Will hire even with a criminal record
More businesses give the formerly incarcerated a chance
More businesses pledge to give those formerly incarcerated chance to work
Michael Clark got out of jail in 2013. But he arguably got his first true taste of freedom when he landed a fulltime job. ❚ “Just having something positive to do is very important,’’ says Clark, who once dealt drugs. The 24-year-old said that earning $20 an hour doing construction work has enabled him to get his own apartment in Brooklyn. ❚ But finding a job took years.
“They had those questions, and I just used to check ‘yeah’ because I wanted to be honest about the situation,’’ he said about queries regarding whether he had been convicted of a crime. “I applied everywhere, and I didn’t hear back at all. So it was really difficult for me ... trying to survive.’’
Now, Clark and others may no longer have it so hard.
A low unemployment rate, millions of open jobs and shifting attitudes are leading to a tearing down of barriers
that have long hindered those who’ve had run-ins with the law from finding a job.
In December, Congress passed the First Step Act, which, in addition to giving judges more latitude when giving sentences for non-violent offenses, bolstered rehabilitation programs for former inmates.
Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., have banned private or public employers from asking prospective employees if they have a criminal history until after they’ve passed an initial screening, had an interview or been given a conditional job offer, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some local jurisdictions, including New York City, ban most workplaces from asking about criminal history until they’re offered employment.
And in January, the Society for Human Resource Management announced an initiative in which businesses are committing to giving the same opportunities to qualified applicants with a criminal background as they do to those who don’t.
More than 700 individuals, companies, associations and nonprofits have taken the pledge so far.
“The key is to get us past the point where people are rejected immediately and automatically because they have a criminal background,” says Johnny Taylor, SHRM’s CEO.
At a time when the national unemployment rate is 3.8 percent, SHRM says
that more than 7.8 million jobs need to be filled by 2020. With 650,000 people being released from jail and prison every year, the time is ripe for employers to be more open to those with a criminal history, Taylor says.
“I think it’s the perfect storm,” Taylor says, noting that communities also become safer when people are able to legally earn a living. “People aren’t recidivating (or returning to criminal activity) simply because they’re bad actors. They’re recidivating because they can’t provide for their families.”
Even before the recent push by Congress and state lawmakers, some major companies had implemented policies to ease the path of those who’d spent time behind bars.
Target removed a question about criminal history from its job applications in 2013.
“Now, we gather criminal background information in the final stages of the hiring process,” says Danielle Schumann, a Target spokeswoman.
The retailer also has signed onto federal and New York state pledges calling for a reduction of workplace barriers to the formerly incarcerated.
At Tyson Foods, “while applicants ... may be subject to background checks, questions about felony convictions aren’t part of the application process and don’t automatically preclude them from employment,” spokesman Derek Burleson says. “We make hiring decisions on a case-bycase basis.”
And Walmart, the nation’s largest employer, removed criminal-history questions from its job application a decade ago.
“The removal does not eliminate the background check, but it offers those who’ve been previously convicted of a job-related crime a chance to get their foot in the door,” spokesman Justin Rushing says. “We also have a thoughtful and thorough process where the candidate can, if they choose, submit additional information to have their individual circumstances reviewed.”
Only 5 percent of managers say their businesses have specific recruiting programs for people with a criminal record, according to a study by SHRM and the Charles Koch Institute that was released in May.
However, more than a third of managers and HR staffers said they were willing to give jobs to applicants with such a history, and more than 80 percent of managers feel the value employees with criminal histories bring to the business is as high, or greater, than that of their colleagues who do not have a record.
Such openness is significant, says Geoffrey Golia, associate executive director of Getting Out and Staying Out, a New York area re-entry program that helps with needs from education to job placement.
“Human-resource officers for mediumand large-sized businesses are often the people who make the decisions about who to hire and how to set standards for hiring,” says Golia, whose program helped Clark land his job, “so that kind of effort demonstrates that there’s a real sea change in terms of people’s perspective on hiring formerly incarcerated and justice involved people.”
He adds that changing attitudes may be more responsible for the shift than a low unemployment rate since “it is possible to, in some ways, continually discriminate against people and still meet your hiring needs . ... I think people know people who’ve been involved in the criminal justice system. When they hear individual people’s stories, I think it humanizes it in a way that people start to realize the human cost and the reality of the system. So I think the social and cultural piece is important.”
The link between having a job and staying out of jail is strong.
Among those who’ve gone to school, undergone training, received mentorship or gotten jobs through GOSO in the previous 90 days, the recidivism rate is less than 2 percent, Golia says. For those who’ve engaged with the program over the previous three years, the rate is 15 percent. That’s compared with a fiveyear recidivism rate of 76.6 percent for those released from state prisons according to the Bureau of Justice.
“I can’t overstate how important it is to make a decent wage,” Golia says. “The dignity inherent in work and being able to earn a wage to support yourself and others is a really powerful incentive.”
Four years ago, Michael Almodovar, 19, says he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, charged with robbery and assault because of crimes committed by a friend. He was released after a month in New York City’s Horizon Juvenile Center, but he says that brush with the law woke him up.
Three months ago, through GOSO, he got a job making salads and doing deliveries for the restaurant Harlem Pizza Co.
“My whole family is incarcerated,’’ Almodovar says, noting that he has a teenage cousin who has been in New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex for three years on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. “Nobody in my family finished school . ... My grandmother always told me she saw more in me than anybody else. I want to make my grandmother proud of me.”
SHRM’s goal is not merely to get companies to hire a set number of workers who were once incarcerated “as an act of good will,” Taylor says. The organization intends to collect data from businesses about not only the number of people they bring on board but their rate of retention, and how well they perform in comparison to their colleagues.
“If you’re just hiring people purely because they were formerly incarcerated, we could end up hurting this movement, this initiative, because it’s a quota,” Taylor says. “Our goal is to ensure that employers take the formerly incarcerated through the same level of rigor and assessment that they would any other employee.”
Still, even some businesses that are open to hiring employees who’ve had run-ins with the law are reluctant to publicize it.
“One of the biggest challenges that we have to overcome is the NIMBY (not in my backyard) phenomenon,” Taylor says, “and that’s, ‘Yeah, you should hire people with criminal backgrounds as long as they don’t work here.’...You must respect the privacy (of the formerly incarcerated) because there are some employees who have strongly held opinions and it would change their view of someone they previously thought was great.”