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Local NewsSafe Streets Offers A Second ChanceBy George Mallet
MILWAUKEE - The auditorium at Hope School on the north side was silent as an elderly woman approached the microphone stand. She had a story to tell.
“My daughter is clean now,” she said. “But I had to raise her children. I raised my own and then I raised hers. That’s what the drugs did. Now my daughter isn’t even a whole person. She used to be able to type. But her brain doesn’t work that way anymore.”
There were other stories like that at this face-to-face meeting between drug offenders and the community where they committed their crimes. The offenders were given the opportunity to stay out of jail by attending the meeting and availing themselves of a host of resources to change their lives.
“If we wanted to, we could arrest you and charge you and send you to prison right now,” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett told the drug dealers.
Through much of the meeting, the handful of drug offenders in attendance sat stone-faced. They gave the impression of abject indifference. But District Attorney John Chisholm calls such expressions deceiving.
“They put the front on,” Chisholm said. “I think inside them they see they have a rational way of getting out of a pattern they’ve gotten themselves into.”
Only one of the offenders was willing to talk. She was a 38-year-old mother of six who thought she’d be hauled off to jail at any moment. She had only one thought as she arrived at the school:
“Ain’t no way in the world they not gonna arrest me. Ain’t no way in the world I ain’t going to jail today,” she said.
That mother with so much weight to pull vowed to change.
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