OCEAN CITY -- Everywhere U'Baid Harris turned, they were talking about him.
At a conference of about 150 Maryland corrections professionals, vendors hawked chairs of indestructible plastic -- the kind Mr. Harris might have tried to throw at another youth when he was, by his own description, "one of the worstest [troublemakers] in the juvenile system." In workshops, specialists listed all the social ills and criminal-justice failures that condemn so many young black men like Mr. Harris to prison.
That Mr. Harris, 20, was now out of jail, a partner in a growing business and sitting on a panel at their conference crystallized the reasons members of the Maryland Criminal Justice Association vowed finally to break silence -- and to start challenging an angry public's assumptions about modern corrections.
"If it was up to a lot of people . . . they would like me to spend 25, 30 years in prison," said Mr. Harris, who grew up in East Baltimore. "You're going to come out worse than you did before. This mentality, it's a time bomb."
The public is in a mood to make prison management harder -- with the elimination of Pell grants for prisoners' education and a recent Maryland law that put more juveniles into adult courts and prisons, these corrections experts agreed.
Nationally, the cry is for longer prison sentences and, in states like Virginia, no more parole.
Maryland corrections workers said it was time for them to emerge from behind bars and talk reality.
"I wonder when it's going to be that we have 50 percent of the people in jail and the other 50 percent watching them. It's coming, folks," thundered Samuel F. Saxton, director of the Prince George's County Department of Corrections, during a meeting on the future of the criminal justice system.
"We need to seize the public debate," said Mr. Saxton. "I looked at this [federal] crime bill and I tried to find a correctional administrator or someone besides a chief of police talking about it."
Said Parole Commission Chairman Paul J. Davis: "We've been moving back to a sterner approach . . . and still the prison populations continue to grow."
Mr. Davis outlined solutions that included some initiatives the state already has started on a small scale. He suggested identifying violent offenders for long sentences, while getting property criminals and drug addicts out of expensive prison beds.
Those convicts could be supervised with day reporting to parole and probation agents and electronic monitoring, he said.
Today, Mr. Harris might fall into one of those categories, if he was still following his urge for "instant gratification."
At a workshop on racial relations in prisons, Mr. Harris described the twists and turns of his life.
His father was in and out of prison from the time Mr. Harris was 5. Mr. Harris was committed to the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School for two years at age 15, after four assault convictions, and later did time in the Baltimore City Detention Center on a drug conviction.
He made a fresh start with several Hickey classmates in starting TICO Enterprises, which sells products such as wooden soap dishes and tool boxes. But Mr. Harris faltered, spending several more months in the city jail after he went back to selling drugs. Now he is back in the legitimate business and determined to stay on track.
Mr. Harris is like many repeat offenders, some at the conference agreed. Failures, especially where drugs are involved, are to be expected. The solution, they said, is not punishing most failures with long sentences.
Parole agents and correctional officers burn out from stress when they should be the most valued soldiers in the war against crime, several agency heads said. State parole and probation workers' salaries rank below all but two states in the country, with some of the highest caseloads.
But even as the group planned their campaign to highlight their hopes about managing criminals, reality intruded.
Lt. Gov.-elect Kathleen Kennedy Townsend appeared at the conference Monday to shake hands and gather ideas. In a brief speech, she said Gov.-elect Parris N. Glendening's transition team will announce a public-safety initiative next month. But that is not likely to include much more money for new solutions.
"We heard the voters loud and clear," she said, saying the administration planned to hold the line on taxes.