WASHINGTON -- Robert Barksdale steps in front of the students in an English class at Eastern High School, searching for some semblance of redemption.
"For me, school is a treat because I never got to be in school, for real," he begins. He always envisioned visiting a school to speak to students but is beginning to realize the pressures of standing in front of the classroom. He scans the room and says: "Y'all are a little intimidating."
Barksdale was around their age when he chose the streets over school. By 16, he was arrested and convicted on armed robbery charges, the culmination of a series of ill-conceived attempts, he said, to be a man.
Now, at 25, he is one. But after spending so many of his formative years behind bars, he wonders: What sort of man is he? Behind him are two former inmates. They hope to find the answers together.
Phil Mosby, 26, hands out copies of a poem for the students to read. Juan Peterson, 24, confesses to the students that this Washington neighborhood makes him a little uncomfortable: It is close to the D.C. jail, where the three friends first met.
They were all teenagers then, charged as adults for their violent crimes. At the D.C. jail, they found solace in a book club, reading memoirs and reciting poems they had written.
Over the past year, they finally returned home. They now see themselves as changed men who did dumb things as kids and who know that others may have trouble forgiving them.
So they have stuck together. The support system that strengthened them then is the one they are counting on to help them now that they're out of prison. The unlikely community has become an unlikely lifeline, as they work to defy the patterns of behavior that send ex-offenders back to jail.
They fall into a high-risk category: Juveniles tried as adults are 34 percent more likely than youths tried as juveniles to return to prison, according to a 2007 report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The alumni of the book club have no interest in becoming part of that statistic. So they work together to create goals. They applaud when someone meets his goal, such as when Barksdale got a full-time job as a city maintenance worker. They share job leads and work out together and meet up for pancakes.
They particularly like to lead writing workshops, which is why they are at this English class on a January day.
'Makes me wanna cry'
The jail book club is called Free Minds. The nonprofit was founded 13 years ago by two former journalists, Tara Libert and Kelli Taylor, after Taylor became pen pals with a young man on death row who loved books. Then the two journalists realized that the inmates they had learned to love would need even more support after prison, so they extended their mission to provide support programs for the men when they returned home.
Nearly 940 juveniles have passed through the book club. About 230 of them have been released, 114 of them in the past two years, according to Free Minds.
Tired at the time of sitting in his jail cell, Barksdale joined the book club as an excuse to go to a room with windows. He would slip into the nondescript classroom in the jail and lay his head on a desk, saying nothing.
It took months for the two leaders to persuade Barksdale to write a poem. Then, he scribbled stanzas too profane to print, but the leaders applauded his sense of rhyme. Encouraged, he wrote more.
"The brothers I used to roll on the streets with? All of them are gone. Except one, who is serving 60 years in prison," Barksdale said, reflecting on his time living in Washington. "I am not proud of what I did, but it turned out to be kind of beautiful. I get a chance to be somebody."
At 16, Mosby was bigger than most of the other students in the lockup. Intimidating. He rarely shared that he loved to write.
In his first year in the club, the group finished reading Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall, a memoir of a former convict turned writer. The volunteers provided this prompt: "What makes you want to holler?"
After 10 minutes, Mosby stood up with a piece of paper and read a tribute to a close friend:
"When I feel your family's presence
Makes me wanna cry
When I know I could have talked to you before your death
Makes me wanna cry"
Trembling, Mosby stopped reading. The inmates watched as he turned his back to them, walked to a corner and started to weep.
"No one knew what to do," Taylor recalled.
Another inmate, Calvin Minor, now 26, stood up. He walked to Mosby, placed his hands on Mosby's shoulders and told him he needed to trust God. They talked until Mosby calmed down.
Mosby recalled: "You have to keep on a mask in prison to survive, so people don't mess with you. But then, Free Minds, it started feeling like a brotherhood."
A new fit
On Sept. 18, Mosby went home from prison. He reunited with Minor.
Home didn't fully feel like home, Mosby told his friend. His former housing project, an open-air drug market known as East Capitol Dwellings, had been demolished. He had no idea how to send a text message. No one wore baggy clothes anymore.
"Everything's fitted," Mosby said. "Not too baggy, not too tight, just fitted."
Minor, two years out of prison, took on a professional air by pulling his dreadlocks into a neat ponytail and always wearing a button-up shirt.
"Be patient, take your time and execute a plan," Minor recalled telling him. It took years for Minor to find stable work.
In the middle of January, Mosby put on a pair of fitted jeans and walked into Church of the Pilgrims in Washington for a get-together with former book club members.
"Phil!" they shouted when he walked through the door.
About 1 in 3 inmates go back to jail, usually for violating probation or selling drugs.
"We're going to set some goals for the new year," said Libert, one of Free Minds' co-founders.
One person wanted to remove the tattoo on his face. One wanted children; another wanted none at all. Others wanted licenses for truck driving or pest control or to go to college.
Mosby summarized his goal in one word: "freedom."
"I want to understand freedom," he later explained. "I want to be able to have a job that can make a decent living, and put all of my past behind me. I can do it if I stay positive."
'Life is not a game'
Inside the classroom at Eastern, a nervous Barksdale explains his new self.
"Writing opened up a passion in me," Barksdale tells the students. "That's what you need to get through. Phil and Juan know; they were on the block with me.
"I began to read books, I wrote poetry, got my vocational certificate because life is not a game. Nobody is playing out there."
The students are rapt.
Peterson speaks about how most of the men he met in prison have cycled in and out of jails since they were teenagers.
"They were old, dying, with heart failure," he says. "They never got to see their kids. But they had wisdom.... So now, I'm doing better."
Mosby is next.
"I actually went to this high school for one day, and then I was arrested," he says. "I had hard times, depressing times."
A male student with close-cropped hair raises his hand in the back of the room.
"Why did it take getting incarcerated for you to learn that your life had any meaning?" he asks.
Mosby takes a deep breath, looks into the student's eyes.
"My life was chaos," Mosby tells him. "Sometimes, things were moving so fast that you don't know what to do."
The student turns his head away from him but continues:
"You went to school, but you were looking at school an entirely [wrong] way. School was trying to teach you that the streets is not for you, and when they taught you that, you were not listening."
Mosby replies: "But the thing is, like I said, there's a whole lot of chaos going on in your life. And you really don't have the time ...."
"So you took a part in the chaos, instead of terminating it?"
"My life was hard, and it was hard to get out of that mindset."
The student remains skeptical.
"So where you are from made you?"
The classroom begins to hum, with students debating among themselves: Are these men role models for turning their lives around? Or are they just bad kids who should have just listened long ago, as the student implied?
Mosby knows he needs to prove his case. The rest of his life will hinge on persuading employers, bankers, neighbors to look past his youth. He hopes his presence and optimism will charm others into giving him a chance.
Mosby thinks about telling him more about his neighborhood, besieged by drugs and crime, where boys felt they had little choice but to take on the personas of tough men. But the clock's hands move closer to 5:30 p.m., the students are jumping out of their seats. Class is over.
Mosby keeps trying.
"You have a good head on your shoulders," Mosby says as the student packs his backpack.
"Do you play any sports?" he asks as the student walks away.
The teacher rushes to Mosby. She says that the student is one of her hardest workers, which might explain why he is dismissive.
"He's our honors student," she says.
Before Mosby went to jail, so was he.
SundayMonday on 03/01/2015