Out of jail and straight to the drug house. Harlem. He knew they would give him money. $10,000 in his pocket, no questions asked. The giiiiiiiirls and the caaaaaaaaars – started at age 13. “I was like Donald Trump or somethin.” The fast life.

“When I was 16 — that’s when I first got arrested for sellin’ drugs. They let me go. Not really let me go. ... I got one to three years for that. I came home – did it again – and I’ve been going back to jail since 16.”

Every time he got out, he had the same game plan.

“Get out. And get – more – money.”

So he started robbing banks, seven of them. He got caught – 12 years this time. His longest sentence to date. His girlfriend moved to Ithaca.

“She said, ‘Well come up here, I’m ready, you know, we can start something, we can start over,’ so and so and so. ‘I ain’t using drugs no more,’ so and so and so. I said okay.”

Curtis Smith backtracks through his life, stumbling over dates and a chronology he can’t easily recall. It’s a mesh of odd jobs and prison terms that leaves dates blurred and sentences falling somewhere between two months and two years – he’s never sure. When he adds them up, the numbers never quite work out.

“Three-time felon, you’re a career criminal,” he said. “Period.”

Nearly 2.2 million people in the United States are in prison or jail. According to a 2006 study by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, more than 60 percent of former prisoners will be rearrested within three years of their release and more than half will be re-incarcerated.

Marjorie Olds, a former judge at the Ithaca Community Treatment Court and lecturer of sociology at Ithaca College, said communities are not adequately providing for people re-entering society.

“We reach a feeling about how we want our society to be today and in the future and how we’re going to invest our resources — whether it’s helping people start a new life, or it’s setting them up to go back to jail,” she said.

The cycle of re-incarceration is fueled in part by addiction, Olds said. Smith, 45, went to jail for the first time because he was selling drugs. Then he started using. Along with the addiction came more serious crimes.

“If we went to jail for a year, or if we go to prison, one to three [years], and we get out, we’d still be addicts or alcoholics or have mental health issues,” Olds said.

When people come home, Olds said, they need structure: someone to greet them, take them to a shelter and help them find a job. For most, none of these things are available.

One of Olds’ solutions is Drug Court, a program that gives ex-convicts the opportunity to be in a structured recovery program rather than prison. In the Ithaca Community Treatment Court, clients report to work programs every morning and to the judge in the afternoon. They are drug tested regularly. It’s about offering people the basics: work, sober housing and a lot of accountability.

As a drug hustler, Smith would pay kids to hold his product, knowing if the cops caught them they’d get lesser sentences. Now, he talks to kids in Ithaca about the dangers of a life of crime.

He works through Circle of Recovery, a group that was started by Gino Bush, an Ithaca activist, in 1997. Bush, 65, created the group to support African American men in Ithaca who are battling  addiction. The circle started with four men, but grew fast to a community of nearly 15.

Bush went to jail when he was 14. He said there came a time during his 17-year sentence when he forgot what it was like to live outside of prison. When he left, it meant readjusting to a world he didn’t know.

“I was 14 when I went in and I was in my 30s when I came out, [but] I was still 14 because you don’t mature normally in prison,” he said. “You’re not living in a normal society. You’re living in a society that’s surrounded by four walls, steel bars and concrete and a lot of negative people.”

Bush is now known in Ithaca’s ex-convict community as the man who can get people jobs. As many as five a week come to him for help. Through word-of-mouth he has slowly built a community of business owners who are willing to give work to people with records. He’ll offer his help, and sometimes a $20 bill, when money and hope are low.

“People that are really trying to change their lives, all they need is a chance,” he said. “The more people in the community hear these stories, the more they feel as though they’re wiling to take a risk.”

Kenneth W. Courtney, an Ithaca resident, spent four years living in Ithaca without steady work. He moved here in 2003 after being released from a 15-year sentence in New York City.

He got his Commercial Drivers License, put out applications from Buttermilk Falls to Locke, N.Y., and waited for calls. But the calls never came, and as the weeks turned into years without steady employment, he began to see the inequality.

“I had an interview for a garbage throwing position in sanitation,” he said. “They told me that they got somebody that had more experience. I didn’t realize that you had to have experience to throw garbage.”

Schelley Michell-Nunn, director of human resources for the City of Ithaca, said a criminal background can sometimes dictate job placement.

“[One department] does believe in second chances, so there’s a tendency for them to hire individuals who may have had a criminal record,” she said. “... Now my police department, .. we don’t hire anyone with any kind of criminal background.”

When applying for a job, Smith never writes that he’s a three-time felon, opting to explain his history in the interview. He tells them he robbed banks because he was on drugs, but has been clean for 16 years — that he has changed his life. He asks for a chance to prove himself.

“They say, ‘Okay Mr. Smith, we’ll get back with you. We just want to check a few things out,’” he said. “When they don’t call me I know why.”

Smith has been out of the system for six years. It’s one of the longest times he’s spent out of a jail cell since he was a kid running the streets of Harlem. He’ll keep looking for a job that pays a little more than the last and writing “will explain history in interview” on the applications, working against the label “career criminal.”

“If they came to me today and said, ‘Curtis, Curtis, we got a plan now, it’s going to work, we won’t get caught,’ and so and so and so and so, I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “My heart ain’t in it. I’m not stayin’ in prison. I’m not dyin’ in prison.”