"The most heartbreaking part of the book occurs when the other Wes Moore almost ends up leaving the drug trade, thanks to a job training program called Job Corps - but then he gets sucked back in. What went wrong?"
What we saw in the case of Wes is actually typical and illustrative of the situation that you have with ex-cons. Many of these people are disillusioned with school. They don't have college degrees. They have a record so they're not legally eligible for a lot of jobs, and to that, you add the burden of children. They're often not welcomed by their family or have precarious relations with them, and we're asking them to become upstanding members of society.
That was one of the most heartbreaking interviews with Wes, when we met specifically to talk about that. After that I went to my car, and I was unable to drive for half an hour because I was trying to absorb how close he was to doing something with himself, and yet how far he was and didn't even know. We need to figure out a better way to address recidivism in this country and find a better way to help those people who have served their debt to society, because we can't continue to pay for this financially and morally - having people with rap sheets as long as their arm because in many cases they don't know any other way.
"Now that you've written the book, what lesson do we take from your stories? What made you succeed where he failed?"
There is no one answer. We weren't responsible for the neighborhoods we happened to be born in. There are lots of issues that affect these kinds of outcomes: the abilities of families to use leverage to change their situation, their ability to support a child, the ability to give children the sense that they belong to something bigger than themselves.
Source: http://www.salon.com/2010/05/09/wes_moore_interview/
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