Philadelphia turns ex-offenders into returning citizens

There's no sweeter homecoming than the first glimpse of Center City when returning to Philadelphia after an extended absence. As you drive in at night from the west on the Schuylkill Expressway, along a winding river route through Fairmount Park, the skyline spires play peek-a-boo behind a curtain of leafy green. You can't see the city for the trees.

But the frustration is brief and the reward is breathtaking after navigating the long, slow southward curve past the Philadelphia Zoo and then emerging from beneath the high stone arches of the Girard Avenue Bridge to find the gleaming glass towers of Center City beckoning like Oz on a half shell.

To the left, Boathouse Row slowly reveals its twinkling Victorian reflection upon the smooth surface of the Schuylkill, while straight ahead, looming large like some glowing orange Olympus, the Philadelphia Museum of Art completes the majesty of the vista.

Hand me a violin, because I can romance this city like a strolling troubadour. That's why part of me likes Mayor Nutter's executive order to change the wording in the Philadelphia Code to read returning citizen wherever the code now reads ex-offender or prisoner.

After all, they are returning and they are citizens. They just happen to be returning from a maximum-security correctional institution such as Graterford. The mayor cited the stigma associated with the word ex-offender.

Ex-offender, no doubt, replaced earlier versions of once socially acceptable designations for persons released after a period of incarceration: criminals, crooks, convicts, inmates, parolees, jailbirds, to name a few.

Returning citizen, on the other hand, means anything you want it to mean. No doubt Martha Stewart would think the term returning citizen tasteful, even lovely. Vince Fumo would probably approve on the condition that in some cases the word prince replaces citizen.

South Philly wordsmith and Abscammed congressman Ozzie Meyers might add, "Money talks. Returning citizens walk." Former City Councilman Leland Beloff would most likely give returning citizen an "ave" Roman salute. And I'm pretty sure my father, Harry DeLeon, would have been proud to be called a returning citizen after arriving home from Okinawa just before Christmas 1945.

The only returning citizen from Philadelphia's elected official ex-offender ranks who seemed willing to comment on the record was former City Councilman Rick Mariano, who served 51 months in federal prison for, as he put it, "borrowing $25,000 from the wrong guy."

"Returning citizen? Sounds like I just got back from Vietnam," said 58-year-old Mariano. "I'm going to use that in my stand-up act." The former Local 98 electrician turned politician does comedy dressed in an orange prison jump suit at the Greater Kensington String Band clubhouse.

He knows what it feels like to be stigmatized. "I got no job, I got no house, my lovely wife left me - and not my first wife, my trophy wife - and I got cancer," Mariano said. "But I'm doing good. I beat the [prostate] cancer. I live behind a Dumpster on Castor Avenue next to the Wawa."

He makes no excuses. He knows he blew it. "I was convicted of 18 felonies," he said. "Once that stigma is on anyone, it's over."

Ex-offender? Returning citizen? Disguising reality by softening language is often government's quickest solution. George Orwell described it in a 1946 essay, saying political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind."