This is a story on young people on probation from Sing Sing, a renowned maximum-security prison 30 miles north of New York. Sing Sing has the most beautiful view, but there are walls so big that you cannot see it when you are inside. I met them at the exit of these walls, the day the doors finally open on a freedom they are often scared of. They are serious violent offenders, offered a re-entry initiative because they well behaved. When they leave Sing Sing they are given a $4 Metro Card and a $40 check, and then they come home to the most under serviced communities and neighborhoods. Most of the time they either do not have house, or they are not allowed back to their families. They have to follow a series of re-integration programs, based on which their probation will either last or not. According to the Correctional Association of New York, in 2006 there were about 63,000 prisoners in NY State prisons. 50.4% are Afro-Americans and 30% Latin Americans. More than 50% do not have high school degree, and 60-70% have a history of drug abuses. The numbers are even more significant if one looks at the juvenile imprisonment. NYC continues to jail a large number of teenagers for minor crimes that do not cause any threat to public security. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the average cost for the detention of a teenager is $170,820, while that of a student in public high school is about $12,000. Even in the case of juvenile justice the number of Afro American and Latino American is largely higher: 95% of those in jail in juvenile prisons. The majority of these youth come from the poorest neighbourhoods of the city such as South Bronx, East Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant e East New York, neighbourhoods with terrible housing and school conditions. It is probably not a case that in 2006 46% of the teenagers who left prison were incarcerated again few months later. Here’s some faces to finally give a name to these numbers: Brian, Allen, Calvin and Dayna. Most of them with terrible backgrounds and non existent families. Here’s these young people telling their past, their dreams, their fears and their struggle to remain ‘straight’ and not to go back in anymore. They live in shelters, at times they work three jobs, and they do not trust anyone. With this story I did not only want to cover the big problem of detention in the US, with its incredibly large population of prisoners, but also the problem of prevention, considering that the majority of them comes from the same poor and troubles neighborhood, where little investments are made and where at times the walls of Sing Sing are an obligatory stop.

New York, September 2006