Tomi Hiers

"They will not walk through the doors of an organization by themselves if they don't know who they are going to meet," says Tomi Hiers, the Enterprise Foundation's program director for the Reentry Partnership."They're scared.So the advocates kind of act as a buffer.Because they're ex-offenders, they have street 'cred.' "

Baltimore's program has been underway since April 2001.The process begins "behind the fence," where a Correction Division caseworker identifies prisoners from the five high-crime neighborhoods, including Druid Heights, whose residents are eligible for the program.