By A.C. Thompson

AT 36, Bill Buehlman is living proof that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong – there are, in fact, second acts in American lives. Problem is, Buehlman – a cerebral, gregarious character with a shaved dome and Clark Kent glasses – can't seem to drop the curtain completely on act one.

See, from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, heroin had its claws in Buehlman, and, while strung out, he was busted repeatedly for peddling proscribed substances. "I had a few years there where I was an aspiring kingpin, but mostly I sold 'cause I couldn't hold down a job," Buehlman says now. There were LSD charges. Heroin charges. Tampering-with-evidence charges for swallowing a bindle of coke and dope when the cops tried to bust him. Altogether, Buehlman accrued five felony cases in two different states, doing stints in Texas state prisons (where several teeth were knocked out of his head) and San Francisco county jail. His last arrest, for possession of heroin, came in 1996 in the Mission District.

But that was Buehlman V.1. The new incarnation, the guy living out his second act, has gone through two rehab programs and now counsels recovering heroin addicts at Ward 93, the methadone clinic at San Francisco General Hospital. He's earned an associate's degree from City College, is working on a nursing degree, and is contemplating law school or going after a master's in public health. He's been ruler-straight for six years and off probation for as long.

And, at this juncture, Buehlman would like to go to work for City College, which, he's finding out, is not so easy when you're a convicted felon.

• • •

When Buehlman had been clean for about a year, he enrolled in City College's Drug and Alcohol Studies program, a 31-unit course of study for people looking to become substance abuse counselors. "That program was powerful for me," he says. "I was 31 years old, and I hadn't seen a classroom since I was 16. It opened up doors for me. It ..." he says, pausing and taking a deep breath, "made me a better person."

After years of rotating in and out of jail cells, Buehlman flourished in the classroom, becoming one of the program's star pupils, landing himself on the honor roll, and, in 2002, getting chosen to give the graduation speech.

Equipped with a state certificate in drug and alcohol education, Buehlman took a job at Bay Area Addiction Research and Treatment, a chain of private methadone clinics, before transferring to General Hospital's methadone ward, where he manages a caseload of nearly 40 opiate addicts. "We take the sickest patients," Buehlman explains. "A lot of HIV-positive people, people with cancer, people who've been to the wound clinic for abscesses." He's been at the hospital for four years.

On Aug. 9, Buehlman applied for a job as a management assistant in the Drug and Alcohol Studies program at his alma mater, disclosing his criminal record on his application. The City College position, Buehlman says, "was the perfect job. It was 11 to 7 – no more getting up at 5 a.m. It's a mile from my house."

After Buehlman sent in his application for the City College position, he expected to at least get called in for an interview, given his experience in the field. When he didn't hear anything, he decided to do a little research, eventually pulling up the voluminous and fairly arcane California Education Code on the Internet. That's when he realized what was going on: The law prevents the school from hiring people who've been convicted of sex or drug offenses.

City College chancellor Philip Day Jr. maintains that school staffers apprised Buehlman of the situation. "He didn't have to go digging around for the information," Day contends. "There was no mystery as to why he was not being allowed to proceed."

• • •

Though Buehlman plowed into a roadblock with City College, overall he's been remarkably successful in recalibrating his life's trajectory. Obviously, a lot of folks have less luck – the jails and prisons of this country are bulging with 'em; in San Francisco alone, according to stats on file with California attorney general Bill Lockyer, cops make 7,000 to 9,400 felony drug arrests each year. It's this caste of untouchables, these pariahs of the war on drugs, that Lateefah Simon hopes to reach.

For many years, Simon, a scarily bright 28-year-old who received the MacArthur "genius" award in 2003, headed the Center for Young Women's Development, a nonprofit aimed at keeping hood girls from getting sucked into the maw of the criminal justice system. These days she's working in the system, running a small program out of a small office on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, her salary paid by San Francisco district attorney Kamala Harris's office.

With the backing of the DA, a microscopic budget, and a few allies, Simon is helming an array of initiatives designed to put a dent in the local recidivism rate. Of all these efforts, arguably the most interesting is Back on Track, a new 12-month program aimed at nudging drug dealers out of the game. For BOT, Simon is partnering with Goodwill to put about 50 low-level drug sellers through an intensive get-your-shit-together boot camp as an alternative to months or years in a cage on drug charges.

Simon's core beliefs aren't exactly standard fare among people working in law enforcement. "It may sound a little trippy," she says over coffee at a café on Bryant Street, just across the street from the Hall of Justice, "but you have to love the people we're talking about to make a difference."

When somebody enters BOT, the DA's office moves for what's known as a "deferred entry of judgment," leaving their drug case in a sort of limbo state. Should the person graduate from the program, the case is dismissed, leaving their record unblemished; if they mess up, they go immediately to sentencing, which could mean prison.

