(solemn music) - Man, Second Chance Center is different things to different folks, but if I had to describe it, it would be a base for folks returning to community where they find themselves welcomed and where help is available.

It doesn't matter who you are, and here's the thing.

You know, (chuckles) at one time, they used to call us the Black Agency, and I was like, "Really?"

Well, there was only three of us, and we were all black, yeah, but (chuckles) we've never, we've always been open to whoever it was that came looking for help.

So the thing about it is, we don't care.

You can come in here with lightning bolts and swastikas, you know, or a bone through your nose.

None of that matters to us.

If you come in here and you're looking for an opportunity to get your life on track, and you're open to being assisted in that way and maybe following some guidance or some instruction, we got you.

We have over 250 years of cumulative incarceration time on staff, so we don't wear that like a badge of honor, but what it says is that nobody can come to Second Chance Center and tell us anything about doing time.

We know all about that.

We also know something about transitioning out here successfully, and navigating the barriers and challenges out here.

We know something about that too.

- You know, you come here to NGB on Saturdays, it's a good session.

(attendees chattering) - [Leader] Good morning, everybody.

- And I love coming here on the weekends because it's a great support, and I got the letter E for striving to make every day a better day and make better choices every day to become a better citizen, returning citizen.

So I really appreciate this place a lot.

I come here, you know, every Saturday when I can come, and I really enjoy it.

Super thankful that that came into my life, you know?

Because I didn't have a plan.

My plan was to get out and commit crimes, you know, just to get that money, that fast money, that fast life.

- Most people don't realize that 98% of folks who are currently incarcerated will one day be back on the streets, so it only makes sense I think, and behooves us as a community to be concerned about what they have to endure while they're inside, and what kind of opportunities are available for them when they come out.

It just makes sense, not just physical sense, it makes common sense.

But there's a thing about having access that's different for people who don't have it.

So the same kinds of experiences that one person may have had, healthcare and access to mental health treatment, access to substance abuse treatment, access to a good lawyer, access to bail when they got, for those folks, perhaps they don't wind up in prison.

- I knew that if I got in trouble again and ended up back in prison, I probably wasn't coming out.

And I was really ready to change my life and make a difference.

My first week outta prison and coming back to the Second Chance Center and Hassan, first he got me clothes to go out job searching with, flagger certification, OSHA certification.

Once I did get employed, he was proud of me and he asked me, "What's the next step?"

- What I found, what I learned over the course of the years that I worked for this organization was that people were cycling in and out of prison.

Even though we were there providing training and employment opportunities, there was something missing.

About 50% of folks were going back to prison.

And it seemed like the Department of Corrections expected that, 'cause that was the norm, and the people I worked for seemed to accept it.

I had a problem with both of those things.

November of 2011, we had three board members come to a staff meeting and inform us that they were shutting the program down in four days, and I came up with two things.

I had started writing a book four years earlier.

Hadn't written a word in two and a half years, so I said, "Finish what you started, dude."

And the other one was, if you think there's a better way of going about this work, if you really think you have the answers to some of the things that are missing, and you know, you know how to fill some of these gaps, stop being scared.

And that was the impetus for me, you know, starting Second Chance Center in my car.

And for the first 13 months, that's what it was, a mobile unit with me begging my way into halfway houses, offering addiction support services, and really just trying to get an opportunity to show folks what I had to offer around reentry, transition.

- Transitioning men and women back to society, we wanna give you a good neighbor.

We wanna reduce the chance that they will commit another crime.

So it's a public safety issue as well as, you know, it reduces taxpayer costs, right?

Because, you know, we pay a lot of money to incarcerate people, right?

And so, a lot of guys, they made these bad decisions based on some circumstances that if we can remove some of that, some people would choose to make better decisions, right?

And would choose to buy a house versus whatever they were doing before, and that helps the economy.

That helps your next door neighbor, 'cause now he has stake in that.

He has stake in, he or she has stake in that area.

He owns the house.

- Well, I'd like to think that some of them are experiencing such a thing called double jeopardy, you know, as it relates to housing and employment.

So what we do is try to mitigate and just intervene in those areas where we can assist them with standing tall on their feet and starting their lives over again.

- I've been coming to the Second Chance Center since January of 2021.

I was getting ready to get out, I had no plan.

I didn't know where I was gonna go, I had no resources.

I felt pretty alone, cut off from the world.

And I've been to prison before and when I got out, the area of Colorado I came from, southwest Colorado, they don't have a lot of resources there, so it's really hard to get some help, you know?

When you don't have anything and you're just let out to the streets.

So I wrote a letter to Second Chance, and they actually responded.

They've helped me a tremendous amount.

They put me in the crew house.

