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?”
O
ne critical part of transitioning is
to help someone involved with the
justice system get involved with the em-
ployment 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 “some-
thing 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 rit-
uals shared by the society outside prison
walls. Weekly workshops at Fortune pre-
pare clients for job interviews, and, par-
ticularly, 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 crimi-
nal record, but it is legal, after a job has
been offered, to run a search on the pro-
spective 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 great-
est weakness. (“Uh, my greatest weak-
ness? 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 ap-
parent that he doesn’t know much about
cooking. (“You get in the good habit of
bullshitting white people,” Rivera re-
marked later. “And you start bullshit-
ting yourself.”) Interviewers like detail:
about work programs upstate, about
roofing or custodial work or how to op-
erate 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 back-
ground 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 some-
thing like: “Yes, when I was younger and
behaving stupidly, an unfortunate situ-
ation occurred and someone got badly
hurt. This led to my becoming involved
in the criminal-justice system. But I stud-
ied hard and attended several programs
while I was in jail. That person I was is
not who I am now.” That, the inter-
viewer explained, is a version of the per-
fect 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 in-
still 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 pos-
sibility of a confrontation on the street—
just a car-cutoff thing, you know; hap-
pens 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 resi-
dents. “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 audi-
tioning for acceptance into the pro-
gram 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 per-
son. 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 mid-
dle-class rituals and mores. Rivera con-
siders 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 so-
ciety would have to change, and I don’t
have a long enough life to wait for that
to happen.”
A
t a Thursday meeting a couple of
weeks later, a recent home-comer
praised another Castle client for gen-
tly urging him away from a confronta-
tion 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
