Hard Road Home

“Everybody supposed to get a chance. You ain’t coming out of the stomach for no reason. It’s the point that it’s favoritism these days and racism and fucking miserable,” testifies a young man just out of prison. He’s frustrated and earnest and just getting started. “It’s to the point,” he tells his counselor, “That you may say this and that, but you not on my block to the see the 47th precinct come every five minutes to snatch you up whether you got shit on you.” Speaking at the Exodus Transitional Community office in East Harlem, the young man can’t see a future that’s much different from his past. “I don’t need a job,” he insists. “I’d rather be out there hustling, get caught, go to jail, then come back out, because it’s just me. Know what I’m saying, that’s just who I’m gonna be. I’m not gonna kiss everybody’s ass. I don’t gotta be like everybody else.”

As he talks, his listeners, fellow ex-cons and parolees, nod, shift in their seats, sip coffee. What he’s not seeing is that bouncing between the streets and prison, is only another system. It promises a certain kind of celebrity and even a whiff of heroic self-imagery, but like workaday routines, it leaves users depleted. “But you got to come out the hood,” a woman urges, suggesting that a salary and a family will give him a way out. Any way he looks at, the kid is caught, “like everybody else.”

Exodus means to help people make the transition out of prison, out of the cycle of drugs, violence, and hopelessness. The brainchild of Julio Medina, Exodus is one focus of Hard Road Home, premiering tonight on PBS’ Independent Lens. “We’re not defined by that worst moment,” Medina insists. Instead, Exodus participants hope to rise up out of the system that now incarcerates some 2.2 million men and women, the largest prison population in the world. Medina served 12 years for drug possession and started Exodus in 1999. It provides him with an income and, more importantly, a mission. He means to help as many people as he can, working with Exodus’ staff, comprised of former inmates like himself: energetic, committed, and astute. “We know firsthand what it takes to be successful,” says Medina. “That is our greatest strength.”

While everyone at Exodus is aware of the odds (four out of 10 people getting out of jail will be going back within six months), they persist, equally aware they are expected to fail. “Some of us in this room,” Medina says at a weekly staff meeting, “might not be in society in the next three to six months. Maybe in prison, maybe dead, maybe running the streets on drugs.” The camera looks over nodding faces, intent and attentive. Medina means to put mythologies to rest, focus on what’s doable, each day. “You thought you were gonna come home and join your wife and do all that good stuff,” he sighs. “No. You get out of prison and this is the wilderness.”

Medina’s dedication to his job, to the people who depend on him, has various costs, not least being high blood pressure. During the film, he’s briefly hospitalized with an “enlarged heart.” The camera follows an Exodus worker as he goes to visit: the elevator doors close on him, standing at the back with his headphones while a white man in suit gazes warily at the camera. In his room, Medina, upbeat and tubed-up, reassures his staffer, attributing his condition to expected stress: “Not enough oxygen or something is getting to the heart,” he half-explains.

He doesn’t quite expect what he finds when he gets back to the office some days later: in addition to the piles of bills on his desk, Medina looks across the room to the desk belonging to Alberto Lopez, an Exodus job developer. It’s empty. Medina has been encouraging Lopez throughout the film, and worries that he’s not showed up. While Medina’s been in the hospital, the film has followed Lopez, dealing with diurnal crises. When his wife’s car breaks down, he philosophizes, noting the degrees of stress that shape an addict or an inmate’s life, as trivial matters loom too large. It’s a fan belt, he sighs. “I can’t stress out, I can’t go crazy. It’s everyday life.”

Lopez has a “gift,” according to Medina, a passion for his work and a capacity to see through deceptions. When asked what he imagines for his own future, Lopez says he aspires to take on Medina’s job, running Exodus. When he emerged from prison in 200, he recalls, he was just 35, and had spent too many years inside. “I have a 20-year-old son,” he says, the camera close on his face from the passenger side of the car he’s driving to work. “He’s actually following in my footsteps. As we speak, he’s incarcerated… he’s me when I was 20.”

During the filming of Hard Road Home, Lopez is working with 21-year-old Griffik Negroni, who’s still a little uneven when it comes to making appointments on time or keeping track of his parole officer’s phone number. Lopez is patient and firm, treating Negroni like an adult (“I can’t babysit you”) who has to make his own choices, but making sure he understands both the options and the consequences. When Exodus staffers notice the as-yet unemployed Griffik is wearing jewelry and carrying a new PlayStation 2, they decide it’s time to ask some questions.

While the ideal relationship between a mentor and a former inmate is premised on trust, each also brings a set of habits, a way of looking at the world, premised on distrust. Everybody is supposed to have a chance, but it’s hard to deny the disparity and systemic injustice that shape the daily lives of East Harlem denizens. Hard Road Home doesn’t overstate any angle on the problem, neither the idealism nor the cynicism. Instead, it tells stories, observing and respecting those who know. “I’m a firm believer in individual responsibility,” Medina says. But “if you look at the prison system, 70% go in without GEDs, half of those can’t read or write… It’s our issue, it’s a community issue, it’s a humanitarian issue, it’s America’s issue.”