I was in the crew house for a little more than six months, but I found an apartment.

They helped me get into my apartment.

Crew house is, so it's like a house.

The one I was in had three bedrooms.

It's got a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and basically, your room is yours.

They have the bed, the dresser, everything you need to live and you get a key to your door, so you know, it's your personal space and you share the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room.

- Generally, people think you pay your debt to society and that's it.

That isn't it.

Collateral consequences, a lot of our folks can't return to their families because their families are living in subsidized housing, and in most instances, if you live in subsidized housing, you can't have someone living there with a felony.

And that means whether that's your mother or your wife, or your children, you can't go back there where you could be welcomed because of that.

That's a collateral consequence, and they go on and on like that.

Some jobs, just by the nature of checking a box, where have you ever been arrested?

Sometimes that's the thing that gets your application filed in the trash as opposed to being looked at.

That's a collateral consequence.

Some people can't get certain certifications because of a conviction, and I'm not talking about some high level kind of, you know, certification.

Even in Colorado right now, you can't get a barber's license because you have a felony, a barber's license.

- It's a lot of discouraging moments, because until I found 111, I was going filling out job applications at Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Taco Bell.

They wouldn't hire me.

They hired my son before I would get hired.

Like when your wife and your kids are able to provide legally, and you're only able to get out here in the streets and get enough money illegally to support home, knowing it's only a matter of time before it folds and you get caught.

Yeah, it's a horrible situation to live like that.

So the balancing it out is, it's good.

It's more good than bad, but it's not easy.

It's just a, I don't know, it's what keeps me going.

- The nation has a recidivism rate of about 40, 50%.

Second Chance Center has under 10%, and if they're in our wages program, less than 5%, right?

So we know that what we're doing is working.

- Our mission statement really kinda clarifies our intent because it's helping formally incarcerated people transition to lives of success and fulfillment.

We think those are two distinctly different things, like success being the kind of thing you could check off on some list, like this person is employed, this person has their apartment, or this person has a car.

Well, people go back to prison all the time with those boxes checked.

We've felt, and I believed early on that there was something else missing, and that's what it was, that fulfillment piece.

Like even with all those boxes checked, there was something missing for folks.

- So at Second Chance Center, we offer a wide array of supportive service programming with really the goal to wrap our arms around our partners and meet any of their needs that they might have.

That starts with our care management team with one-on-one mentoring, and is carried over to our weekly group mentoring sessions by the name of NGB, which stands for Never Going Back.

NGB is based on a book that was written by our founder, Hassan Latif, and addresses seven key steps to never going back to prison.

- Today's topic is gonna be centered around the third step in this book.

Knowledge of self is the best knowledge you could ever have.

If you have the knowledge of self, you could control yourself a lot better.

So that's the step we'll be looking at today, developing your own internal guidance system.

- I was very, very addicted to the street life, you know, criminal life, not even street life, just criminal life, just all the wrong, I was addicted to it.

That's what I wanted to do, I made a choice.

See, I don't know how I didn't know about the Never Going Back group or the "Never Going Back" book, like, I don't know how Hassan was my mentor and I never listened to the jewels that he was giving me.

He was giving me the blueprint from the beginning and I was, you know, I was hardheaded, I didn't believe it.

I didn't believe that nobody cared about me that much, not like that, and he really did, and he really do, and he showed me.

All he told me was, "You gotta put in the effort.

"If you put in the effort and show me you want this, "I'm gonna make sure you get it."

- So Second Chance Center is committed to removing barriers to employment for justice involved individuals, and in an effort to do that, we have developed an onsite Employment Opportunity Lab, which is a one stop shop for job seekers, employers, and other community-based organizations that are committed to fair chance hiring initiatives.

- I got a blessing, you know?

I got recommended to go to Local 111, I ain't never think that I could be taught how to climb up no power pole or how to switch out 5,000 volts of electricity, how to isolate, insulate, how to drive a manual CDL truck.

I encourage everybody that need work, come on.

They ain't doing no background check.

You're not filling out no application.

You sign in the books and you're getting up and going to work.

- [Participant] Thank you.

- Thank you.

- We serve a spectrum, a wide spectrum.

Some of our folks come here, man, they've done a lot of work on self.

They have pretty good ideas about what they wanna do.

They just need, you know, get pointed in the right direction and encouraged, and they're on their way.

- If a person is released, you know, why are we still holding them accountable to the crimes that they have served the time for?

Understanding that they may be on some type of supervision, and that post supervision should be enough, so when we talk about housing, which is one of the major things that our client partners come in for, when we talk about housing, how are we intervening in those areas?

How are we assisting these folks in those areas?

