“What do people who commit crimes look like in a moment of desperation? Or craziness? Or drug addiction? And what do they look like when they start to change?“ asks Diana Ortiz.

As job developer at Exodus Transitional Community in Harlem, her mission has been helping ex-cons find the work essential to their reentry into society.  Crucial to that function is her ability to build ties with employers.

In many ways, Ortiz’s biggest asset is herself – her warm, personable manner, her eloquent speech. Well put together and attractive with unlined, caramel skin and long straight hair, she is 44 but easily looks 10 years younger.

She also spent 22 years in prison.

Ortiz presents herself as evidence that people who have served time are not the thugs depicted on television.

Bright and early on a Thursday, Ortiz stood in front of a room full of community leaders at an East Harlem breakfast meeting and introduced speakers, including Exodus founder Julio Medina and City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito. Ortiz had brought them all together to explain the Exodus program and build cooperation between local organizations.

“That was so awkward for me,” Ortiz says afterwards. Her prison time has left her a self-described introvert who struggles for comfort in social situations. But standing in front of the audience in a charcoal gray suit and patent leather pumps, her confident demeanor gave no hint of unease.

Ortiz was arrested at 18 as an accomplice in an armed robbery turned deadly. A high school dropout under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and heroin, she was dating a 36-year-old who planned the robbery with two other men. Ortiz stopped a man on the street in Coney Island, where she lived in the projects. After she stopped the target, her three accomplices approached and Ortiz left the scene.

“The robbery was supposed to have gone easily but the victim was killed,” Ortiz recounts. The shooter was sentenced to 25 years and the other three participants, including Ortiz, to 17 years.

“I went through all of the appeals and at 18 I was thinking, ‘This is it, my life is over,’” Ortiz says. She was angry. She was a young, first time offender, not carrying   a weapon, under the influence of a much older man. How could the court not take her circumstances into consideration? It took her nearly five years to mourn what happened and accept her lot.

“Once I went through that process and took responsibility for me, I was able to say, ‘Now what do I do with my life?’”

Ortiz threw herself into education, earning her GED, associate’s and bachelor’s degrees and finally a master’s in English literature. She did advocacy work helping female inmates reconnect with their children. Being educated and employable are the keys to success upon release, Ortiz says. “Even if we do think we’re facing life in prison, we have to make ourselves productive in prison, and that’s what we did.”

Around her 15th year behind bars, the possibility of going home started to become a reality. Ortiz hung back after a job readiness workshop to show the facilitator her resume. “I did the sell,” Ortiz said. “This was a once in a lifetime opportunity.” Impressed, the woman told Ortiz to contact her when she was released.

Ortiz was rejected for parole but stayed in touch until she was finally granted her freedom after more than 22 years’ imprisonment. That same facilitator gave Ortiz her first job. It initially paid only a $50 stipend per week, but a month later led to a case manager position in which she could continue the advocacy work she began in prison.

“I always took initiative, I always came up with ideas and I always extended myself, even for $50,” says Ortiz. Another agency soon hired her away to oversee programs for kids with parents in prison. Ortiz then joined Exodus several months ago.

“This is where the work is,” Ortiz says. “This is where I belong. Being formerly incarcerated, we can help each other and make sure the recidivism rate is lowered and that we don’t go back to prison.” In the last 10 years, Exodus has helped more than 5,000 men and women get back on their feet.

“It’s kind of hard for ex-offenders due to having a record. There’s a lot of places you go to find a job and they frown on that and the application doesn’t go anywhere,” says Exodus client Alex Pierre-Pierre, who served a year and a half for mail theft.

The statistics for people like Ortiz and Pierre-Pierre are grim. Among 272,111 prisoners released in 15 states in 1994, an estimated two-thirds were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years, according to a study by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. Of those rearrested, nearly half were reconvicted and a quarter resentenced to prison for a new crime. Recidivism rates were particularly high – more than 70 percent – for those with robbery convictions, like Ortiz.

