US labor shortage provides opportunity for ex-prisoners
JACKSON, Miss. — When Antonio McGowan left the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman after serving 17 years, he was free for the first time since he was 15. But as an adult finally out from behind bars, he immediately found himself confined to menial labor.
McGowan needed stable work, for a paycheck and to keep busy, but temporary gigs were all he could find.
Just as those around him counseled the importance of maintaining a routine, he became trapped in a cycle of odd jobs and irregular hours. He trimmed grass one week and painted a house the next.
But he couldn’t land anything full time, and the unpredictability of his income proved challenging. Disconnection notices and unpaid bills piled up.
“Things weren’t in place,” McGowan said. “They weren’t where I wanted them to be as far as being an individual back in society. It was a struggle.”
After several years adrift, McGowan was finally able to regain his footing with the help of the Hinds County Reentry Program, a workforce training program for former inmates created in October. Reentry programs are one way employers are trying to fill some of the 11.3 million open jobs in the U.S. amid a dire national labor shortage.
The practice of employing people with a criminal record is known as “secondchance hiring.”
In rosier economic times, many former prisoners faced steep obstacles to finding work. The labor shortage sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic now presents them with opportunities, said Eric Beamon, a recruiter for MagCor, a company that provides job training to people in Mississippi correctional facilities.
“We think the pandemic, in a sense, was a big help,” Beamon said. “If no one wants to work anymore or if everyone wants to work from home, employers are begging for employees.”
Some studies have shown that stable jobs are a major factor in reducing recidivism.
Still, not everyone is willing to hire an ex-convict, and a lack of job opportunities for those with a criminal record is still stymieing workforce participation in the economy, Stephanie Ferguson, a senior manager of employment policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote in a May report.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, barriers faced by people with felony convictions were linked to a loss of at least 1.7 million employees from the workforce and a cost of at least $78 billion to the economy in 2014, the year that McGowan left prison.
The current desperate straits in which employers now find themselves could help spur a change. In a 2021 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, the SHRM Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute, 53% of human resource professionals said they would be willing to hire people with criminal records — up from just 37% in 2018.
That’s where programs like Hinds County Reentry and MagCor step in, helping to make former inmates more desirable as candidates by properly training them to reintegrate into society and matching them with jobs tailored to their skills and interests.
McGowan said he’d like to work in air conditioning and heating repair, and the program’s staff members recommended him to Upchurch Services, a Mississippi-based company that allows workers to take classes in repair services while gaining experience in the field. McGowan was hired the second week of May.
He makes $15 per hour, working 40 hours per week with paid overtime. He said he has full health care coverage — and he loves the work.
“Summer, winter, spring or fall, you’ll need either heat or air conditioning,” he said. “So I found something I can help people out with. At the same time, it can keep me in the working class, so I don’t fall back into the things I used to do.”