Italo Sanchez was in a bad way in the spring of 2015. He’d been in and out of lockup, first in juvie, then prison, since the age of 13. Now, at 35, he’d been stuck in solitary for the best part of eight years. Then, out of nowhere, came a break in the clouds: a fellow inmate named Sandy sailed him a kite (a prison note sent by paper plane) about a spiritual retreat that weekend in the prison chapel. The gathering would be more about healing the past than chanting hymns and Hail Marys, said Sandy. Somehow, Sanchez talked his way out of the Box and attended the two-day gathering at Otisville Correctional Facility, a medium-security pen in mid-state New York.

That Saturday, he sat peaceably, for the first time in ages, in a room with his fellow inmates. A civilian volunteer passed along the pews, handing sheets of paper to each of the men. Write down each accomplishment you’re proud of in life, she instructed. Sanchez sat before his page and wept: “I didn’t have any accomplishments to write,” he says. “I didn’t graduate school, didn’t go to my prom — I was raised in the system from 13.” A brawler in grade school and a gangster at 12, he was the youngest “peewee” ever to join the Latin Kings, the biggest gang east of the Mississippi at the time. In his stints out of prison, he strong-armed dealers in the Bronx, then climbed the rungs of the Kings in prison, committing acts of violence his OGs ordered. By the age of 18, he’d been promoted to La Suprema: “the Latin Kings’ warlord of New York State,” as he explains it. “I did assaults and armed robberies, then got to the joint and did what I did to survive,” he says. “It’s so much gang politics when you go upstate — slashing other gangsters before they get you. I got so much regret about the things I did, and how I made my family suffer.” 

But what began that Saturday as an exercise in regret turned into something “beautiful,” Sanchez says. It was there that he met the man who’d change his life: a redeemer of killers and thieves named Zach Presutti. As a Jesuit priest based in New York state, Rev. Presutti had found his mission at Attica and Sing Sing. For years, he ran a ministry behind the walls of those prisons, traveling the state as an itinerant chaplain to give faith and hope to hard men like Italo. Then, three years after he met Sanchez in Otisville, Presutti founded a pathbreaking nonprofit in the Bronx. Called Thrive For Life, it offered the first safe co-housing option for formerly incarcerated men intent on going to college.

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“Once Father Zach started to speak [that day], I knew he was different from the other chaplains I’d met,” Sanchez recalls. “He had walked [with prisoners on] death row, so he knew the path we was on — and he didn’t judge us for it.” Presutti spotted Sanchez weeping at the retreat: He walked over to offer words of comfort. “He told me, straight up, just to let my past go. Whatever’s haunting me, just let it go,” says Sanchez. At the end of their talk, Presutti produced a Thrive For Life wristband and placed it in Sanchez’s palm. “Come see me when you get out,” he whispered. 

Sanchez earned parole in the fall of 2016; he went straight to Presutti’s office in Union Square, Manhattan. But he found the door locked — the priest was traveling at the time. So, he walked away to start his life, post-prison. He got a job with a union local as a laborer, secured an apartment in lower Manhattan, and began mending fences with his family. A year or so later, he took himself to dinner at a restaurant in Chelsea. He was sitting at the bar, watching his Yankees on TV, when a stranger grabbed the bar stool beside him. “How’s your day going, brother?” said the man. Sanchez turned and saw Presutti. “He recognized me from the bracelet he gave me [in prison],” says Sanchez. “So we started talking — and we’ve been talking ever since.”

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Over dinner, Presutti saw something in Sanchez: the makings of a community leader. He invited him to speak to his volunteers, the ones who joined Presutti on prison visits. Sanchez so inspired them with his story that Presutti made him an offer on the spot. He’d rented three buildings he hoped to convert to housing for returning “scholars”— his preferred term for ex-cons pursuing an education. But those buildings — connected rowhouses in the South Bronx — needed top-to-bottom renos. Sanchez jumped at the chance to assist. After full days working at his job site downtown, he spent his nights and weekends bringing those brownstones back to life. He hung Sheetrock and laid flooring, installed plumbing and wiring, and turned those properties into apartments for ex-cons who’d enroll at New York University and St. John’s.

