By David Cruz
Correspondent
For almost 50 years Integrity House has been helping men and women emerge from a life of addiction and incarceration, long before President Obama’s high-profile visit to the Newark-based drug rehabilitation program. For President and CEO Bob Budsock, whose been with Integrity for 31 years, the attention is welcome, and long overdue.
“I explained to the president about the origins of Integrity House; that Integrity House was doing reentry in 1968, before it was very fashionable,” Budsock said. “Integrity House was founded by a parole officer named David Kerr. What Dave did was leave his job as a parole officer – this is back in 1968, right after the Newark riots. He purchased a brownstone right here around Lincoln Park and he moved into the building, along with five of his parolees who were having trouble staying clean and sober.”
Today Integrity House serves over 2,000 people a year with services that include residential treatment, halfway house treatment, supportive housing and outpatient treatment from a network of houses in this neighborhood just off downtown. The president – who met with residents and counselors at the Integrity House academy – came away impressed.
“They are accomplishing extraordinary things. And when you meet folks who are taking that step to break addictions and overcome great odds, and you see what they’ve already accomplished and what they’re going to accomplish in the future, you cannot help but feel hopeful about the future,” Obama said of Integrity House.
Still, the statistics are daunting. Over 2 million Americans are behind bars. We’re five percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Seventy percent of them have some kind of addiction.
“The great thing about Integrity House is that they’re doing, in my perspective, God’s work every day, and to understand that an addiction is a disease that crosses all races, economic strata, all throughout the nation,” said former governor Jim McGreevey, who works with former inmates every day as Executive Director of the Jersey City Employment and Training Program.
The president announced the expansion of a grant program for nonprofits working on drug treatment and prisoner re-entry opportunities for returning inmates, and issued an executive order that bans the box in federal hiring, ending the practice of compelling job applicants to tell about their incarceration.
“We all recognize that, even when people deserve to be punished, and people do when they commit crimes, 95 percent of them are going to get out and they’re going to come back to a place that they call home, or used to call home, and they’re going to try to make a life for themselves,” added U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman. “If we don’t help them do that, the natural pull back to a life of crime is strong, and so we have an obligation not only to them, but to ourselves to do something about that.”
President Obama was back on the road by late afternoon yesterday, off to New York for a political fundraiser. Meanwhile, at Integrity House, the difficult work of putting lives back together, one at a time, continues, as it has for almost half a century.