CONFIDANT
After 37 yrs. in prison, he gets help for freed inmates
WHEN CARL DUKES was released from prison after more than 30 years behind bars, he had no idea what to do next.
He spent his first few months of freedom in two of the city’s most dangerous and rundown shelters and desperately tried to find a job.
Now, Dukes, 74, wakes each day at the crack of dawn and makes his way to the Long Island City, Queens, headquarters of the Fortune Society, an organization that helps former prisoners.
He grabs a handful of letters from a plastic bucket on the main floor and brings them up to his office. Dukes, who lives at Fortune’s permanent supportivehousing building known as Castle Gardens, reads each letter carefully.
They come from prisoners in New York and throughout the country. They typically ask about job opportunities, housing ideas, free book services and legal assistance.
Dukes proudly responds to each using a set of 15 templates he created and constantly updates.
“It’s my way of giving back to those in need,” he said during an interview by his desk Wednesday at the Northern Blvd. nonprofit.
Dukes is a sentry at the gates of a multitude of programs that await for those who have made it to the finish line of their sentences. He tries to inspire and keep the responses upbeat. But he’s also a symbol of the future that’s weighed down by the crippling limitations many will face.
Good housing and jobs are limited and most will end up in the city’s overtaxed shelter system.
There were 22,628 prisoners released from New York State facilities in 2016, the latest records show. The Fortune Society has the capability to provide housing for about 400 of those people each year.
The rest are left to fend for themselves, perhaps with assistance from family or through charities typically averse to helping former felons.
“More than half of people released on parole after serving time for felonies end up in large, dehumanizing barracks-style shelters rife with violence and drug use,” JoAnne Page, president of the Fortune Society, wrote in a recent op-ed.
“According to the federal government, people getting right out of prison who have nowhere to live are not considered homeless and don’t qualify for housing programs supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development,” she added.
Still, Dukes does his best to inspire, and some letters resonate.
“I can understand a lot of things they are going through,” he said.
Occasionally, an inmate with years left on his sentence asks for a list of educational and job programs being offered by the Fortune Society and other groups. “They dream,” he said. Dukes gently tells them he will share that information — data that is put into their case files before they go before a parole board — when their release date gets closer.
At work, he shares space with the organization’s founder, David Rothenberg, who at 84 still comes to work each day for a few hours.
The two seniors hit it off when Dukes first moved into the group’s emergency supportivehousing complex in March 2008.
Like many others recently released from prison, Dukes sought assistance from the Fortune Society. The group tries to find housing and jobs for as many former inmates as possible, especially people like Dukes, who are older and have done long stretches.
He was eventually chosen to replace the former ex-convict in charge of reading and responding to the more than 3,000 letters the organization gets each year. The gig is part-time and paid for with a federal grant.
Some of the letters are handwritten and look like indecipherable scribbles.
“I’ll walk away from my desk and come back to it a few hours later,” he said of such notes as he sat at his desk in the corner of the cramped office.
The tight working conditions are nothing new to Dukes.
He spent 37 years in upstate prisons after he was busted, along with a crew of four, for fatally shooting a shopper in a Harlem supermarket during a robbery. The criminal case lasted 17 months, the longest in state history.
One of the robbers, Alfred Plummer, admitted to shooting a 30-year-old customer, Phillip Crawford.
Dukes says that for the first decade or so in prison he “wasn’t a nice person.”
But over time his outlook changed and he found a purpose, eventually beginning to focus on lobbying state lawmakers for better penitentiary programs, especially for new prisoners.
Despite that activism, Dukes never saw himself becoming the first point of contact many prisoners have with the Fortune Society.
I never made no promises” to the parole board, he recalls. “But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew there’d always be a way to contribute.”