This past Thursday, my family and I went to the Delancey Street Restaurant located in San Francisco, California, and it was pretty amazing. It is a restaurant that is connected to the rehabilitation center called Delancey Street Foundation. Everyone who works at the restaurant is either an ex-prisoner, ex-drug addict or ex-homeless person, so they are part of the clientele getting treatment at the foundation. The Delancey Street Foundation provides housing, vocational training and businesses for its patients to work at. Around 500 people can live in the housing and the vocation training offers training in purchasing, contracting, computer and accounting services. There is also an outdoor espresso café and bookstore as well in addition to the restaurant.

The foundation operates as kind of a small town so it does not cost that much of our tax dollars to upkeep. This is why investing in rehab is so much better than investing in more jails because it is a lot less expensive and a rehab facility's main goal is for the patients to get better. Not once in the restaurant did I feel in danger because these people were rehab patients. I would not have even noticed otherwise. They carried themselves in such a well-mannered way which demonstrated that they took their job as seriously as any other person would. I wanted to go to the restaurant because I thought it would be cool to write an article about it, but also, I remember researching it in my "Prisons and Punishment" class and it sounded really trailblazing and important because of the problematic nature of our growing prison system which continually increases and takes money away from our schools and healthcare. Prisons do not actually help decrease the amount of criminals because there is not enough rehab within prisons which causes high-recidivism and they steal money away from education in inner-city, high-risk areas. In actuality, prisons increase criminals! Rehab facilities would be able to help the more criminals get better while there and not steal so much money from other necessary social resources. So I thought that it would be a great business to help out and make a small contribution to what will hopefully start a movement in the U.S. towards more rehab facilities.

And let me tell you, I am definitely head-over-heels glad that I went to the restaurant with my family! It was a great learning experience and the food tasted great. It is rated four out of five stars on yelp, so if you don't listen to me listen to the hundreds of people on yelp! The waiters and the host were very polite as well, and the interior of the restaurant made you feel like you should have dressed up classier because it looks so nice. The workers there really took their job seriously because they were thankful that they had a second chance at their life, so it felt good to be able to look at them and see them as waiters and not people on rehab. If you live in the Bay Area then I definitely recommend eating here!