“When criminal justice policymaking happens, it’s important that the formerly incarcerated are an essential part of the discussion. It adds a certain cultural competency to that discussion,” says Glenn Martin, 38, vice president for development and director of the David Rothenberg Center for Public Policy at the Fortune Society, a New York project fixed on post-prison re-entry and alternatives to incarceration, particularly for nonviolent crimes.

He was born in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and was a criminal from the time he was a teen until an armed robbery conviction brought him six years at Attica. There, through a now moribund prison-based college study program, he earned a bachelor’s degree in social science from Jesuit-run Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y. Martin says engagement as a member of the NuLeadership Policy Group is tantamount to a second job. “NuLeadership demands extra time out of my schedule. But it brings an incredible value to my work and affords me a certain type of credibility among my constituents,” says Martin, who left prison about nine years ago.

NuLeadership already has calculated the impact of such recent legislative initiatives as a proposed ratcheting up of federal laws against gangsters and gang violence. NuLeadership also was part of a coalition that championed the enactment of prison health care reforms and the reversal of the extra-punitive Rockefeller drug laws. Adopted during the 1970s heroin scourge, the Rockefeller laws ordered mandatory prison sentences for first-time drug offenders, including those convicted of low-level drug crimes.

The research at NuLeadership is three-pronged. It is surveying:

• The impact of parole on those who’ve received the longest prison sentences; their rates of recidivism; and the dangers that violent offenders pose to communities they reinhabit upon parole

• Gaps between available social services and other re-entry services and the tally of returning ex-prisoners who can access them and those who can and/or do not