The residents recognized the difficulty of Rivera’s role. “I’m aware of the stresses on him,” Webb said. He described a man trying to get into the building, and screaming at Rivera. “Sam was talking back to him in this very mellow, in this Zen way,” Webb went on, “but I noticed that he was holding a radio, and it was physically impossible that he could have tightened his hand on that radio any harder than he was. Knot-tight! I couldn’t have stood there with this guy spitting in my face saying the things he was saying. Yet I know that Sam wasn’t afraid, and he could have whipped this guy’s ass. So he’s, you know, the whole deal—the warrior-monk kind of guy. Sun Tzu said if you know the outcome of the fight anyway, you have no need to fight. I know and you know, so why don’t we pretend the fight is over and move on?”
One critical part of transitioning is to help someone involved with the justice system get involved with the employment system. “I got my job and my apartment” is a motto of success. As the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in the nineteen-fifties, “A status, a position, a social place, it is not a material thing to be possessed and displayed”; it is “something to be enacted and portrayed.” That idea is profoundly relevant to the work of the Fortune Society. Coming home means learning the language and the rituals shared by the society outside prison walls. Weekly workshops at Fortune prepare clients for job interviews, and, particularly, help them address the obvious question: Where have you been for the past four or five (or thirty) years? It is against the law in New York City to ask a job candidate about his or her criminal record, but it is legal, after a job has been offered, to run a search on the prospective hire.
People who have just come home meet interviewers in mock interviews. What is your greatest strength in a work situation? (The right answer is: “I love to work with others.”) What’s your greatest weakness. (“Uh, my greatest weakness? Females,” one newcomer says, a candid but very wrong answer. The right answer is Clintonesque: “I try too hard to get it right.”) A young man who wants to be a restaurant cook is guided through an interview in which it becomes apparent that he doesn’t know much about cooking. (“You get in the good habit of bullshitting white people,” Rivera remarked later. “And you start bullshitting yourself.”) Interviewers like detail: about work programs upstate, about roofing or custodial work or how to operate a forklift.
Near the end of one mock interview, the questioner said, “You seem like a fine candidate for the job. I’d like to offer it to you. But, of course, I’ll run a background check on you. Tell me, if I do will anything come up?” The candidate, trained in previous classes, struggled to recall the ideal answer, which is something like: “Yes, when I was younger and behaving stupidly, an unfortunate situation occurred and someone got badly hurt. This led to my becoming involved in the criminal-justice system. But I studied hard and attended several programs while I was in jail. That person I was is not who I am now.” That, the interviewer explained, is a version of the perfect answer, which the residents work to adapt. Among the central skills that the Fortune Society teaches is how, in a job interview, to tell the truth while putting the best face on a previous failure.
All of us, of course, have to learn to navigate the waters of such interviews by telling the truth while putting the best face on previous failures. (“I did get a C on that Spanish test, but it was the result of some issues in my personal life and, as you can see, I pulled it right up in the following term” is what a kid raised with good fortune learns to say.) The broader task, as Rivera sees it, is to instill new habits of response among the formerly incarcerated. “You have to relearn all your reflexes,” Rivera said. “When you feel threatened, don’t react. If I find myself threatened by the possibility of a confrontation on the street—just a car-cutoff thing, you know; happens every day—I’ve found myself literally running in the other direction to remove myself from those reflexes and that risk.” The aim is to learn a new language of performance in order to have a new chance at life.
The theatrical side of the Castle is self-evident to its sharper-eyed residents. “The Fortune face—that’s what I call what you see in the Thursday-night performance space,” E. explained. “I don’t say that in a disparaging way, but that’s what it is—people are auditioning for acceptance into the program and they’re bringing their A-game to be accepted. And then you get to know the person, as opposed to the audition. Sometimes it’s the same person. With some people, it was just a façade, a performance to get in. And those people really don’t last that long. They shouldn’t.”
Some more radical-minded social-justice advocates don’t like the idea that people who were incarcerated should be taught how to blend in with middle-class rituals and mores. Rivera considers this view the kind of luxury that only people who are not struggling to “stay home” can indulge in. “Obviously, we have to reform the system and end the problems, and put fewer people in prison,” he said. “Obviously. But my job is saving lives now. If I wait for the world to be better, then the whole society would have to change, and I don’t have a long enough life to wait for that to happen.”
At a Thursday meeting a couple of weeks later, a recent home-comer praised another Castle client for gently urging him away from a confrontation with someone who pushed him—or whom he perceived to have pushed him—on the subway. “I almost lost it,” the home-comer recounted. “I was ready to do something about it, but he told me, ‘Just let it go,’ and I did.”
Rivera seized the moment: “What do we mean when we say we’re going to lose it? I realize I hear it often, ‘I was gonna lose it on this guy.’ What’s it mean for you?”
“Lose control,” one person said.
“Rage,” another said.
“Rage!” Rivera echoed. “But you’re gonna lose it. You’re gonna lose your housing. You’re gonna lose your freedom. What causes it?”
One man tried to explain his suspicion that a bunkmate in a homeless shelter had taken money from his backpack. “It’s hard coming from doing a whole lot of time. You’re bunked with someone and you know you’re getting robbed,” he said. “And it’s hard, because, if you were upstate or in another situation, you would have acted in another way. We live in our own minds. Man is mind. We first get out—we’re getting that comfortability back—and it’s hard to lose it, because you live in a room with it. I spent more of my life in prison than free. It’s hard.”