“But then Covid hit us [in the spring of 2020],” says Sanchez, “and we was all locked down together.” So Sanchez, the born leader, sat and thought. Though the buildings were pristine, their backyards were not: “Broken bottles, dirty diapers, the worst,” he says. He convinced Presutti to hire the residents to reclaim those eyesore yards. “We leveled out the dirt, made terraces, gazebos, and [built] raised flower beds,” says Sanchez. “Then we [grew] herbs and vegetables out there, and added flowers and plants.” By the time the lockdown ended, they’d turned urban blight into an Eden — and earned a standing ovation from their neighbors. “When we finally got done, they came out on their fire escapes and all started applauding us, man.”

TWENTY YEARS AGO, as a seminary student at Canisius College upstate, Presutti was sent into a Syracuse prison by the minister of his Jesuit order. “I did not go with alacrity and joy,” he says, a touch of rye in his voice. But once there, he met inmates who read deeply and widely in their extension courses. Their “hunger for meaning” matched Presutti’s, and fired his imagination. He saw that it wasn’t enough to assure those men that “God loves and forgives them all.” He also had to help them harness their drive to create lives of purpose after prison. Too many of them made academic strides in the pen, then returned to New York and wound up sleeping on someone’s couch. Unable to land housing or a living-wage job, they’d deferred their studies until they got stable, by which time they gave up on their education.

For Presutti, step one was to rent them temporary housing while he looked for permanent quarters. In 2017, he used a block-grant award to lease a dozen apartments in the Bronx. The owner of those buildings was a friend of Presutti’s; several months later, the friend offered him the Bronx rowhouses for a nominal rent. Presutti approached his donors, most of them parishioners, for the money to gut those buildings. A year later, he opened Ignacio House: the first supportive setting for returning ex-cons whose goal was to get a college degree.  

Sanchez, whom he’d hired to oversee renovations, was promoted to live-in manager of Ignacio House. His first order of business: helping its 20 or so residents qualify for public assistance. “It’s a lot of work getting them their birth certificate and social security card so they can sign up for benefits,” says Presutti. Too often, inmates lose those papers while they’re behind the walls — or so mistrust the system that they don’t advocate for themselves. “But Italo’s been through it and knows how to do it,” Presutti says. “Guys like him are the best mentors for guys coming out.” 

Presutti calls that advocacy “accompaniment,” and it’s hard to overstate how rare it is. “One of the hurdles guys face when they come home is finding anyone to help them with the [scut work],” says Brother Luke LePean, the spiritual director of Thrive For Life. “Food stamps, Medicaid, short-term assistance — that stuff’s a lifeline your first year back.” But good luck getting it on your own, says LePean. “It’s so easy to fall through the cracks.”

For Sanchez, accompaniment was the easy part. The hard part was everything else. As the manager and de facto caseworker in the house, his duties were never-ending. “I had to take the guys to all their [court-ordered] stuff,” he says. Anger-management groups, mental-health sessions, parole meetings, etc. And he had to drug-test his housemates. “I had guys here who’d did 15, 20 years and didn’t have no [long-term] sobriety.” So Sanchez, the house OG, set the tone. “I told ’em straight up: ‘There’s no drinking, no drugs, and no sneakin’ girls in, or you’ll lose your spot.’”

The flip side of that coin, though, was his love for those men. On nights and weekends, he’d blast bachata in the kitchen while cooking up vats of ropa vieja. He and the guys would linger after supper, trading war stories and pictures of their kids — kids most had barely seen while serving time. “If they messed up, even once, I’d sit ’em down and remind them of the promises they made,” he says. “I’d go, ‘What’d you tell me, when you first came here, about wanting to make it right with your kids?’”

