BALTIMORE -- The week after being released from prison, Bakari Atiba hopped on a bus to go see his home detention case manager without any idea of how to navigate public transportation.
“I was a little paranoid. I felt like everyone was looking at me. ‘Yeah, this man just came home from jail,’” he said. “It was a wild experience.”
After serving 20 years for murder, Atiba, 44, who lives in the White Marsh, Maryland, area, said that he had been freed from the Dorsey Run Correctional Facility in Jessup in March 2019. Now he had to figure out the bus’s schedule and how to pay for the ride.
Atiba, who is under supervision until May 2029, according to the Maryland Parole Commission, said Helping Oppressed People Excel (H.O.P.E.) helped him reintegrate into society. The Mount Vernon-based program worked with him to get a Social Security card, birth certificate and state identification by getting and filling out the necessary forms with him.
Reentry programs can lower the number of times a person returns to prison, known as recidivism, because they provide things like housing, mental healthcare and computer training, said Brian Saccenti, director of Maryland’s Office of the Public Defenders Decarceration Initiative, which works to reduce the number of people in prison. According to a 2021 report by the nonprofit Open Society Institute-Baltimore, Maryland’s recidivism rate is 34%, a number that has been trending down.
However, not everyone agrees with the program’s goals.
Velada Gibson, sister of George Hynson, the man Atiba shot and killed in 1999, said that in addition to killing her brother, Atiba purposefully shot other guests at the party.
“That boy should’ve gotten life – that’s the bottom line,” she said.
According to court records, the shooting occurred following a fight at a party in Harford County in 1999. A woman at the party confronted Atiba “about his manners in putting his hands in a plate of food in the kitchen,” according to court records. Atiba says he was asked by a woman to make his own plate and then was attacked by a group of men.
After the fight, Atiba went home to get his unlicensed gun. Returning to the house, he fatally shot Hynson and wounded Terry Beck, Jr., Julio Ceasar Solis and Shamail Azamby King.
“This was a brutal crime,” said Bill Christoforo, who prosecuted the case for the State Attorney’s Office of Harford County in 2000 and is now retired.
“You go and you get a gun and you come back and people have their back turned watching a basketball game,” Christoforo said. “[Atiba] could’ve very easily killed more than one person.”
Howard Cardin, defense attorney for Atiba, said justice has already been served.
Atiba says that when he was first released, his family called him “Camera Man” because of how many pictures he took with his phone.
He also worked at Country Pride, a buffet-style restaurant in Jessup. Holding a job was not a condition of his release, he said.
“I promised myself I would always keep a legal job,” he said.
But he still faced challenges. He commuted three hours one way by bus from his home in Gwynn Oak, where he lived with his aunt, to his job.
He said that H.O.P.E., which works with at least 60 former prisoners annually, helped him during the first sixth months, and that going to group meetings held by H.O.P.E. allowed him to share some of the issues, such as anxiety, he experienced with other former inmates. Now he serves as a community liaison for H.O.P.E.
“To have other men that had gone through that process and confronted a lot of the barriers that you’re confronting, that goes a long way,” he said. “It’s very helpful.” H.O.P.E. serves men and women.
Several reentry programs in Baltimore are run by former inmates.
The CEO and founder of H.O.P.E. is Antoin Quarles, who began using and selling drugs in Park Heights at 12. The company started in 2017 and offers services, such as housing, education and job training.
In addition, Marlo Hargrove Sr., founder and CEO of Freedom. Advocates. Celebrating. Ex-offenders, Inc (F.A.C.E), grew up in Harlem Park. He started using drugs in his 20s after losing his parents to alcoholism. In 2000, he went to prison for using and selling heroin and cocaine.
Hargrove founded F.A.C.E about 20 years ago because he wanted to help others after overcoming his addiction. He took part in a similar reentry program.
F.A.C.E lasts between six and 18 months and has an 85% completion rate. The duration of the program — which requires sobriety ― depends on several factors, including how long the court says participants must remain in the program. Housing — in the form of leased residences — is offered, along with workforce development and job placement services.
Balimore’s Office of Equity and Civil rights lists at least eight reentry programs in or around the Baltimore area. It is unclear how many people they serve.
In 2020 roughly 2,000 former inmates returned to Baltimore from prison and from the Baltimore City Pretrial Complex, said Wesley Dawson, associate director for community engagement and opportunity at the mayor’s office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. He added about 2,400 former inmates are expected to return to Baltimore City every year.
He said a reentry action council will be created in the coming months that is composed of community leaders, reentry advocates and former prisoners. Dawson noted that based on the needs, housing, medical care, employment and drug abuse treatment would be provided.
While the city intends to create its own reentry programs, advocates said more funding should go to existing programs.
Eric Ford, director of the Choice Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said more funding could go toward increasing staff salaries. The Choice Program works with juvenile offenders. H.O.P.E doesn’t accept juveniles.
University campuses can be crucial in addressing some of the problems former prisoners encounter, Ford said. For instance, universities can allow their campuses to be used for reentry programs.
“We need that financial support to continue to do the work. It takes money to do this work,” Hargrove said.
When asked about how much Baltimore spends on reentry programs, the city released the following statement: “[The city] has awarded $200,000 to community-based organizations dedicated to reentry and has contracted with the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services for $12,690,000 reserved for participants in the City’s Returning Citizens Behind the Wall program.
[The Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services] will act as a fiduciary to process these dollars that will be used for paid employment for individuals preparing to transition back into their communities, along with providing wraparound supports before and upon their return.”
Now Atiba, who changed his name from Mark Edwards after his release, said he is a community leadership coordinator for Charm City Care Connection, a “harm reduction” organization in East Baltimore, where he oversees a workforce development program for former inmates and homeless people, among other things.
“My debt wouldn’t be fully repaid if I didn’t come out here and become an asset in the community instead of a detriment,” he said.
____
