For teens in Suffolk County Jail, a message of hope from an ex-con

In a spartan cement room in the heart of Suffolk County Jail, a forlorn group of teenagers and young men pondered what they would do if they could do anything.

No one spoke.

“C’mon, man,” Michael DeLeon said, turning to a teenage boy from Amityville who was dressed in the dark green uniform of the jail. “If I had a magic crystal ball right now and could make anything happen for you, anything at all, what would it be? What’s your dream?”

The teenager, who’d been kicked out of the public school system before he had even reached middle school, stared down at his lap. There was a long pause before he answered. “I’d make sure I’ll be okay.”

The group of 11 inmates is part of the jail’s Youth Tier Initiative, a program started in 2011 that provides specialized support and rehabilitation services to eligible inmates between the ages of 16 and 21.

The program is designed to reduce the chances of young inmates ending up back in jail once they’ve been released – and it seems to be working. Less than 20 percent of the inmates who have participated in the Youth Tier Initiative have been arrested again since their release, far lower than the 76.6 percent average reoffending rate found by one major federal study last year.

“I’m standing in front of you here today because I’m part of that statistic,” DeLeon told the young men sitting at the table in the jail’s program room. “I’m not like you. I am you. I’m every single one of you.”

DeLeon spent a total of 12 years behind bars for drug- and gang-related crimes. After he was released from his second stint in state prison in 2007, he decided to take his life in a new direction and help other young people struggling with addiction and crime.

He is now a filmmaker and the founder of a not-for-profit organization called Steered Straight, traveling to schools, jails and conferences around the country to share his emotional history with drugs and violence as an example that might keep kids from repeating his mistakes.

“I want to get the door to stop revolving,” DeLeon said. “I want to stop putting kids in [prison] in the first place.”

With national incarceration at an all-time high, DeLeon says that it is now more important than ever to address the sickness at the root of most crimes: addiction.

“Seventy-five percent of everyone in prison is there because of drugs and alcohol,” he said. “Whether that’s possession of drugs, or because of crimes related to their drug habit – shoplifting, robbing, aggravated assault, drunk driving – it all comes back to drugs.”

Indeed, DeLeon’s own criminal convictions were directly related to his drug use.

After losing his high-ranking position at a Fortune 500 company due to his cocaine addiction, DeLeon became involved with a violent New Jersey street gang, moving hundreds of thousands of dollars in high-volume drug deals.

Even as his life fell apart around him – his wife left, taking their two children with her, his landlord kicked him out of his apartment and he was forced to move in with his 63-year-old mother – DeLeon continued climbing the ranks within his gang.

And then DeLeon arranged a high-stakes drug deal that went terribly wrong. Drugs and money went missing, gunfire was exchanged and DeLeon’s friends held him responsible. He spent the next three days on the run, smoking cocaine and hiding out.

When he ran out of drugs, DeLeon returned home the morning of Mother’s Day in 1995 to discover his mom had been strangled to death on her bedroom floor.

“My mother was strangled and killed on Mother’s Day, and I’m one hundred percent responsible for that,” he said. “I brought that into my life. I brought that into my mother’s house.”

But things were about to get even worse for DeLeon.

As a high-profile drug dealer, police immediately pinned DeLeon as their suspect. With no evidence, prosecutors were turned down by three different judges for an arrest warrant and then got a grand jury to indict him in the killing.

DeLeon spent 22 months in jail awaiting trial. He passed three different polygraph tests, one issued by the state itself. Eventually, however, he was forced to consider the agonizing decision to plead guilty to his mother’s own murder, rather than risk being sentenced to life in prison by a jury’s conviction.

“My lawyer said, ‘Do you want to plead guilty to something you didn’t do, and go home in two and a half years? Or do you want to get convicted and spend your life in prison for something you didn’t do?’” There was a heavy silence in the jail’s program room. Several of the young men shook their heads, and one swore quietly. “I ended up deciding to sign the plea,” DeLeon said.

Just as his lawyer promised, DeLeon was released from jail after two and a half years, two of which were spent in a halfway house. But a car accident and a broken neck less than a year after his release landed him with a prescription for 80 milligrams of oxycontin, and he was soon entrenched once again in his runaway drug use and gang activity.

This time around, however, would be the first time he witnessed a murder.

Nineteen-year-old Tyreek was a heroin dealer who made weekly payments to the gang through DeLeon, who was once again holding money for his gang in his low-profile, suburban home. When gang members showed up at DeLeon’s house demanding a missing $1,200, it became clear that Tyreek had not paid up that week.

They forced DeLeon into a van at gunpoint and drove to Tyreek’s apartment. When they arrived, Tyreek insisted he had paid; DeLeon told him he was lying. There was a scuffle, which ended with Tyreek falling to the ground, weeping.

Then Tyreek pulled up his sleeves.

“He’s got abscesses and track marks all up and down his arms,” DeLeon said. “He’s the biggest heroin dealer in our set, and now he’s the biggest heroin addict. Everything he was supposed to be selling, he was banging.”

What happened next came so quickly that DeLeon can barely remember it. The man standing beside him pulled out his gun and shot Tyreek in the chest, “point-blank range.”

“He killed him right in front of me,” DeLeon said. “The kid was only 19 years old.”

The other men in the room would eventually go to prison for Tyreek’s murder, but DeLeon was only convicted of violating his parole. He ended up spending seven more years behind bars.

“I took a five-year gift and turned it into a 12-year nightmare,” DeLeon told the hushed room of Suffolk County jail inmates.

It was DeLeon’s second stay in prison, he said, when he realized what he was meant to do. “While I was on my way out, a corrections officer told me that he’d see me again,” DeLeon said. “And he was right. He sees me every day. He sees me on the covers of newspapers. He sees me on my TV show. He sees me at schools. He sees me at law enforcement conferences.”

As soon as he was released, DeLeon went back to college to become a drug counselor. He began working on a film about the addiction epidemic in New Jersey suburbia, interviewing 137 kids from middle-class families who were abusing prescription pills. He has spoken at schools and jails across the country, hoping his story will inspire them to turn their lives around before it’s too late.

“I pleaded guilty to the murder of my own mother,” he told the young men of the county jail’s Youth Tier Initiative, who seemed to be clinging to his every word. “If I can turn my life around, so can you.”

At the end of his presentation, DeLeon went around the table, asking each young man what he aspired to be. Many did not have answers at first, but slowly, hesitantly, each kid started offering up their dreams.

Football player. Autobody mechanic. Electrician. Engineer. DeLeon gushed with enthusiasm about how each vision was within reach, offering advice on how to achieve their goals and what resources were available to them. Several didn’t know that classes at Suffolk County Community College were now available to them for free through the Second Chance Act.

“But no matter what,” DeLeon told them, “when you walk out that door, you need to tell yourself you’re not going to get back into whatever got you here in the first place. You need to tell yourself every single freaking day that, no matter what, you won’t hustle again. You won’t drink again. You won’t smoke weed again. Whatever your dreams or visions or goals are, you don’t let anything get in the way of that. No matter what.”