Programs like Exodus aim to keep people from landing back in the prison system through support services ranging from interview preparation to counseling. “Employment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reducing recidivism,” says Christy Visher, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, coauthor of the Urban Institute study, “Employment after Prison: A Longitudinal Study of Releasees in Three States.”

Ortiz is lucky to have a strong support system she built within the prison system as well as family. She lives in Washington Heights with her long-haired Chihuahua,  named Beans, her Maltese, Mimi, and her 74-year-old mother, who is too ill to live alone. Her five sisters are scattered around the country.

“It’s not just having a job, it’s having a good job,” adds Visher. The better the job, the lower the recidivism. Her employment study showed that the probability of re-incarceration in the first year was eight percent for those earning more than $10 per hour, 12 percent for those making between $7 and $10, and 16 percent for those making less than $7. The probability jumps to 23 percent for the unemployed. Having health insurance and potential for advancement also lowered the chances of re-incarceration.

Exodus offers a one-year program, after which participants are expected to be self-sufficient, armed with a job and coping skills. “Part of the plan is, we put people to work – and if that doesn’t work, then the agency doesn’t work,” Ortiz says. The program maintains ties with others that supply everything from job training to legal advice, many of whose representatives attended the Exodus breakfast Ortiz convened. And each participant gets a week of training in interviewing, resume writing and accepting rejection.

“There was a lot of little things that they helped me with,“ says Pierre-Pierre. “My eye contact probably wasn’t too good.“ Ortiz showed him how to smile and speak more properly and helped him trim his resume to a single page. He ultimately put his new skills to work in an interview he got through a friend. Pierre-Pierre now works setting up cones for street work.

Ricardo Cisneros credits Exodus’s advice on sending thank you notes for helping him land two job offers. He had worked in such kitchens as the Park Avenue Country Club and the Tribeca Grand Hotel before being convicted of selling cocaine. He served 18 months, plus 90 days for violating curfew in transitional housing. But Cisneros then came to Exodus every day for two months until he accepted a job cooking at a new burger joint, Fresh-N-Fast.

“The job developer has a very difficult and interesting job as intermediary between the employee and the individual,” Visher says. Job developers need relationships and the credibility to vouch for the people they send. To achieve this, Ortiz uses her agency’s standing, the participants’ commitment and herself as selling points.

The recession compounds the difficulty of her task. “I’m sure it’s more difficult to place people in jobs,” Visher says although there is no supporting data yet.

Working to place her program participants, “We tell employers that they’re ready to work, they’re so ready, they’re so hungry for this. They will take minimum wage, they’ll work whatever hours you want them to work,” Ortiz says. “The people that are coming from us want second chances, so they’re going to do a better job than any one else that’s never been in prison because they want that job so bad, and that’s the truth.”

Ortiz still gets some no’s from employers but when she gets an opening she takes it and runs. If a company asks for one person to interview, she sends three. The employer gets an option or, as happened recently with a moving company, the employer hires them all. But after she does her job, it’s up to the Exodus participants to make things happen. “She’d tell me, ‘Rick, this is what I have for you. Go. It’s on you now. I’ll find the connections. You put in your own legwork,’” Cisneros says.

Services aside, the support of people like Ortiz who understand what they’re going through is essential. “Exodus is a good support base. They was ex-offenders also,” Pierre-Pierre says. “Diana is a very, very good person.”

Ortiz is now shifting from a job developer to a community liaison. During her time as job developer, employers responded well and continually expressed surprise that she had a prison record, so Ortiz is moving into a role where she can build an image of the formerly incarcerated that others can relate to.

Being the public face of Exodus is not easy for Ortiz, who missed out on 22 years of normal social interaction. “It’s still not that comfortable for me and I just hope it comes more naturally as time goes on,” Ortiz says of dealing with new people. “I feel like I’m always part of the system.”

But she tries to lead her life as an example to her program participants. “I can’t tell them to do it if I don’t push myself to do the same.”