It’s a hot summer’s day, and Francine Dixon is sitting outside her Brooklyn café watching customers enter. Among the passersby, a middle-aged woman wearing a plastic hairnet and smeared magenta lipstick walks across Malcolm X Boulevard toward the entrance.
“You see that one right there?” Dixon says, motioning toward the woman. “I’ll bet you a quarter she’s gonna go in and ask for food.”

Prisoners need help before and after release, experts say
When a prisoner is released on parole, he could use a little more than a rumpled suit, a couple of bucks and a hardened pack of chewing gum.
Like an apartment. Or a college degree. Or a job.
Or somebody to help him figure out how to get them.