So this is what I'm charged with, and this is what our care managers meet about.

We brainstorm about ways to assist in bridging the gaps in those areas.

- A care manager is, we don't like to say case manager, because, you know, first of all, a lot of us had cases before, so I guess that's kinda like a loaded term for us.

And so we prefer to use care manager, 'cause we really care, you know, about, you know, our job is really to take care of people and things like that who come into these doors, so that's really what we're all here to do.

- So when they come here, the first thing they're probably gonna do is get a cup of coffee and sit down and start talking with a care manager.

You know, we gonna get them out of those clothes, 'cause we make it available so they can get work clothes, they can get interview clothes, you know?

If they go to a a halfway house, it's a little different, but if they come from prison, they're wearing khaki pants, a blue pullover shirt, and some plastic sneakers, and every predator on the street recognizes that outfit.

And so, we want not just to cut someone's ties to prison that they just left, but we don't want them to be victims on the street for someone to walk up on them thinking that they might have $100 debit card or are desperate enough that they'll fall for, you know, going to a check cashing place and cash this check, I'll give you $50, or someone with drugs in their hand talking about, "Do you need something?"

We don't want our folks to be confronted with that.

- As we thought about the folks coming out of incarceration, entering into homelessness, and you know, re-offending, just not having anywhere to go, so our executive director, Hassan Latif did a toolkit, and what came out of that is this beautiful building.

- We actually built a 50 unit permanent supportive housing development about a mile east of here called Providence At The Heights.

We call it PATH.

It was a low income housing tax credit project through a program that's been in existence since '87.

The folks who were eligible to live there were people at 30% of area median income or less who were chronically homeless, previously incarcerated with disabilities, mental, physical or emotional.

So we were able to build it.

We opened it up February 24th of 2020.

Leased up in 60 hours.

We had 49 adults and 11 children that moved in in 60 hours, just in time for COVID to strike.

There was a lot of opposition to this project early on, but it really has become a part of the community, and the residents have become a part of the community.

And it's something we hoped two years down the road, the people who were the most ardently against it would be like, "Why were we even tripping?

"This is a good thing."

- We start by keeping 'em housed, saying, "Hey, you're part of this community now.

"Whatever it is that you're going through, we're here to help."

It's a warm building.

It's a building where you can come in and walk through that door, and everything that you've gone through can just fall off of you, and you can live.

- You know, finding housing for our folks was a challenge, and man, we had very few options, and we were sending people to motels up and down Colfax like everybody else.

But the reality was that you could open your door in a motel room at 11 o'clock at night and be confronted with whatever triggered your worst decisions in life.

- [Wanda] So you can build a building, and you can have 100 units in it, but if people don't know what to do once they get in that unit, or they don't know which way to go, or how to maneuver, or you know, how to deal with some of their behaviors or any of that, you've gotta have the support inside the building.

- We're hoping that it serves as a template for others, because you know, that's 50 apartments, but in Aurora alone, we could use 1,000.

It's a issue that I think should be a community's concern as a whole, 'cause it ain't just people coming outta prison.

(participants clapping) (upbeat music) - I walked through the doors when they were on 16th and Dayton at Second Chance, didn't have anything, was homeless.

Now I'm in permanent housing at PATH, which is Second Chance.

I have income, all is working out, all is well, and I'm at peace.

I haven't been coming on Saturday, but for H, I chose habits because my habits were getting a little sloppy and a little raggedy.

And one thing I know when you know better, you do better, so if my habits, if I don't stay on the good habits, like the somebody else just said, I'm just a drink or a drug away from being right back where I started out when I came in here, so I chose habits today.

So you know, your habits can make or break you, and that's why I chose that.

Thank you.

(participants clapping) - I have to think every day about the right move, to do the right thing, to go to work, to learn at work, to go home to my kids, to help them with school, to help my wife with whatever she needs, to come up here to the Second Chance Center and help everybody that I can get into the union.

That takes a lotta effort, and it takes a lotta heart, and it takes a lotta thinking, and it takes a lot of not caring about myself, so to speak, because it's not just for me.

I feel good helping people out, but I feel like if I have enough people who's doing right, they're not gonna allow me to do wrong.

So that's just how I try to surround myself around people who's doing right, and wanna do right, and wanna live a better life.

- I think life is a state of recovery constantly, man.

When you stop recovering, you're dying.

You're heading in the back, the other direction.

You're heading back to the penitentiary.

You're heading back to the graveyard.

You're heading toward breaking relationships.

You're heading toward divorce.

I also wanna say we're always recovering on that social aspect in terms of relationships.

Sometime, man, we are trained to protect me all the time, and it's all about me, me, me.

But it's always bigger than us, man.

