The first time Hassan Foster stole a car, he drove off without any beginner’s luck. As he parked the vehicle on a Newark street, a police officer happened by, noticed his nervousness, and asked to see his driver’s license. A few minutes later, Foster was in handcuffs.
Had he stolen the car a week earlier, before his 18th birthday Foster likely would have received a slap on the wrist. But in the eyes of the law, he was a juvenile no longer, so he wound up in the Essex County jail. The two months he spent there meant he missed enough classes that he’d have to repeat his senior year of high school in order to graduate. Though he was a straight-B student and a member of the basketball team, he had no desire to spend the next year with younger kids.
So Foster headed down a well-worn path in Newark’s south ward: gang life, street crimes, drug addiction. “And, from there,” he says, “incarceration, incarceration, incarceration.”
