On a bright February morning in Harlem, Jean Sanders shook Bill Clinton’s hand. Just one week out of prison, Sanders had risen early and put on a suit to come uptown from Brooklyn and apply for low-income housing–one of the first stops after scratch for former felons starting over. Clinton happened to be looking for office space in the same building that day. Plunging into the frenzy of cameras and adoring well-wishers, Sanders jostled and sweet-talked his way to the front of the throng and welcomed the former President to the neighborhood. It was hard to say who was more thrilled to be there. “He’s gonna love Harlem food,” Sanders predicted. Then he went upstairs to submit his forms. That day Sanders, then 41, fairly bristled with possibility. After nearly seven years behind bars for stealing a woman’s car while in a drug-addled haze, he was free. He had a plan: 1> reconcile with his family, 2> find an apartment and 3> get a job. He filed his housing application and surveyed the scene outside. “If this is a sign, then I think everything’s going to be all right.” Then he headed home to Brooklyn to watch, along with his mother, his cameo on the evening news. This year the nation’s prisons will release more than 630,000 people–the largest prison exodus in history. That’s four times as many as were released in 1980, before crack, before zero tolerance, before truth-in-sentencing policies and before 1.9 million people filled U.S. prisons and jails, the current record. Since 1980, the number of prisoners returning to society has steadily climbed. It’s simple physics: the more people you lock up, the more you must one day let out. For 40% of those now in state prisons, that day arrives in the next 12 months. Since Sanders was released, TIME has followed him through a labyrinth of bureaucracy and temptation. Most of the time, he is optimistic, almost irrationally so. He envisions a better life for himself, whereas most would see a life half wasted. And like almost all ex-cons, he can rattle off a litany of reasons he should be forgiven. “I have a good heart, I have a halfway good brain, and I believe in myself,” he says. “People gravitate toward me.” And it’s true. In welfare waiting rooms, small children toddle over to him unprompted. On the subway, the same place where he used to jump the turnstile and beg for coins, he is now the chatty middle-aged man in a leather jacket, thriving on the laughter of strangers. At the hospital he visits every week to take his tuberculosis medicine, he shouts, “Hi, Mom!” to every old lady he sees. And no matter how stoic the women looked just a moment before, slumped in their wheelchairs, they positively light up. Sanders has come out of prison before and gone back in. He has spent years of his life on a kaleidoscopic array of drugs. But he has four children, ages 18 to 21, and he wants very badly to stay out of jail this time. “I want a life. I want to be normal again. I want to go to work, come home, see my kids, go on vacation,” he says. Then, hearing himself, he adds, “That’s a lot of wants.” It’s clear to everyone who knows Sanders that this time he is bent on reinventing himself. It is equally true that he has never been good at handling life’s most punishing moments. His default tendency has always been to escape, either in body or in mind.
