In the 90s, my ad agency partner Mike Schell and I agreed to do some pro bono work for an amazing alternative sentencing program on the lower east side of Manhattan – the heroin capital of America. Started in 1979, the Andrew Glover Foundation (AGF) searched overcrowded Manhattan criminal courtrooms for youths who might turn their lives around if they only had a second chance. Instead of sentencing young people to prison, judges could send them to AGF for counseling, training, education and employment assistance.
This simple tactic — keeping youths out of prison — has saved the lives of hundreds of young lives every year for four decades. At a time when the U.S. incarceration rate is the highest of any nation in the world and a cycle of arrests and imprisonment has become the norm within many low-income communities, AGF has bucked the trend to become one of the most successful and cost-effective crime prevention programs in America.
The economics of this program are staggering….
–It costs about $353,000 a year to put a youth in a New York State juvenile detention center for a year, and only 25%-50% remain crime-free when they get out.
–It costs only $5,200 a year to keep a youth in AGF and 90% of program graduates stay out of prison.
Two youth centers in the Lower East Side and East Harlem give juvenile offenders the chance to build new lives without prison or crime.The staff develops a personalized plan for reform. AGF breaks the cycle of repeated incarceration by replacing it with true rehabilitation and second chances for youths: accountability and supervision, mentorship, education, job training and employment. As an integral part of its transparency, AGF regularly give progress reports to the court.
Basically, their mission was to convince judges to give them kids – instead of sending them upstate to prison. Everyone knows that once a teenager did “hard time” at a New York State prison, it was almost impossible to save them. But when a judge took a chance and gave a kid to the Andrew Glover Program, that kid had a chance to save him or herself. The team at Andrew Glover would help the teenager get off drugs or alcohol, finish their high school education and get their GED, find a decent job and stay out of trouble. It didn’t always work out that way of you course but when it did it was life-changing. Mike and I got to go to court, meet with a lots of defendants, judges, cops and lawyers. It was exciting and it was inspiring. We developed a broad range of fundraising materials for AGF to use.
The man behind it all was Angle Rodriguez, and incredibly charismatic and committed youth advocate who co-founded The Andrew Glover Program with his friend Robert Siegal. In 1977, Siegal was a political science student at New York University. He lived in Manhattan’s East Village and dedicated himself to helping the community’s troubled teenagers and their families. Together with Rodriguez, who was an intermediate director at a local Boys Club, they formed a youth advocacy program — naming it after their friend Andrew Glover, a New York City policeman.
Officer Glover, who had made a second career out of helping children on the Lower East Side, was shot to death in 1975 at age 34 by a drug dealer. Sadly, Siegal also died young, from an illness in 1979, at the age of 28, but not before he and Angle created a program that would permanently change the community. After Siegal’s death, Rodriguez — who had grown up on the Lower East Side — was determined that the Andrew Glover Youth Program would thrive as his friend would have wanted it. ”I couldn’t turn way from the kids, I couldn’t give up the mission,” he says.
Mike and I used to walk through the projects with Angel and it was quite an experience. Not only did he know everyone, they all loved and respected him. He was like a rock star. Angel spent so much time in the courts advocating for kids that the Andrew Glover Program was offered office space at 100 Centre Street — where the program’s main courthouse offices are. Realizing that there was also a need for a safe space for youth in the neighborhood to go, AGYP purchased an abandoned building at 100 Avenue B for $30,000 in 1986.
Today, the program has a staff of 11 counselors and administrators, dozens of volunteers, and a second youth center that opened in East Harlem in 1998. Rodriguez’s tireless efforts to keep Robert Siegal’s dream alive have won several of the city’s top honors for social service.
