The beginning of arc , the seed of Budnick’s fascination with crime and punishment, dates back to his internship on Baywatch in 1997. A gofer at the Marina del Rey office of Tower 18 Productions, he was handed a recent Rolling Stone article and asked to assess its cinematic possibilities. The piece was called “Lynching in Malibu,” an account of middle-class stoner kids in nearby Agoura Hills who end up on trial for murder.

The events centered on a backyard shed, infamous as the neighborhood spot to light up. The four teenage defendants dropped by one evening to score some weed, and when a fistfight broke out with two other boys, the oldest defendant pulled a pocketknife. In the chaos, one of those boys was fatally stabbed; he was 16 and the son of an lapd detective. It was a shocking crime for an uncommonly safe community to absorb, and the pressure to make an example of the assailants was immense, especially after the lapd chief urged the judge to show them “the same mercy” they showed the victim. When prosecutors alleged that the fight was a botched robbery, they invoked California’s felony-murder rule: Even if none of the defendants intended to kill anyone, even if all but one were unarmed, each was responsible for the result. Three received life without the possibility of parole.

After visiting the defendants in prison, Budnick was at a loss. “I hate to say, it’s not a movie — there’s no third act,” he reported. “What a depressing movie. Two acts and no conclusion.”

When an industry friend invited him several years later to observe a creative-writing class at Sylmar, Budnick carried with him the memory of those condemned boys. His Hollywood career was on the upswing by then, but he was already finding himself feeling, he says, “a little bit trapped in a bubble.” At juvenile hall, 20 miles and a universe away, Budnick was suddenly sitting side by side with boys from East L.A. and South Central, Long Beach and Pacoima, hearing tales of abuse and neglect, addicted mothers, missing fathers, a merry-go-round of foster homes. “I couldn’t sleep that night,” he says.

The class that drew him to Sylmar, that continues to be his pass into the Compound, is sponsored by InsideOUT Writers, a nonprofit that sends dozens of Angelenos into the county’s juvenile facilities every week. In the mid-2000s, I was an InsideOUT volunteer, too, and not the only one then who was unsure what to make of Budnick. We became friendly, but he was rapid-fire everything, a macher amid poets and journalists and dancers. I cared about the caliber of the writing; he cared about parlaying the writing into action. In time, I drifted away; Budnick joined the InsideOUT board.

Eventually, some of Budnick’s students began trickling back home, often to the same turbulence they had left. He thought InsideOUT should be there for them and began organizing a camping trip, the first of what he envisioned as an annual retreat. InsideOUT, concerned about liability, balked. So Budnick did it on his own.

From those occasional, unofficial gatherings, the Anti-Recidivism Coalition was born. It was to some degree an accidental organization, created to accommodate the ambitions — and the brain chemistry — of someone who was moving faster and thinking bigger than the organization he already belonged to. “I’m add to the fullest,” Budnick says. “I like going and going and going and getting shit done.”

arc has an unconventional relationship to its constituency, a population it both serves and leverages. Unlike, say, Father Greg Boyle’s Homeboy Industries, which puts former gang members through an 18-month job-training course, arc ’s assistance revolves around “support network meetings,” anything from a movie night to a meditation circle. arc also has a transportation team, which picks up new parolees from prison, and it hosts barbecues and ice-skating trips to steer them clear of less wholesome alternatives. For its signature event — the annual getaway — arc now has the run of the Canyon Creek Retreat Center, an elaborate sports complex in the Angeles National Forest, where Budnick keeps a couple of hundred members and guests moving with a whistle and megaphone. This year his live-in girlfriend, a policy advocate at the Children’s Defense Fund, and her 11-year-old son even attended.

When a probation officer drops by arc ’s offices to ask about the length of the program, Budnick shakes his head. “It’s lifetime,” he says.

A better way to think of arc is as a collection of redemption tales, a vehicle for the “real experts,” as Budnick calls them, to articulate who they once were, and why, and how they came to no longer be that person. “When they tell their own stories,” Budnick says, “that’s where the magic happens.” In that sense, he is a casting agent again, combing through all his jailhouse visits, the decade of relationships he has cultivated with gangbangers and drug dealers, to identify the best and the brightest — the ones with the charisma, the self-awareness — to serve as arc ’s public face. “His brain is like a Venn diagram,” says Ryan Lo, who was released last fall after doing 23 years for a murder he committed at 17 and now answers arc ’s phones. “In his head he’s assessing you — your personality, your skills — and seeing which circles you fit into and where those circles overlap.”