Toil is central to the program. Participants work full time for Goodwill or at other "transitional" jobs arranged by a crew of four career advisers. The pay is modest, usually $7.50 to $10 per hour.

Question: Will the promise of low wages really lure people out of the drug game? Simon doesn't miss a beat. "That's an issue," she admits. "Transitional employment isn't the end all, be all." Still, she says, "young people in this program want to work, they want to be good parents."

Simon stresses the discipline required of participants, who are overseen by two judges: Superior Court judge John Dearman, and Thelton Henderson, a highly respected federal district court jurist. "Judge Henderson isn't going to take any mess off anyone," Simon says, adding that BOT-ites have their progress reviewed by one of the judges every two weeks.

When BOT participants aren't working or checking in with the judges, Simon "saturates" them with "education, case management, and accountability." There are restorative justice classes, law classes, parenting classes, and hold-down-a-job classes, and Simon hopes to enroll the bulk of her charges in community college.

Whether her saturation strategy will work in the long run remains to be seen. And at some point, undoubtedly, Simon will run into blowback – giving offenders a second chance always carries a risk because some of them are destined to screw up, and every now and then one of them will screw up in a horrific way. Sooner or later there will be headlines about the guy who went through BOT and ended up doing something awful.

Question: Can Simon – and Harris – handle the pressure when things go bad? For her part, Simon portrays herself as a realist who doesn't expect every single person who joins the program to stride directly into the straight life. Still, she insists, "we are not going to be deterred" by the inevitable criticism.

There's also another public safety consideration, one that often looms off-camera during these discussions. Most drug offenders herded off to the pen won't be there forever. Eventually, they'll emerge from those punishment factories and walk back into the sunshine of the free world, in many cases hardened, deeply angry, and unable to score a decent job – that, of course, is risky as well.

To be sure, Simon's not the only public official pushing for some kind of detente in the drug war – we've already got "drug courts" and diversion programs and 12-step meetings in the county jails, as well as Proposition 36 (the statewide "drug treatment instead of incarceration" deal), the medical marijuana law, and an array of other initiatives. Yet vast numbers of people are still doing time for using, moving, or selling verboten substances.

"I feel like we're scratching the surface, but it's a good scratch," she says. While Simon's enthusiastic about the possibilities of her programs, she's also cognizant of the broader, deeper forces at play – race, class, and culture, for starters – and the fact that she's dealing with a tiny fraction of the folks who come through the system on rock or weed or dope charges. "It's an etching on a system that's been around longer than any of us have been on this earth."

• • •

Buehlman's spent the past couple of months gabbing to anyone who'll listen about the door that slammed shut on him. With help from Marci Seville, an employment expert at Golden Gate University's School of Law, and All of Us or None, a group that advocates for ex-offenders, he's made a mini-campaign out of his case, talking to several honchos at City College, as well as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the city's Human Rights Commission, and at a public meeting in late October, he addressed the college's board of trustees.

Buehlman had located a little-known chunk of the Ed Code allowing the trustees to declare him "rehabilitated," clearing the way for him to work for the school. Hoping to convince the trustees, a board of seven elected officials who govern the school system, he gave each a fat packet of paperwork documenting his life as a law-abiding dude, and got an endorsement from Tandy Iles, head of the Drug and Alcohol Studies program, who described him as a "wonderful example" and a "successful citizen."

When Seville got a chance to speak, she unleashed on the school. "Mr. Buehlman," she told the board, "is the poster child of rehabilitation. He is the person who is the star student in your program, the graduation speaker in your program. It sends a terrible message to the students in your drug and alcohol program that their star student couldn't come back and work here."

The trustees declined to rule on the issue, instead choosing to refer the matter to school faculty and administrators for further discussion. "We are not qualified to make these sort of judgments unless we have some standards and training," trustee Milton Marks III says.

The outcome didn't surprise Chancellor Day. "They're certainly weren't going to make a decision that night," Day says. "The stakes are too high."

For his part, Buehlman understands the worries of school officials: Obviously, they don't want to end up loading the school system with unsavory characters who've managed to keep themselves out of jail while remaining embroiled in the criminal life. "I certainly understand the concerns about public safety, but I think you can balance them in a way that provides opportunities for people who've been rehabilitated. If I'm not rehabilitated, then who is? I work in a hospital. It's the most regulated field out there."

Day and Marks both say Buehlman performed a service by illuminating a snag in the system, and Day says his staff will be "revising our job descriptions, revising our job postings on the Web, and the applications themselves will be modified." In the near future, Day says, ex-felons will know from the jump to obtain a formal "certificate of rehabilitation" from the courts before applying for a job with the school.

At this point Buehlman's chances of getting the job are zero. The position's been filled. He's hoping, however, that his efforts make things easier for the next ex-offender.

In the final analysis, he thinks City College blew it. "I could've been a good addition to their team," he says. "I'm a whole lot more than a rap sheet." E-mail A.C. Thompson at acthompson@hushmail.com.