“You can use anything” to justify criminal behavior, he says. Unremitting rage was his, built during years growing up as one of eight children in a three-bedroom Brownsville apartment. Sleeping with five brothers in one room every night, shut inside a downstairs neighbor’s apartment days, life began confined. At 14 he took a job at the local daycare center to help pay bills, at the same age he joined a gang for the “love and attention and affection.” He quit Brownsville High School at 16 to join the Army and send home a paycheck. Then, just prior to release, he got word that his father had “caught a sudden heart attack and died.” The loss of “the key token” in his family ended Grant’s tenure as a good guy.

“The death of my father triggered me to really rebel. And it was not just me, it was my brothers – we all turned bitter. And from that point on, I sought out other means to obtain finances: narcotics, armed robberies, taking from the drug dealers, or whatever it was that was necessary for me to do at the time. And I sought to take from those that I knew had money.”

At the age of 47, Grant is a survivor, an old-timer given the lifespan of a black man in America, where two million more black women than civilian black men live. With 800,000 additional African-American males in prison or the military, black women outnumber their male counterparts by 2.8 million, according to U.S. Census data for 2002. One in four of these men serves prison time at some point during his life; of those released, a third return, Bureau of Justice statistics report. Grant already has fulfilled both predictions. But he considers himself blessed.

"It was meant for me to get caught," he explains. "God has reversed my old way of thinking into a positive way of thinking," using "my criminalism in a positive manner now that other people feel the same way that I felt and can identify with it and understand it. It's just that simple. I mean, life is what you make it, truly. If you do what you always did, you're gonna get what you always got. But then, there's always room for change. If you don't apply yourself to want to change, then you'll just be stagnated and be that same individual, with the same mentality. That's not the case for me." Anymore.

What Grant had to learn through 15 years of incarceration - their final 18 months spent at Bo Robinson - was that all of his reasons for crime didn’t justify an excuse. Despite being born into near-hopeless living conditions, the criminal can blame no one for his actions but himself.

“In reality, you have oppressed yourself," Grant says. "Because you have placed yourself in that position.” And only he could free himself.

"I had to sit back and re-evaluate myself and realize what kind of lifestyle I lived that caused me to be (incarcerated). People wouldn't want to chance it, you know? My whole life was consisted upon violence. Weapons, you know. Taking advantage. And taking from other people.

"Once you have come unto that knowledge, you are held accountable," he says. "I knew if I ever got out the only thing that would bring me back (was) if I had an opportunity to come back and give something back. And I hold that to this day."

***
In March of 1979, soon after his nineteenth birthday, Ronnie Grant sawed twelve inches off a three-foot-long shotgun, pulled on a ski mask, and stormed a bank in suburban Valhalla with four of his Brownsville, Brooklyn friends. He held the gun and guarded the door, putting anyone to the floor who tried to enter to leave. Making off with $45,000, impressed with the robbery’s ease as well as their new-found reputation, hungry for more money, the boys struck again. This time, they stuffed $150,000 – much in small bills – into gym bags. Fleeing safely back to the Brownsville projects they “just threw the small bills up in the air for the kids to take."

Soon convicted of that armed robbery, Grant spent eleven years in federal penitentiaries, which only served to solidify Brownsville-bred toughness. In fact, he sees hard, unyielding streets like Brownsville’s – which branded its boys with its mottoes Only the strong survive; and Brownsville: Never ran; never will - as training grounds for prison life. (“Well, I’m gonna be truthfully honest with you and frank,” he says. “I knew I could make it (in prison) because I made it in the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn. If I could make it in the streets of there, I could make it anywhere. And I’m not glorifying prison or my life now or the life I chose to live. But I made it all the way from the west coast back to the east coast. Where the prison system over there is…very racially motivated; segregated. Now mind you, I served quite a bit of time in prison. And I’ve been in very different violent situations in prison. I was stabbed. I stayed quite a long time in solitary.

“But then also I knew in the back of my mind, I had only one concept: Coming out the way I came in. And I meant that by any means necessary. I was gonna take care of myself. I had to take care of myself on the streets of New York and I did. So it was a little easier for me to get in there and perform. And…I met some real major killers that didn’t even have a problem killing people and talked about it like it was nothing, like it was general conversation. But even they had respect for me.”)

When it came time for release eleven years later, in 1991, Grant, thirty-two years old, unrepentent, unreformed, had only one “blunt idea: Somebody was gonna pay. Prison had nothing to offer me,” he explains. “And I felt as though somebody owed me something for the time I had to serve.” So, with customary ruthlessness, despite setting up a Brownsville barber shop (a skill learned in prison), he took to Brownsville streets again and acted according to its crime ethic.

"I really didn't care (about consequences) because (they) didn't matter." He had no hope for a better life. Within a year of release, Grant was apprehended for robbing a Brownsville drug dealer of $590 at gunpoint and sentenced to prison for another five years.

“Having to do another five years of my life, I knew I wasn’t going back to prison,” he says. He just didn’t know how to quit the rage that made him attack.

***
The one-story brick building encircled with spiraling barbed wire - near a junk yard and across from rusty train tracks - on Enterprise Avenue appeared suspicious to Ronnie Grant when he first arrived at Bo Robinson. Even the Department of Corrections ride from Northern State Prison in Newark to the Trenton facility was unusual.

"Guards said, 'Well, get on in the van.' And the first thing I did out of instinct was turn around for him to handcuff me. He said, 'You don't get handcuffed.' I'm like, 'What? Okay!'
"We riding down the highway, pulled over to a McDonald's. 'You guys hungry?' 'Yeah.' So they brought us lunch. And they brought us in here. When I got here I'm like, 'Aw, man. What is this?'"
In 1999, the recently-purchased former glass factory appeared dilapidated to Grant, nothing like the fortresses he'd conformed himself to in Attica and Leavenworth, among others. Although he'd applied for Bo Robinson – reputed, through the prison grapevine, for access to more physical freedom – he was disappointed upon arrival. Still prohibited from furloughs due to his A304 – or violent offender - status, Grant was "really not feeling anything like" the treatment programs he was expected to attend.

The prisoner concept, to which he'd become acclimated for the past 13 years, disappeared at Bo Robinson, where "cells" were bedrooms he shared with seven other guys, housing bunks that made them look more like college dorms. Brightly lit hallways were hung with four-foot-tall posters touting Twelve-Step slogans that confronted them at every turn: POOR ME, POOR ME, POUR ME ANOTHER DRINK; IF YOU DO WHAT YOU ALWAYS DID, YOU'RE GOING TO GET WHAT YOU ALWAYS GOT; YOU ARE THE CREATOR AND COMPLICATOR OF YOUR OWN SITUATION; LIFE IS TEN PERCENT ACTION AND 90 PERCENT REACTION. Unlike other prisons, where he could go to Bible study, work out, do physical labor, and watch television, here he was expected to attend academic classes, drug and alcohol treatment, finance and computer training, counseling, and resume-writing workshops. He was called a "resident" instead of an inmate; and former prisoners who came to rally him at motivational meetings, "alumni."

Part of Community Education Centers (CEC), a group of rehabilitative facilities initially opened in the mid-1990's by President and Chief Executive Officer John J. Clancy, Bo Robinson forced Grant to become actively involved in his own rehabilitation. Founded on the concept of respect for the individual, CEC's mission statement includes treating residents "in a humane and dignified fashion," Clancy states. The therapeutic treatment environment is working to lower recidivism rates, according to statistics cited in the July/August 2004 issue of Corrections Compendium. Of the one-third of all released prisoners who normally would return to prison, a third of those treated at a Community Education Center do not. Today, there exist 17 Community Education Centers in seven states. About eight percent of its former residents now work for the company.