Ain't none of us would be here, man, if it wasn't for two people coming together and bringing you into this world, so everything is a relationship.

Some of us got kids, neighbors, friends.

Ain't none of us did it by ourself, man.

And so we always recovering and trying to re-nurture and put back into those relationships, man, because we're only gonna reach our potential, our highest potential based on our ability to connect with other people.

If you can't work with other people, man, you're only gonna go so far in life, and so that social-emotional piece is super important.

And finally, recovering that spiritual awareness, whatever that mean to you, and to me, that just means, man, trying to live by a set of principles.

- My oldest son's best friend got murdered, and then after my son's best friend got murdered, my son got shot.

And then after he got shot, he got shot again in the head and lost his left eye.

And then I lost, like without exaggerating, I lost like five of my closest friends in about a 18-month span, and two of their funerals was right across the street from the Second Chance Center.

It was gang related funerals.

You know, I didn't even try to go across the street to the Second Chance Center, and Hassan came across the street to me and walked through all my homies and everything, and was like, "Hey Mike, I know this is hard.

"I know that you're in pain right now, "but you're not going in the right direction.

"Come on across the street."

He gave me a cup of coffee.

He didn't care that I smelled like liquor.

He didn't care that I was wearing all kind of red.

He just was like, "Mike, you can do better, and I love you."

And my biggest challenge was to be able to have the strength not to go retaliate, but instead to try to show my son that I understand the pain and I understand the anger, because I've been in them situations, but life has to keep going on.

The letter I got today is T. One of the biggest things that I'm dealing with for myself right now is threatening thoughts.

You know what I mean?

And the threatening thoughts, they're not like, "Oh, we're gonna (censored) somebody up "or somebody gonna (censored) you up."

Nah, my threatening thoughts is like, "Do you really have what it takes to come up here "and talk to people and make a difference?"

- So when I see you, bro, I'm super, super proud.

Don't change it.

You start trying to change and tweak something, man, that ain't gonna even be you.

I love how you bring it.

You keep it real, and it connects with people, man.

It connect with everybody else, man.

If you try to change that bro, it ain't gonna be you.

I'm proud of you, man.

Keep doing it, bro.

- [Participant] I told him the same thing this morning when he was gonna talk to all the brothers over at the Tall House, man.

- [Participant] Yeah, you present yourself well, you got a great presentation, you got a great story.

- Cognitively structuring work is what we figured was needed in order for people to figure that out.

So we work off a very simple formula here, thoughts plus feelings equals behavior.

Our belief being that people need to do whatever work is required to take an honest look at how they got to think, like, how did you get to think it was all right to put a gun in somebody's face and take their stuff, you know?

What makes you think that because you have the strength or the capacity that you can physically dominate someone or force someone to do what you want them to do, what makes you think like that?

And the other part of that equation is the feelings, and like, having people really take an honest look at examining that, what's driving some of those behaviors and some of those thought patterns?

When people come here at the Second Chance Center, we expect them to succeed, as opposed to what many of our folks encounter everywhere else they go.

We expect them to succeed, and it's not just because we've had a track record of at least nine out of 10 people, you know, transition successfully, but because there's energy in that kind of encouragement.

Several years ago I was providing testimony at the legislature, and one of the state representatives asked me what the secret sauce was.

What I told them that day is what I still believe, that that provider recipient power dynamic, we reject that here.

We know that we are the stewards of resources, and we take that very seriously.

- [Interviewer] How is that navigating being, you know, a husband, a father, just a citizen?

What is that like balancing all that?

- It is a lot easier to balance that than it was to balance prison, and 60 cent a day, and racist police, and you know, being cellies with killers and rapists.

It's a lot easier to manage this.

- We don't say that this is an easy thing, getting past your past.

What we say is it's not complicated.

- In my situation, the resources that they've given me has made a difference between me falling back to that old life and staying on a good path to a good life.

So you know, I really appreciate, I get emotional, because I appreciate this place so much.

- And when people around the country are looking at what's called the Colorado Model, they're wondering how we did this, and I don't mean we at Second Chance Center.

I mean how we connected legislation, advocacy, community, how all of that came together to work.

And we wanna be a part of sharing that with folks as much as possible, and that's part of our mission now.

The average male's ejaculate is comprised of approximately 100 million sperm.

The odds are a hundred million to one.

Who could win with odds like that?

We already have.

Each of us were that one.

We didn't give up when everything around us just wanted us gone.

We started life winning.

Who's to say we can't do it again?

And whoever does say it, we don't have to listen to it.

- in fact, forget them .

(group applauding) - It don't say that in the book.

I'm saying that.

Yeah, anyway.

(gentle music) (gentle music)