Articles

Work Zone; For Kenneth Glover, Making a Life After Prison Is a 24/7 Job

Neely Tucker, Washington Post Staff Writer - July 10, 2005 Sunday

The life of Kenneth "Boo" Glover started with broken glass and a fistfight, and then it got worse.

As an infant, he was abducted by his father in the bitterness of divorce. His mother, Barbara Jean Glover -- lean, gravel-voiced, hard-knuckled, of East Capitol and 58th streets -- found her child at her mother-in-law's house. She shattered the glass front door, knocked the woman down, kicked her in the face, punched out two of her teeth and walked out with her baby boy.

Broken glass, broken teeth, broken family.

It was 1968. You could find a lot of broken things that year. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis. Riots ripped black Washington apart and nearly 1,000 stores were torched. A dozen people were killed. Resurrection City, the idealistic tent city set up on the Mall by King's people, collapsed into squalor and disarray.

Broken city, broken dreams, broken lives.

Like a lot of young men in the rougher parts of D.C., Kenny Glover grew up hard and he grew up mean. He was on the front end of a generation of young men who, in their early twenties, would turn the city into the deadliest in America. Carnage and cocaine and R.I.P.s spray-painted in derelict alleys. The effects were devastating and well documented -- today, almost half of D.C.'s black men in Glover's generation have some sort of criminal record.

But not everything broken is lost forever, and not all lives lost to prison and violence must remain that way. Sometimes even veteran ex-inmates in the poorest parts of this city, men with almost no skills and no hope, can salvage some part of their lives.

It doesn't make the evening news. There aren't any medals -- you don't get awards for staying out of jail and showing up for work -- but sometimes you don't need medals to recognize what is honorable in a man.

In the days after Barbara Jean Glover brought infant Kenny home, she was young and single and determined, but she had no money. She moved Kenny, whom she called "Boo," and her older daughter, Kim, 12 times in 13 years. The rent money was late or nonexistent. She worked an office job, as a parking lot cashier at Redskins games, anything to stay off welfare.

"I wanted to have five kids," she remembers, "but two was enough."

Kim did fine. Kenny started smoking dope when he was 11.

He broke into an elementary school in Southeast that year with a white kid. They were seen. Even Kenny would later say, how dumb was that? How many white kids were there in all of Southeast to even be a suspect? The kid gave Kenny up in a heartbeat, and here came the police while Kenny was at baseball practice.

He grew tall and muscular.

By the time he was 14, his big sister was scared of him.

His mother was not. Barbara Jean loved him like a mother and fought him like a man, closed fists and no pulled punches. She threw him to the ground one day when he came home wearing a lumpy jacket. She pinned him down and slit the inside seam. Out spilled $450 in small bills and 50 nickel bags of marijuana. She kept the cash and got rid of the dope.

He went to Fairmont High in Prince George's County. He broke into 50 or 60 lockers. He was expelled and sent to a juvenile custody camp in Western Maryland. He escaped, got caught and was sent back to a rougher school, fought with the kids from Baltimore, came back to school in D.C. and did a lot of PCP. Angel dust, they called it then.

The other family members worked their way up. His mother got a job with the federal government. Kim went to college and on to a professional career.

Kenny slept in homeless shelters, on park benches, in bed with women whose names he didn't know. "I was out of control." He hung out around 14th and Pennsylvania, a street thug and a hustler and a crackhead. He was just another young black man clogging up the court calendar. Down in the holding cell at 500 Indiana Ave. NW, D.C. Superior Court, guys call it doing life on the installment plan -- cycling in and out of prison, all your sorry life.

"My record," Glover says, "is as big as a dictionary."

He was arrested twice in 1988 (robbery, assault), once in 1989 (robbery), three times in 1991 (cocaine, disorderly conduct, destruction of property), seven times in 1992 (theft, shoplifting, threats, theft, theft, parole violation, shoplifting), six times in 1993 (assault, theft, theft, parole violation, public drunkenness, assault with a deadly weapon), four times in 1994 (assault, assault, theft, theft), six times in 1995 (assault, cocaine, assault, robbery, disorderly, disorderly) and twice in 1996 (destruction of property, burglary).