Budnick is especially canny about seeking out juvenile offenders who appear to represent the system’s excesses: the accomplice serving a life sentence, the backseat passenger convicted as an adult. Eighteen years later, he still visits one of the Agoura Hills defendants, Brandon Hein, whose sentence was commuted to 29 years to life, meaning he will be eligible for parole as early as 2020. “I was just in the chapel at Lancaster State Prison sitting next to Brandon,” Budnick tells me one day, “as John Legend sang ‘Glory,’ the theme song from Selma.” (This really happened: Budnick spent a January afternoon leading the R&B star on a correctional tour, which culminated in a spontaneous performance.)

Budnick figures he has escorted 600 or 700 potential benefactors on jailhouse visits, maybe double that if you include special events, like the TEDx talk he hosted with Richard Branson at Ironwood State Prison in Blythe last year. When the actor Jake Gyllenhaal was preparing for Brothers, Budnick brought him to Sylmar; afterward Gyllenhaal joined arc ’s board. Budnick recently hosted a meeting of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce at Men’s Central Jail; the chamber, which employs an intern from arc , is now calling on its members to hire ex-cons.

In the long run, Budnick dreams of removing every young person, 18 to 25, from the adult prison system and placing them on a campus with educational and therapeutic programs. He has been sketching plans for what he calls the California Leadership Academy for more than a decade — a Warner Bros. set designer helped with the earliest diagrams — and since his recent appointments to both the California Community Colleges Board of Governors and the Board of State and Community Corrections, he now has more platforms for making it happen. While still years away, the project just received an $865,000 endorsement in Governor Brown’s budget. This sweeping proposal, with all of its promise and uncertainty, is not rooted in an especially religious perspective, nor is it particularly ideological. If pressed, Budnick will repeat the axiom “hurt people hurt” — and its corollary, “healed people heal.”

Budnick’s vision can be so ambitious, his pace so accelerated, he sometimes starts building structures before he has finalized the blueprints. He has described plans to add hundreds of new arc members, for instance, and eventually open more offices, first in the Bay Area, later possibly in San Diego and the Central Valley. Even his board has cautioned him about stretching the organization too thin and increasing the risk — maybe the inevitability — of a former offender becoming very publicly current again.

To create a refuge for parolees, Budnick launched a housing program last fall, an endeavor he considers the organization’s most innovative. He rented nine units in a Sylmar apartment building, moving in two dozen arc members and enrolling them in nearby L.A. Mission College. He calls it the state’s first community college “dorm for the formerly incarcerated” and wants to “scale the shit out of it.” But because he was in such a hurry to get everyone settled before the start of school, arc partnered with an organization that has transitional housing experience — only to discover that the provider, judgmental where arc tends to be forgiving, was a bad fit. He calls it a learning process: “I just don’t like learning when there are real lives at stake,” he says.

I was with Budnick in December when he took an arc group to San Quentin, the first visit to a maximum-security facility for some of his newest board members and staffers. Budnick was eager to educate and inspire his team. But when they arrived at San Quentin’s gates, the guard took one look at Budnick’s faded Levi’s and shook his head: “You can’t wear those pants in here.”

“What are you talking about?” Budnick said.

“Those jeans, they’re blue,” the guard said.

“I’ve worn these jeans to every prison in California.”

“Well, you can’t wear them in here.”

To avoid just this situation, Budnick’s assistant had emailed everyone the prison’s visitor guidelines, which ban blue and gray denim. To Budnick’s thinking, those rules were silly and inconsistently enforced. “If they fuck with us like this, think what they do to the families who come to visit,” he grumbled, stomping back to his car and rooting around for another pair of pants. I wanted to say that those families probably read the dress code, but Budnick was already kicking off his shoes, stripping down to his checked boxers. A different kind of person might have felt sheepish. Budnick snapped a picture of the offending jeans and emailed it to the warden.