Rivera grew gentler: “Can I talk about that? Your voice changed. I heard it.”
“It’s hard having something taken from you. My life style—I’m not proud of it—but I was a stickup kid my whole life. I’m not used to having anyone take anything from me. There’s nothing you could do.”
“Here’s the deal,” Rivera said. “There’s something you could do and you chose not to. Don’t dismiss that, man! You should be, like, this should be a celebration, man. Like, for real—‘I did that, and I didn’t do what I would normally do.’ We all know what we could do. Many of us have done it. Take the power—I chose not to do that this time.” He glided into the next thought. “Was anyone around this week when I got stepped to?”
“When you got what?” Rothenberg asked.
“David needs help—what is ‘step to’?”
“Someone came at him very aggressive,” one person explained.
“He had a brick!” someone else added.
When a client had confronted him, Rivera hugged the man, literally, until the confrontation ended. The possibility of violence in the building had shaken everyone.
Rivera hadn’t seen the brick, and was startled to learn about it: “He pulled out a brick? For real? Let’s hold that, because I definitely want to know about this brick. But I want to come back to you, brother. Sometimes doing nothing is the best decision we can make, right? Someone says to me, very glum, ‘I didn’t do anything.’ No! You did . . . nothing. That’s an action. You chose to handle it. Doing nothing is doing something. Ignoring someone is reacting to them.”
Afterward, Rivera looked bemused. “I’m interested in this brick. Nobody told me about the brick.” He paused. “I’m glad I didn’t know about the brick.”
The coronavirus pandemic hit the Castle hard. Rivera was like a captain approaching a storm, battening down the boat while planning to take the waves broadside. Several residents contracted COVID-19, and the decision was made to stop accepting new residents—a painful departure from long-standing Fortune Society practice—and to shelter the entire population in place, with the positive cases self-quarantining. The Thursday meeting was moved to Zoom. To attend remotely was oddly reassuring in those first panic-stricken weeks of the pandemic in New York; having been through so much worse, and accustomed to enforced isolation, the Fortune community had a kind of unfazed gaiety unique among the difficult interactions of the moment.
Then, in late May, after the standard announcements of a Thursday meeting, Rivera said, as smoothly as he could, “So, I have an announcement. I submitted my resignation today.”
There was a brief pause. “Resignation not accepted!” E. called out, cutting through his usual cool with obvious pain.
“Resignation not accepted!” Easy called out, in turn. And the cry went around the gallery: “Resignation not accepted!”
Rivera tried to quiet them. “Now listen to me, it’s a decision I’ve made.”
E. was insistent: “You can’t just say this. You got to explain this shit, man.”
Rivera told them that he was leaving to become the executive director of a “harm reduction” group, an organization that promotes health among drug addicts and sex workers, providing condoms, clean syringes, training in overdose reversal, and the like.
Eventually, the residents surrendered, and began to congratulate him. “I’m grateful for all you have done to help me see the world more clearly,” one said.
Rivera was privately equivocal about the reasons for his departure. Although he disavowed any internal conflict, there clearly had been complicated feelings between him and some of the top people at the Fortune headquarters. “I would have loved to stay at Fortune,” he said in early June. He was at home, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and sitting in front of a picture of the Buddha—an accidental but telling juxtaposition. “But our values just aren’t well aligned anymore.”
Rivera cited the society’s response to the protests in New York and across the country. “In organizations, you have to be careful not to take a political stand—but this isn’t political. And Fortune froze.” He was frustrated that, even though the staff was almost fifty per cent Black, it took weeks for its leaders to speak out. (“I didn’t realize how important it was to make a statement because I thought our actions spoke for themselves,” Page said. “And that was a lesson learned. We’re now making statements.”)
Still, Rivera admitted that he had decided to leave long before the protests started. Conversations with others in the organization suggest that the issue was a familiar one, especially within nonprofits. Sam Rivera, the charismatic center of the operation, had little executive power within it, and over the years this had created some rubbed-raw feelings between him and the people who did. The same rule that holds in a small regional theatre holds in a nonprofit devoted to post-incarceration transitions: the charismatic figure wins the allegiance of his clientele, at the risk of alienating his colleagues, who, without any malice or even conscious envy, become mindful of what they see as his managerial deficits. Tension grows between the charismatic person and the administrators, who have a clear idea of the dogged and unglamorous work required to sustain the institutional structure.
Page insists that the organization will go on more or less intact. Angela Scott, an eight-year veteran of the society, has replaced Rivera. “I ran Thursday meeting for years, and then Stanley did”—the Fortune vice-president—“and then Sam,” Page said. “Now it’s Angela’s turn.”
As with anyone who has left an organization to which he was devoted, Rivera became more aware of Fortune’s flaws and fissures in retrospect. “We came across as participating in the punishment,” he said. “Our line was: If you smoke weed, and keep doing it, we’re going to discharge you. I’m not going to expel someone for smoking marijuana. I’ve never met anyone who O.D.’d on marijuana.” (Page said that Fortune would never force a client out just for smoking marijuana.)
