By Katti Gray, STAFF WRITER

In an hour reserved for rooting out issues that can fester and boil over, Rhonda Aikman stood in front of the women prison parolees who are her housemates, inviting their input. As overseer of that hour at Greenhope, Aikman, a parolee herself, was trying to ensure that no temper flared and that anyone in the room full of women with any morsel of a concern would have a chance to air it.

A hand flew up in a far corner. With Aikman's nod, the gesturing woman stood. She cleared her throat. "My thing is this, right?" she began. "No one needs to eat two lunches and three dinners every day. When someone comes in hungry and there is nothing for them to eat, that's a problem. They missed breakfast and been out for lunch and they can't even get a string bean? Leave something for the other person."

Finished, the speaker sat down. Aikman invoked a mantra of the house: "Can she get that?" "She got that," the women replied, in unison, a pledge to keep order in the 42-person dormitory. Someone left the coffeepot plugged in throughout the previous night, another woman said. "Can we be mindful?" she asked. "That can start a fire or anything. Can I get that?" "You got that," the collective said. "The third-floor bathroom has been looking really raggedy.... Please be mindful," Aikman said. "Can I get that?"

Listed on Greenhope's weekly calendar as "House Matters," that session is one of dozens filling the days and nights at the East 119th Street residential treatment facility for parolees and convicted women who end up at Greenhope as an alternative to incarceration. The Harlem center, one of a handful in New York State exclusively for women, serves an additional 50 or so women through an outpatient program. Greenhope provides six months of temporary housing, remedial education, counseling, job training and job referrals to clients ranging from as young as 18 to old enough to have grandchildren and gray hair.

Financed by the state and private donors, Greenhope opened in 1975. Its services have expanded over the years to accommodate a rising number of women circulating through the criminal justice system, mainly on drug-related charges. Since the mid-1980s, the tally of women in state and federal prisons nationwide has almost tripled, hovering now around 93,000, or 7 percent (another 78,000 women are in municipal jails, and tens of thousands more are on parole or probation). In New York State prisons the female count has gone from 1,085 in 1985 to 3,041 in 2002, but it has declined slightly since the late 1990s.

Those who work with women who were incarcerated say they need more specialized attention than has been available in rehabilitation projects initially established for men but also accepting women. In a man's presence, it can be difficult for a woman to unmask, explore the source of her troubles and, having done that, be reformed, Greenhope counselors said. The process of reforming can mean delving, as women at the center do, into everything from being HIV-positive to being lesbian to having been raped to having children who hate them.

More than three years after leaving Greenhope, Renee Davis, 49, is still trying to forge a relationship with her son and only child, a 30-year-old husband and father whom she forced, at age 8, to hide under a convertible bed while she, high on crack, had sex on top.

Drug-free for four years now, she persuaded him to attend a few counseling sessions with her, but he has refused Davis' most recent entreaties. The two of them may never be bound as mother and son, and that makes her heart ache, Davis said. But she tries not to be fixated on that prospect. She focuses instead on the fact that she is a better person today than when she showed up at Greenhope in 1998, fresh out of jail, her front teeth knocked out in a brawl and 105 pounds of flesh stretched thin on her 6-foot frame.

Greenhope arranged for her to get new teeth and ran her through its drills. Recently vacationing from her job as an administrative assistant at the Drug Policy Alliance in Manhattan, Davis was relaxing in her newly leased one-bedroom Bronx apartment, a step up from the 9-by-9-foot room Greenhope had helped her secure when she left there. Davis charged her new furniture on a $10,000 credit line she obtained in her own name.

"Life is a process, and once one phase is over, another is coming. I prepare for the next one, and I know it may not be as pleasant as the last. But I have never felt better," said Davis, who earns $28,000 a year and, with two years of college credits, plans to return to the classroom in January.

At fund-raisers for Greenhope, Davis sometimes shares her story. Greenhope administrators hold her up as a sign of what is possible. "We are trying to teach them how to use their free time and that there are a lot of other things to do with their free time besides getting high," said the Rev. Anne Elliott, executive director of Greenhope. It is planning to begin construction in 2004 on a bigger center, with more programs for women and their children, across from the current site.

About 90 percent of Greenhope's women ended up there because they were dealing drugs - sometimes for a man in their life - or pumping their bodies with them. To finance a drug habit, some sold sex, robbed and stole.

"We've had women who've been so high they tried to kill their children," said Alethea Taylor, the project's deputy director. "They know they are not the norm. And they have a whole lot of fears: 'How am I going to get back into society when my own mother doesn't even see my change?' But we tell them, 'You've changed in the last three months. Your mother has seen 30 years of bad behavior.'"

Aikman, a single mother of one, was convicted in federal court of letting heroin dealers ply their trade from her old apartment on Lenox Avenue, blocks from Greenhope. "Me and my baby's father had domestic violence, and when he decided to leave me - thank God - he threw everything out. My daughter's milk, her crib, the food, my bed, the TV, the microwave, her toys. We had nothing," Aikman said. "That's what led me to dealing."

Each day, she packed up her baby daughter, now 7, handed the dealers her door keys and headed out. While she was away, the dealers passed roughly 100 bundles of heroin - $10,000 worth - through the Aikman "stash house" daily, she said. Her share of the proceeds was $250 a day. ”I would give them the key because I didn't want to be there," said Aikman, who also was a cocaine addict. "But, the money? You couldn't beat that."

In a place where many women say they were raised by one parent or grandparents or, perhaps, do not know either parent, Aikman stands out. She is the only daughter of a mother employed in corporate human resources and a stepfather who owns a funeral home. If anything, she said, they tended to overindulge her and did not demand hard enough that she go to school or get a job, though she did short stints in a candy factory, stuffing envelopes, delivering office mail and working as a hospital clerk.