"I felt I was making a difference," said Phillips, who was freed in February 2007, after serving time for aggravated assault. "This will make my life a lot worse. I'm on parole until 2019. I'm a father of four."
Phillips' plight is primarily the result of the economic crisis that has badly damaged the city's finances.
But nearly a year into Nutter's first term, the city's efforts to help former inmates have sputtered, and not all the problems can be blamed on budget pressures.
The city failed to take basic steps to implement a law encouraging the employment of ex-offenders. And the man hired to run the city agency helping former inmates was demoted after overspending his budget and canceling a contract with a nonprofit agency helping ex-cons find jobs.
Ray Jones, director of Impact Services Corp., said that his agency still doesn't know if its city contract will be renewed, and he wonders what's going on in the Mayor's Office for the Reentry of Ex-Offenders, or MORE.
"To date, there's been nothing but lip service in providing services for re-entry," Jones said.
Nutter's deputy mayor for public safety, Everett Gillison, acknowledged that there have been problems, but said that the administration's re-entry efforts are becoming more focused and beginning to show results.
"It's a work in progress," Gillison said in an interview last week. "There's no doubt the mayor's on the right track."
Gillison said the city is ramping up prison services and finding jobs for a growing number of ex-inmates.
The scale of the challenge is daunting. Roughly 35,000 people are released every year from Philadelphia prisons. MORE operates a single location in Southwest Philadelphia and has a staff of 18, including its director.
