By Jeff Shields
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — Everett Gillison, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor for public safety, looks down at an aerial map of the city’s prison complex spread out in his office, runs his finger over the obsolete House of Correction, and talks about tearing it down and building a job-training center where it now stands.
The vision is intoxicating - taking the wrecking ball to a prison in a city with one of the highest incarceration rates in the country. All this while making the city safer.
Gillison has a start. The city has reduced its prison population from more than 9,800 in January 2009 to less than 8,300 last week, with the help of new initiatives aimed at ending the warehousing of nonviolent offenders. It has been accompanied by a decrease in crime.
But no walls in any of the city’s six prisons will fall before that number drops to 6,500, and Gillison needs a new tool to get there.
States including New Jersey are already using that tool, known as day reporting. It’s a more efficient way to deliver critical services to nonviolent offenders while providing supervision and a certain degree of punishment.
Think of it as an expanded parole office with job training, drug testing, classrooms, and counseling.
“My vision is that this is your one-stop shop, where this is close to your house,” said Gillison. “You have a better chance at a better outcome if you can keep people in communities rather than locking them up.”
In October the city issued a request for proposals for day-reporting centers, with the plan to establish 10 throughout the city, in neighborhoods with the highest concentration of ex-offenders.
The concept is not new; former Prisons Commissioner Leon A. King II recommended day reporting to Nutter before he left in 2008. It has the support of those most involved in prisoner reentry in the city, including Mayor Nutter; former Mayor W. Wilson Goode and his son, Councilman W. Wilson Goode Jr.; and District Attorney Seth Williams.
On the streets of Southwest Philadelphia, however, those progressive ideas are getting roughed up.
The first publicized proposal for a day-reporting center at 52nd Street and Grays Avenue has been welcomed with no less than a neighborhood uprising, a war between City Council titans, and stiff political opposition to the zoning change for what the city defines as a “private prison.”
“It’s truly a nightmare that’s trying to occur, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen,” said Greg Moses, chairman of Ward 40B in Southwest Philadelphia and director of the Southwest Association for Involvement and Development, a local neighborhood group. Moses said he has more than 2,000 signatures opposing the project.
The men behind the “nightmare” are Ronald Watts and his son David from Vineland, N.J.
Their vision is no smaller than Gillison’s, their pitch no less idealistic.
They answered the city’s call with a plan to convert the mothballed M.A.B. Paint factory at 5213 Grays Ave.
Their proposal, called “Vision-nary Community Re-Entry Centers,” or VCRC, would provide job search resources, vocational training and jobs through companies modeled after the Delancey Street Foundation, which puts addicts and ex-convicts to work in their own businesses, including moving companies and restaurants.
Inside, those ordered to be there would take classes in life skills, receive counseling for domestic violence and addictions, and work toward their high school equivalency diploma or take college courses. The community would be involved as part of the center’s advisory board.
The VCRC proposal goes beyond what Gillison is contemplating - their facility could even potentially house 250 offenders in transitional housing for short periods of time at the 200,000-square-foot building.
“We really see the Philadelphia model and what we are offering as the gold standard of reintegration,” said Ronald Watts, a former Cheyney University professor, who was involved in bringing college courses to inmates at Graterford Prison.
Watts had a connection in Philadelphia in former Mayor Goode, who graduated from Morgan State University, where Watts once taught. Goode has devoted his post-political life to prisoner reentry. He took the Wattses to meet City Council members last spring, and West Philadelphia Councilwoman Jannie L. Blackwell jumped at the project.
Blackwell organized three community meetings in her district, but Moses said Blackwell ignored a critical group - the neighbors on the south side of 54th Street, where Council President Anna C. Verna’s Second District begins.
Moses and James Harris Jr., assistant director of Southwest AID, said they found out about VCRC only the day before the Feb. 2 Zoning Board of Adjustment hearing. All they had in hand was a required notice posted on local streets - a notice they said virtually no one saw - announcing the application to the ZBA for “consideration of permit for a private prison [halfway house] with accessory office and accessory amenities in an existing building.”
Fran Burns, the city’s commissioner of licenses and inspections, said facilities dealing with offenders sentenced to a program by the court are classified as a prison, though the Wattses and Gillison object to that categorization.
“Do I look like a jailer?” David Watts, a plastic surgeon who has worked with prisoners in New Jersey, asked grumpy residents at the Kingsessing Recreation Center on March 1, after the ZBA recommended they meet with community members.
“Yes!” came the answer with such unified enthusiasm that the crowd of about 250 burst out laughing.
That meeting went relatively smoothly, but Moses and about 300 neighbors, who refused to attend the March 1 meeting, held a meeting the next night at Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School, six block from the proposed day center.
Blackwell regarded the Moses meeting as a political “setup” by State Sen. Anthony Williams, a political rival. She advised Ronald and David Watts not to attend, and they did not. Moses said he has had no contact with Williams. Williams did not return calls seeking comment.
Verna wrote to the ZBA to back up her residents and their concerns, breaching the politically sacred tradition on Council of never treading on thy neighbor’s district. Blackwell exploded, touching off a rare public feud between two formidable Council members.
“I read with great dismay your letter to the zoning board about a project in my councilmanic district!” Blackwell wrote, underlining words for emphasis in a March 9 letter. “Never have I seen nor heard of one councilperson interfering in zoning in another district, and certainly not without that councilperson having any knowledge of these actions.”
The conflict doesn’t bode well for dreams of closing the House of Correction, built in 1874 and reconstructed in 1927, which was designed for 1,300 inmates and now has more than 1,420. It is the place where “triple celling” the practice most complained about by civil rights activists has occurred regularly.
Now both sides await a ruling by the ZBA, and city officials ponder a better way to get their message across.
“Everyone wants to reduce the prison population, everyone wants to reduce recidivism, everybody supports reentry. . . . It’s something that takes better advocacy on our part to allay people’s rational fears,” said District Attorney Seth Williams.
Gillison and prisons commissioner Louis Giorla are hoping for $200,000 in next year’s budget to get at least one center up and running. The city expects to choose a winning applicant in 30 days.
Gillison understands the fear from neighbors but says the centers will serve offenders who already live there and are destined to return.
“I understand that people know their neighbors, and maybe that’s why they say, ‘I don’t want them here.’ But these are the places they’re coming back to.”
Copyright 2010 Philadelphia Newspapers, LLC