Goal: 1 Million ​“Second Chance” Jobs

A nationwide campaign to land jobs for one million formerly incarcerated people made a stop in New Haven with a pitch focused on encouraging hospitals to step up as ​“second chance” employers.

Roughly 300 people turned out Monday afternoon for the NAACP​‘s One Million Jobs Campaign Corporate Network Reception, held in a third-floor auditorium at the Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) Student Center at 345 Fitch St.

Organized by state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) President Scot X. Esdaile, the networking event featured a diverse lineup of political and corporate speakers exhorting businesses throughout the state to help train and hire people recently released from prison.

Johns Hopkins Medicine Senior Director of Strategic Workforce Development Yariela Kerr-Donovan served as the keynote speaker and the Connecticut Hospital Association as one of the campaign’s regional partners. The event targeted its hiring message towards hospitals, which Esdaile described as many of Connecticut cities’ largest employers following the long, slow demise or urban manufacturing jobs.

“We want to give our families, our communities, and these companies a second chance,” Esdaile said.

The event was held as part of a nationwide NAACP campaign to partner with governments, nonprofits, community organizations, schools, and businesses throughout the country to help get one million formerly incarcerated people jobs.

Esdaile, who is also the chair of the national NAACP Criminal Justice Committee, said that he convinced the organization to conduct a three-year pilot of the campaign in his home state of Connecticut. In April, he and Gov. Ned Lamont joined over a 100 business leaders and state officials in Hartford to kick off the statewide pilot, which has a goal of landing 10,000 jobs for formerly incarcerated Connecticut residents by 2022. 

Esdaile said that the NAACP has prioritized this jobs campaign because of the disproportionate impact that mass incarceration has had on black and brown communities. Now that states like Connecticut have been working more and more towards reducing their prison populations and shutting down prisons, he said, civil rights organizations like his have to work all the more closely with the government and with employers to make sure that those returning home from prison aren’t barred from the workforce because of their criminal history.

“The question is: Are we prepared for these individuals coming back?” he asked the representatives from 250 different businesses he said had registered to attend Monday’s event. All too often, he said, the answer from the employer side is, ​“No.”

Thus the jobs campaign.

Each of the subsequent eight speakers proceeded to take the mic and praise the NAACP for spearheading such a hiring initiative, and to describe both the economic and social justice imperatives of making sure that people who complete their prison sentences are able to achieve steady, good-paying employment.

“Let’s have a real conversation about what it takes to survive in society today,” said state Department of Correction (DOC) Commissioner Rollin Cook. Food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, and all the other bare necessities of life require money, which in turn requires employment.

Imagine having two, three, four strikes against you, he said. No references. An unstable family life. Maybe a history of addiction. Maybe a lack of formal education. ​“Imagine what that feels like,” he said.

He called on Connecticut’s employers to exercise ​“stoic courage” in not holding every mistake against an employee, in looking past a rap sheet when determining whether or not he or she might be a good fit for a job.

“They’ve paid their debt and served their court-imposed sentence,” he said. ​“Collectively we can stop the life-long sentence that occurs when society won’t forgive and provide these people the chance to succeed.”

Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said that making sure that the formerly incarcerated have ample employments opportunities makes economic sense for employers.

More people in a community with stable jobs, higher purchasing power, and more marketable employment skills only contribute to, rather than detract from, a thriving economy.

“In other words,” she said, ​“doing good is really good for business.”

Alan Lazowski, the founder and president of LAZ Parking, said that only 15 percent of people who have a job after getting out of prison go on to commit another crime that lands them back in prison. Roughly 60 percent who are released without a job, he said, do return to behind bars.

The son of a Holocaust survivor and prominent state rabbi, Lazowski said he has prioritized hiring the formerly incarcerated for positions ranging from valets to managers out of a commitment to ​“conscious capitalism” and ​“elevating humans through business.” Employers must step up in the fight for criminal justice reform, he said, and they must do so by not just avoiding discrimination, but actually hiring those who have completed their sentences.

The keynote speaker of the event was Kerr-Donovan from Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Medicine, which Esdaile described as one of the leading employers throughout the country in their focus on training and hiring those who have been ​“justice impacted.”

Kerr-Donovan listed a host of strategies that her employer and the Human Resources department under her leadership have pioneered in the past decade.

Those include not just ​“banning the box” so that applicants don’t have to identify their criminal history on job applications, but also making sure HR staffers in her department have sufficient knowledge of the criminal justice system to understand that not all past crimes are relevant to a prospective employee’s suitability for a given job.

“Who’s checking backgrounds?” she asked the employers in the room. ​“Do they know what they’re looking at?”

She also challenged the group to think hard about job descriptions, and whether or not education level and work experience requirements are true musts or just nice-to-haves. If nice-to-haves, she said, consider establishing an on-the-job training program that can stand in for work and educational experience, so that those without those credentials still have an opportunity to succeed.

Make sure there are venues for advancement within the workplace, she said, because people who are formerly incarcerated are some of the hardest-working and most loyal employees imaginable. They want to learn and succeed and rise the ranks, she said.

And, most importantly, treat all employees, regardless of their criminal history, to the same standards and provide them all with the same training and opportunities.

“This cannot be the process that we use for ​‘those people,’” she said. ​“Separate but equal treatment,” she said, hasn’t ever worked in this country’s history, and it won’t work here.

Jennifer Jackson, the president and CEO of the Connecticut Hospital Association, said that representatives from all 27 member hospitals in her organization were present Monday, thus indicating the seriousness with which Connecticut hospitals want to participate in this hiring initiative.

Hospitals are committed to addressing the social determinants of health, she said. ​“They are committed to keeping their communities healthy.” And one critical way of doing that is making sure that people in the communities they serve have good jobs.

Watch a Facebook Live video of the full event below.