IN THE SIX YEARS since TFL opened Ignacio House in the Bronx, it has tripled in size and enrollment. It moved Ignacio House to permanent quarters in Spanish Harlem in 2022, then opened Abraham House, a bigger complex in the Bronx. Last year, it launched its first outpost out of state, opening Joseph House in Milwaukee. Over the course of those six years, the organization has housed 150 scholars, and graduated 80 men with two- and four-year degrees. (Five of those men are now pursuing master’s degrees.) It’s also put dozens of residents through training programs, then sent them on to careers in the building trades.

Sebastian Budinich, the academic director of TFL, explained how its jail-to-college pipeline got built. “We were already inside the walls with Father Presutti,” he says. “He formed connections with the schools that were working there, too — schools that had made [investments] in those students.” Those colleges, said Budinich, need measurable successes to keep their grant streams flowing. “So working with us was a win-win,” says Budinich. “The universities sent us their prison scholars,” TFL provided them housing while they studied — and the schools got to chalk up those bachelor degrees as “victories to their funders.”

TFL’s flagship partner is NYU: Nearly a dozen of its scholars have earned degrees there since 2020. One of those alums is Michael Pagan, who got a bachelor’s degree in documentary filmmaking in 2024. “I earned a major fellowship while I was there and made two documentaries,” says Pagan. “I give all the credit to Thrive. I’d worked on myself in prison, but still came home feeling like I didn’t deserve a good life.” 

One of the first arrivals at Ignacio House — he was released from prison in April 2020, days after Covid struck — Pagan and Sanchez worked side by side to build those gardens out back. In the months that followed, Pagan opened up, sharing his story with fellow ex-cons. He’d done 14 years for an armed robbery count and spent most of his bid at Sing Sing. “I went in there weighing a buck thirty,” he says. “I literally thought I was gonna die in that place.” Born to a teen mom in foster care, he grew up abused by, and enraged at, her boyfriends. To protect himself and get “some sorta love,” he joined the gang on his block. His job was to collect money owed to that gang, and, after kicking down the doors of dealers and addicts, he got caught and sent upstate. 

Pagan was an introvert when he got to TFL, keeping himself to himself. “That’s really where TFL helped me the most,” he says. “They put me here [in communal living] and forced me to use my words.” Over time, Pagan “unraveled [his] story” in heart-to-hearts with his peers. “From them, I saw I had a chance to show the world that prison isn’t the best I can be.” 

Sanchez, who’d spent years exhorting his peers to do right by their kids and families, finally took his own advice. He’d dropped out of school at 11 years old, and didn’t pick up a textbook till he was in solitary. “They bring you books on the cart, so I started educating myself; got my reading and writing down good,” he says. But Sanchez, who was in “every max facility in the state,” never felt safe enough to go to classes. “It was always politics up in there, always my gang versus your gang, everywhere I went.” Until he was sent to Otisville, where he finally stopped looking over his shoulder. “After Attica, Otisville was heaven,” he says. He enrolled in courses, formed connections with his teachers, and earned his GED there.

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But even after joining TFL, college felt beyond his reach. He was working two jobs, both full-time, and helping at a food pantry on Sundays. It wasn’t till he mentored men like Pagan that he allowed himself to dream bigger. In 2023, he enrolled at the Borough of Manhattan Community College; he earned his associate’s degree in Human Sciences last winter. Next up, he says, is a bachelor’s in social work, and then a master’s degree. “I’m just hungry for more,” says Sanchez, who’s now the director of community outreach at TFL. 

Meanwhile, Father Presutti casts his eyes beyond New York City. “As long as we get a building [from the local diocese], we’ll go anywhere people will have us,” says Presutti. “We just need the facilities to do it.” He’s currently in talks with church officials in Boston and Palm Beach, Florida, about opening Thrive houses there. Sanchez will be beside him every step of the way, doing anything asked of him to grow the TFL network. “I’m so grateful to that man, and to TFL I’m not trying to let ’em lose — ever.”