Home to Stay helps ex-offenders resettle
Job training, resource information offer stability, reduce recidivism
It had been 18 years since 49-year-old Tommie Wright had seen Milwaukee.
“It didn’t look like this when I left,” he said about the downtown area, shaking his head.
He started looking for a job on June 18, the day he walked out of prison.
Wright attended the Home to Stay Fair co-hosted by the Milwaukee Justice Community Council and the Department of Workforce Development on Wednesday at Employ Milwaukee.
The fair hosted more than a dozen employers and resource providers, including Progressive Community Health Center, RITUS, 414Life, Hope Street, Community Advocates, Volunteers of America and Literary Services.
The vendors were there to offer employment, health care, housing, insurance, parenting and child support resources to reentries, people who return to society after serving their jail or prison sentences. People like Wright.
Wright said he’s been working at Taco Bell since he got out, but wanted a better job, so he connected with Maurice Sprewer, Department of Workforce Development employment and training specialist and founder of the Former Offender Pipeline to Employment program.
Wright is now three days into the two-week-long program that exposes ex-offenders to resources such as the Home to Stay Fair.
He said he believes the program fills a serious need among reentries.
“Allow the men and women that come out of prison to continue to have access to opportunities like this,” he said.
“If this is not offered, some of us will go back to doing some of the things that got (them) in prison. For me, that’s not an option anymore.”
Turning talk into action
Wright is not alone. Unemployment is a major barrier to reentries and a serious precursor to recidivism, the Journal Sentinel reported in 2015.
Before co-founding Home to Stay, John Thomas, the employment and training supervisor at the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, was constantly in meetings with other criminal-justice-focused organizations.
“Everybody was meeting and it seemed like nothing was getting done,” Thomas said. “I just jumped in.”
So Thomas began envisioning a resource fair after he saw a similar event in Ohio and wondered if he could re-create it in Milwaukee.
To test out the idea, he worked with the Milwaukee Community Justice Council and invited a number of other local, state, federal and private institutions to one location.
The result was the first Home to Stay resource fair. In the past, vendors have included Wisconsin Community Services, Familia Dental, Covering Wisconsin, Northcott Neighborhood Center and Wisconsin Regional Training Program/Big Step.
David Goines from Progressive Community Health Center said he was there to help reentries realize the value of health insurance.
“Everyone should have some type of health insurance, not just for yourself, but for your children,” he said.
He also pointed out that employers want costeffective employees who aren’t always out sick.
Getting out, staying out
Oscar Jones was IMING for, among other things, getting another library card.
Jones is also a participant of the Pipeline program and is reentering the community after he spent six years in prison.
Like Wright, Jones said the first thing he noticed was the change in scenery.
“Everything is gone and changed over: the downtown area, the Bradley Center is gone — right away, I noticed it,” he said.
That was just one way in which the world had essentially gone on without him.
“All of this digital stuff is new to me,” he said. Without the guidance from Sprewer and the opportunities at Home to Stay, Jones said he doesn’t know what he would have done for housing, clothes, food and shelter.
“It’s a blessing this program is up and running the way it is,” he said. “I would have been lost, confused and possibly doing something that would have gotten me back locked up.”
In fact, he said he wishes he would have had the resources he has now before he was incarcerated.
Mandy Potapenko, executive director of the Milwaukee Community Justice Council, noted that the consequences of confinement can become cyclical.
“Research has proven that even a short stay can be very destabilizing to individuals’ lives, to losing housing, to losing employment, to having their insurance benefits turned off,” she said.
Wright left a lot behind — two working parents, a loving home — when he started making bad decisions because he wanted to be like his friends.
But Wright said the person who went to prison and the man he is now are night and day and he doesn’t want his past decisions to dictate his future.
That future might have him working at RITUS, one of the vendors that showed up Tuesday to offer felonfriendly employment and offered Wright a job interview for Wednesday.