Thirty-one arrests, 62 charged offenses in eight years -- and that didn't include his juvenile record. What a rap sheet. What a résumé. What a joke the courts were!

His last robbery -- holding up a gift shop on K Street in the middle of the day while high on crack -- earned him a six-year stint in a federal prison, and Kenneth Glover was back on the installment plan. There's all this talk about drug programs and treatment and rehabilitation instead of incarceration, and it all sounds good, except that none of it did Kenny Glover any good. What caught Glover's attention was hard time.

He was sent to Sussex, a hard-time prison in Virginia. He was 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed a good 230, but the inmates there scared him. These weren't hustlers and thugs. These were enforcers and gang muscle. For the first time in his life, he had a moment of what might be called enlightenment -- that he would die in here. Enlightenment, Part 2: He did not want to go out like a dog in a gutter.

"The inmates were the worst people I had ever seen in my life," he remembers. "We stayed on lockdown so much you couldn't think. The prison didn't feed you anything. I lost 30 pounds. They didn't care. You were a piece of meat. "

He fought the drugs for two years -- yes, you can get as high as you want in prison -- and finally got the jones out of his system. He converted to Christianity, that jailhouse cliche, but he was pretty sure he meant it. He prayed, and felt something stir in the darkness inside him. He began to have the idea that he might want something different for himself. He wondered what that might be.

"I learned to be alone," he says. "I learned to deal with Kenneth. When I got those ill feelings, I had to talk to somebody. Had to get it out of me. A lot of guys don't want to do that. They think, you know, it's less than being a man."

This was all grand, really, Kenny the Sensitive Convict, but the fact is: Nobody cared.

Hard? That's making it legit on the street. That's working a grunt job out in the heat and the cold, earning a few dollars by the hour, because that's all that most guys who come out of prison are qualified to do. Ex-cons like Glover, they're about 75 percent of the city's homicide victims, never mind the perps. Two-thirds are unemployed. Forty percent score high on personality disorder scales. They read, on average, at the level of a fairly bright 13-year-old. Nearly three out of four have "severe" addiction problems.

When Glover was released on March 13, 2002, he was one of 2,000 such men and women who return to D.C. from prison each year. Vegas wouldn't have given odds on him lasting a month.

He was 34 years old. He didn't have a dime. No job skills. No high school degree. No credit. No place to live.

How does a man survive such a circumstance of his own making? How does someone whose life is riddled with such abject failure and irresponsibility begin anew?

He broke it down to days. To hours. Work. Church. Family. Groceries. Again.

"Most guys don't come out and figure they gonna rob a bank," he says. "They come out, they got good intentions, they get that first paycheck, though, and it goes right up their nose. I didn't want to do that. I already been arrested 1,500 times."

Kim, ever the good big sister, made some calls and found a program called the East of the River Clergy, Police, Community Partnership. It's run by Donald Isaac, who ministers to "the least, the last and the lost." A lot of those are former prison inmates, and he has a thorough and world-weary knowledge of the scams and hustles ex-offenders play. The nonprofit is based in a refurbished crack house in the 4100 block of First Street SE, near the Prince George's line, and it was here that Glover walked in one day, looking for help. He offered to clean the place. He went out and started raking leaves, for free.

"Kenny was figuring out so much about how to just live life," Isaac says. "He was like a lot of guys, so much in a hurry. They've been planning, all this time in prison, and they want to get out and make it happen now, and it's not just going to happen like that. They don't realize the level of their literacy skills, their inability to show up every day, the wages they're going to earn."

Isaac put Glover to work at the office, emptying garbage cans and the like, giving him a token salary of $6 or $7 an hour. Isaac also set him up in an apartment next door, a grim building devoted to housing former inmates, but a place that kept him off the street. And, without much hope, Isaac sent Glover to a construction job, part of a social services program to help ex-offenders get back to work.

