Job agency gives light to lives of ex-inmates
By Li Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-02 07:20

Pan Rui hewed out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope helping fellow former convicts acquire self-esteem and re-enter a world he sees as full of discrimination.

Pan, 32, runs his own ex-prisoner aid service in Beijing, a non-profit organization of its kind in the city.

A prisoner talks with a recruiter at a job fair in a jail in Jinan, Shandong Province. More than 800 prisoners who would complete their sentences within three years signed letters of intent with 54 employers, last June. The work units promised that the prisoners, once employed, would enjoy the same level of pay and treatment as ordinary workers.

"Suspicion and prejudice spawn at every corner around prisoners from their first step out of prison," Pan said. "Society then forces them to bear the stigma all the time in their minds."

Pan knows that suspicion and prejudice first-hand. He served almost three years for killing an army officer while driving drunk in 1999.

"No employers would hire me after learning about my past," Pan said. "They asked: 'How could you be a good man?' with obvious alienation and distrust. The bitter stories of ex-inmates are all roughly the same. We found ourselves exiles in our own country.

"But nobody is born to be an evildoer, and nobody is born to be a criminal. Prisoners also need care and love. And dark clouds can become heaven's flowers when kissed by the light."

It was that belief in prisoner rehabilitation that motivated him to start up a service to help them.

A change of heart

Pan was a promising lawyer in Beijing on the day of the accident.

"I was drunk that day but still insisted I could drive my car, and then the tragedy happened," he recalled. "I hit a man, and he died on the spot. His fiance was preparing their wedding ceremony when she heard the terrible news.

"I destroyed a family with my own hands. I can never forgive myself."

Pan served his sentence in his hometown, Meihekou City in frigid Jilin Province of Northeast China.

Living with more than 100 other prisoners in one huge room, Pan said he could not get along with them at first and they beat him black and blue.

"I believed they were all bad men at the beginning," he said. "They were convicted of various crimes such as murder, arson, rape, robbery and drug trafficking. I thought I was totally different from them and hated to be associated with them. I isolated myself and refused to talk to anybody.

"But later on, I gradually changed my mind. A prison guard showed me some warmth and helped me untie the tight knot in my heart."

The guard let Pan help him sort through the prisoners' records. "I knew his intention was to help me know more about my roommates," Pan said. "After reading their records, I learnt that they are ordinary people with ordinary feelings and desires, just like me. Few of them committed crimes with malicious intent. And they expressed remorse for what they had done."

Prejudice ends with understanding, and Pan gradually found merits in people he had thought were evil. For example, one of Pan's roommates was a farmer who was sentenced to five years in prison for impulsively stabbing his neighbour in a land dispute.

"The man is really simple and kind-hearted," Pan said, adding that the man always helped others do manual labour such as digging ditches or removing huge stones. He was also glad to share with his fellow inmates the goods that his family mailed to him.

"Actually, everybody in prison has shining points, and most of them want to do good things," Pan said. "As I tried to communicate with my roommates, they started to accept me, and those who beat me before became my good friends."

After being released in 2002, Pan still kept in contact with his former inmates. "Similar to what I encountered, most of my roommates also suffered discrimination and ignorance after they walked outside the prison walls," he said.

"Their plights pushed me to do something immediately. I could not stand by with folded arms, knowing that some of them were so without hope that they could do nothing but commit crimes again to make a living.

"Since it takes time for society to accept us, we needed to help ourselves first rather than wallow in the valley of despair."

Love connection

With money borrowed from his friends, Pan set up his service in April 2004, two years after his release. Named Loving Navigation (Aixin Daohang in Chinese), it basically combines psychological counselling and an employment agency.

"What ex-prisoners need most is care, love and a feeling of being needed," Pan said. "What I have done is to tell them that they are never alone and that I am right here to offer a hand at any time. Love, tolerance and understanding can change a life."

Since Loving Navigation opened, as many as 5,000 ex-prisoners have obtained various types of assistance. Nearly 100 of them have found new jobs through Pan's recommendation. The service has set up ties with nine companies mainly engaged in construction, interior decorating, domestic service and security that are willing to accept former prisoners.

Even desperate ex-prisoners resisted the temptation to return to lives of crime thanks to Loving Navigation. Li Ming, once an infamous figure in the Fengtai District underworld in Beijing, is one of them.

Li served three prison terms. He was a drug abuser and lived on collecting protection fees from business outlets.

When he learnt of Pan's legal background, Li consulted with him on how to collect his black money using a legal facade.

"I thought he must know all the legal tricks to turn the protection fees I was collecting into a payment by contract," Li said. "But Pan told me that no matter how a contract is made to appear legal, the essence is still outlawed. And the more contracts of this sort I made, the more criminal evidence that could be accumulated against me."

The two men talked about other things that afternoon, such as their outlooks on life. Finally, the gang leader asked, "How can I be a good man?"

Eventually, Li, 34, joined Pan in his mission and became a full-time volunteer of Loving Navigation. He also gradually cut himself off from drugs and his old circle of friends.

"Nothing is impossible with a willing heart," Li explained how he was able to bid farewell to his old days. "Here I am valued by other ex-prisoners as this organization helps them re-enter society. These feelings give me the power to help me step out of the gloom in my heart."

Li has apparently become the good man he so desperately wanted and knows how difficult the path is for his ex-inmate brethren. "A good man is hard to become, especially when one tries the second time.

"Most Chinese people like to pry into other people's personal life. It is hard for us to totally step out of the shadow of our past stigmas as people around always look at us through coloured spectacles. All we beg for is tolerance, which is rarely seen in society."

Peng Gang, a native of Central China's Hubei Province who has been in jail twice, knows the feeling of a desperation rooted in discrimination.

Eager to throw off his past and resume a normal life, Peng came to Beijing with his wife in August 2004, six months after completing his second sentence for theft. But for the next month, every employer he asked for a job turned him down.

Peng and his wife had to live on the meagre income she earned from a temporary job at a small factory in the outskirts of Beijing.

But misfortunes rarely come single. A car hit Peng's wife in September, fracturing her right ankle. Worse, the police officer judged that Peng's wife was completely at fault because she did not observe traffic rules. With no income, the family could not afford medical treatment, and the woman lay in bed in a shabby rented house day and night.

In despair, Peng phoned Loving Navigation's hotline and made his declaration of war: "I hate this damned man-eating society," he told Pan. "I have nothing to lose now, and I have considered doing just about everything you can think of. I want to blow up the airport. I know how to do it. I know how to make bombs perfectly well."

Pan immediately visited Peng and his wife and assured them that, by law, unearned suffering is redemptive. He helped the couple take the case to court, where the ruling was that the driver should bear 60 per cent of the fault and pay compensation totalling 18,000 yuan (US$2,250). Furthermore, with Pan's help, the factory where Peng's wife worked paid her 3,000 yuan (US$375) in medical support. They returned to Hubei about a year ago.

"Without him, I would have become a ghost," Peng said of Pan. "I owe him my second life."

(China Daily 02/02/2006 page3)