In other facilities Grant had been taunted, harassed, had his mail withheld, and was expected to pay for utensils he should have been given, like toilet paper and shaving cream. He'd witnessed one cellmate die from as asthma attack, just because "staff didn't want to take the time to write out a pass for sick hall." He'd been stabbed twice in a fight over a basketball game, locked in solitary confinement. Here, people wanted him to talk about his feelings. Sure that the staff – some former inmates themselves – were faking it "because they got the job," he didn't believe any of it was for real. Goodness for its own sake didn't exist in Grant's world.

Then, one Wednesday night at Bo Robinson, seated on a molded plastic chair each resident carries for himself into the mess hall, Grant – one of the 300 - listened intently as stories unfolded that mirrored his own too closely to deny. Some of the 20 alumni were employees; but others were giving their time, after long days at work – some from two hours' away - simply to tell him how they got released from prison and changed their lives to stay free. They started speaking at 7:30 pm and stayed for two and three hours just to talk him into something. They traveled from places like Newark, Camden, Jersey City, places where poor people grow up and ex-prisoners return to live.

A handsome, light-skinned black man stood up to speak.

"I sat in the same seats as you are last year. I had no parole. I maxed out. But I'm taking my driving test Saturday. I'm going to school. I'm 44 years old."

He then related a recent challenge that would let him slip back into drug abuse if he allowed it.

"My girlfriend left me after 17 years because I was cheating. She said the same words the judge said to me: 'Shoulda thought about that before you did it.'" The prisoners laugh.

"I thought I still had it." He got into a physical fight and lost. "I broke two ribs. They tried to give me Percoset. I told them, 'I can't take them. I'm an addict.' They said, 'Take them anyway.' I said, 'If I take them I'll be sticking you up.'
"Sometimes we think we still got it. We got it up here (he points to his head) but not in the body. I felt like a bird dog." After the humorous interlude he tells the men, "You should all be out at the next Alumni meeting."

The stories told of struggle, a struggle to survive that Grant had fought all his life. But now, these survivors were struggling to stay straight despite the hard turns of life, which alumni call "accepting life on life's terms." Through the vehicle of these meetings, Grant saw the reflection of himself, and hope for a new self.

"And that's what triggered me to want to become an alumnus," he says. "I seen by their consistency of coming to the meetings that they were sincere." He became "very close friends" with some alumni.

"And that's the difference," he explains. "When you can befriend someone that you never really knew," outside of the criminal or family circle. Growing up oppressed, he had stopped trusting other people, as have many criminals and inmates. Of trust he says, "A lot of them lost it. A lot of them never had it. Because no one was able to give it to them. And they didn't know how to obtain it. See, there's goodness in everybody." In some it is deeply buried. The staff and alumni at Bo Robinson try to root it out.

"We act as a family," Grant says, a unlike street gangs or unhealthy families. For a whole segment of society that came from American slavery, in which families were fractured by the buying and selling of its members, the great need is to rebuild the concept of family, a concept whose origin never existed intact in this country. The African-American family structure was whole and healthy only in Africa. Now the Alumni Association tries to build a healthy structure for its members on ideas of what constitutes family health given its experience with rebellion and fragmentation. It knows what not to do.

Now a Senior Counselor at Bo Robinson, Grant loves his work. He also loves to return to Brownsville every summer for a reunion with his old friends, and to recognize how far he's come.

"That's like heaven," he says. "Because you see everybody. I seen guys I hadn't seen in 24, 25 years, and they knew me from coming up in high school, boxing, playing basketball, athletics. I see the people I grew up with, and some of them look horrible. But I still embrace them with love and affection because it was a family. Girls I knew that was beautiful in high school, that wouldn't even give me the time of day, look awful. But I still show them love. You see, I can't judge them because I been in the same environment that you have all my life too. But I had to be placed somewhere…to understand there's a better way of thinking that I was taught (at Bo Robinson). As opposed to going on in a vicious cycle and deteriorating myself like everybody else."