The jobs were for the taking. The problem was that nobody wanted them.

"I referred 60 or so people into the program," Isaac says. "Nobody lasted."

A $10.50-an-hour gig working open-air construction, toting and lifting, sweating and grunting. The odds were 60 to 1 that the ex-con would flame out in a week.

Glover got some boots and gloves and a hard hat. He had to get up by 3 or 4 a.m. to be at work by 7. His mother helped him buy a beat-up 1991 Ford van with 76,000 miles on it to get him back and forth. He made it through one week, then another. Sundays he went to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, a tiny congregation where his cousin was the pastor.

He prayed for strength.

Spring turned to fall, and his pay moved to $13.50 an hour. He worked the custodian job at Isaac's nonprofit on weekends, for which he was paid $350 a month. A good month, he could make $900, maybe $1,000 if he got some overtime.

He stayed sober. He passed up the drug sales in front of his apartment building. He did his clothes at a laundromat, pumping in the quarters, flirting with the women. He had brief relationships but nothing lasted. One woman he liked, they'd go jogging together. Her mother found out Kenny's history. She told her daughter to drop him like a bad habit. She did.

One day last summer, the heat in his apartment was stifling.

It's a living room and a space for a tiny dining table, a slot of a kitchen, a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom. He sleeps in one room; modest weight-lifting equipment is in the other. There is almost nothing on the walls, save for a clock and a sign that says "Bless My Apartment." A ceiling fan beats the air. A small television is turned to face a smoked-glass dining table, the top cluttered with papers and ketchup and mustard and hot sauce bottles. He's a big man, up to 250 pounds, wearing gray sweat pants despite the heat, and he's twitchy.

"I know if I slip, I'm gone for the rest of my life," he is saying, his voice husky. "I got two felonies. Guys out there on the street see me in the van, they ask me for a ride, it's not easy. I got to think if they're clean or not. I got to think if they're gonna leave something in my van. I just can't let them in. They don't like it, but I can't take that chance. I'm a recovering addict. I could be back out there tomorrow."

It's an uncomfortable thought. Temptation is always just outside the door. Guys hang out on the corner, dealing. Prostitutes walk by, day and night. He blinks a couple of times, as if to focus.

He turns his attention to bills -- electric, rent, car insurance, the phone. He has no credit and no checking account. He has to pay most of these in person with money orders. His hands are sweaty.

He turns to the blueprints spread out over the table.

His employer, Miller and Long, has given him a chance to get ahead. It is paying his tuition, and paying him to attend, a carpentry class run by Amalgamated Builders and Contractors. It trains unskilled workers. It meets once a week for two years. If he makes it, he'll earn an apprenticeship license. It could boost his salary to $23 an hour. He also wants to learn to operate a crane, an even higher-paying skill that could earn him $70,000, $80,000 a year.

"You got to have a plan," he is saying. "By the time I'm 40, I want to be in a crane, be married, have a family, maybe a house. They got programs, you know, for people who never had a house, what you call them, first-time homeowners. People who don't got a lot of money. That's what I got my eye on."

By fall, he's beginning to make a believer out of a few people.

He's in a small classroom in a two-story building on East-West Highway in Prince George's County. There are a dozen guys in class, slumping over their desks. Glover is the only native English speaker. The others are Latino immigrants. The teacher, Bruce Weatherald, conducts the class in Spanish, then backs up and does it in English for Glover.

The lesson is tedious. It's about using a carpenter's level to determine the relative height of a wall in a building constructed on land of differing elevations. Weatherald talks to them about the formula for computing how much pressure there is in a form of poured concrete.

"But what about vibrated concrete?" he asks. There are giggles. Guys. You can count on it.

Weatherald acknowledges this with a smile, then, "Okay, I'm not playing now -- you ever vibrated concrete? You held onto a vibrator? It takes muscles -- "

And this is lost, lost, the guys laughing out loud, elbowing one another.

