Shabazz staffed the American Friends Service Committee booth at Job Fair 2001, Northern's first-ever employment fair, which was held May 16. The daylong event brought together hundreds of inmates and more than a dozen organizations and potential employers.

In 1993 and '94, Shabazz was an inmate at Northern, serving the final years of a 20-year sentence that also included stays at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, East Jersey State Prison in Rahway and Bayside State Prison in Leesburg.

Today, Shabazz serves as coordinator of American Friends Service Committee's Prisoners' Resource Center, which provides ex-inmates with assistance in such areas as emergency services - food, clothing, shelter, detoxification - counseling, employment and education. The center also can offer direction to former offenders searching for family members, trying to get custody of children "or almost anything else you can think of," Shabazz said.

"A lot of times, the information and the opportunities are here, and the ex-offenders are there, but the marriage never happens," he continued. "We're here to make sure former inmates are able to put themselves in a position to take advantage of the services available to them.

Sometimes, Shabazz pointed out, freedom isn't enough.

"If an individual doesn't know what to do or where to turn once he's free, he's at a huge disadvantage," he said. "That where the Prisoner's Resource Center comes in."

One of the center's primary resources is Shabazz, a living, breathing example of an ex-offender who made the successful transition to productive citizen.

"I tell an inmate that he owes it to himself - not to society, not to his mother, not to his preacher - to become an upright human being," he said. "I can give them help, and all of the other facilitators here can give them help, but first, they have to want to help themselves. When I tell them these things, I'm not just talking. I've lived it."