Glover is one of the best students in class. He averages nearly 90 on most tests. By December, Miller and Long is using him to represent the ex-offender program. He is a good speaker, earnest and brief, and he talks to the students at Cardozo High School about new vocational classes his company is helping sponsor.

"The message I want to get to you is to please get this education," he tells them. "All I wanted to do in school was learn enough math to count my money. I didn't think I'd need all this math. I didn't. But I do now. And you can make good money in this work. My future looks bright, and I want y'all's future to look bright, too."

In June he graduates from the carpentry program, second in his class. Twenty-one students started, nine finished.

Remember the 60 to 1 odds against?

Those are the odds you have to beat, just to survive.

In late May, there was a very small celebration that nobody in the wider world noticed.

Kenneth "Boo" Glover turned 37 years old, out of prison, drug-free, employed. A major accomplishment in a small world.

Present at a birthday luncheon at the Timbuktu Restaurant in Hanover were the faithful women in his life -- mother Barbara Jean, sister Kim and aunt Cookie. They are seated among people out after church, all in their Sunday best. He blesses the food and says in prayer, "Thank you, Lord, for 37 years, to be where I am."

And the women say, "Amen."

The four of them open their eyes and look up. Barbara Jean says, "Well. Thirty-seven. You happy, son?"

"Yeah, Ma, I am. I didn't think I'd make it to 25."

"Neither did I."

She laughs. There is genuine affection between them, the warmth of a life together and battles survived. During lunch, the conversation turns to Kenny-back-in-the-day chatter, an overlapping story about an ill-fated trip the women made, two decades ago, to visit him in a remote juvenile detention center:

"We got stuck in the mud -- "

"That blue car -- "

"The Impala?"

"Mama couldn't drive in the mud for -- "

"Thought we was gonna die -- "

"It was the blue Vega. The Vega."

"Raining like everything -- "

"The Vega? Lord, I thought -- "

"Couldn't find the place for -- "

"Might well have been in West Virginia -- "

"So mad at that boy -- "

And it dissolves into warm female laughter, razzing the guest of honor, who is looking down at the table and smiling.

"I think I been to jail enough for everybody in my whole family," he says, and the laughter starts up again.

"You got it covered for the grandkids?"

"Ain't no reason for anybody else in this family to go to jail for a few generations -- "

"I can tell 'em 'bout the food -- "

"Just tell the judge, 'My uncle did my time for me.' " And the conversation melts into a stream of affection, drifting through the afternoon, lost in the conversations of other families at other tables.

Laughter is a good thing. When it is about pain, it is one way of showing that the hurt is past.

Snapshot, the life of Kenneth Glover, a few days later:

He awakens three hours and change after midnight. A box fan is blowing, stirring the stale apartment air. There are voices from the street below. Two men are drinking a beer and offering drugs to a passing driver.

He staggers out of bed and switches on the tube, ESPN. "SportsCenter." Makes some oatmeal. Eats it out of a plastic bowl, standing up in the kitchen.

At 4:23, he pulls the apartment door shut behind him. Step, step, down the stairwell, work boots slap-slapping in the predawn darkness, then he's outside, exchanging nods with the men on the sidewalk. There will always be men here. There will always be the hollow-eyed women, the ones who will do things in the alley for a few crumpled dollars.

He sniffs and wipes his eyes, cranking his aging Ford van.

By sunrise, he is another figure at work on the growing spine of an office building near Union Station. For the few passersby who bother to look up, he can be seen on the top floor in hard hat and sunglasses, a native son of Washington five floors up, a shadow against the brilliant blue sky.

He has little to sustain him up there but family, determination and a belief in something beyond what he can see.

Sometimes, when you are strong and life is merciful, what is broken can be made whole.

Sometimes, that is just enough.

CORRECTION-DATE: July 12, 2005

CORRECTION:

A July 10 Style article about former inmate Kenneth Glover incorrectly identified the organization that runs a carpentry program in which he was enrolled. It is the Associated Builders and Contractors Inc., not the Amalgamated Builders and Contractors.