Lots of companies support second-chance hiring. Very few talk about it. - Boston Business Journal (2024)

Two years ago, Stephen Pina was released from prison after 28 years and immediately faced the challenge of getting a job.

At age 54, one of the first hurdles was catching up on the technology advancements he’d missed.

“I got a phone my second day home and didn’t know what the hell I was doing with it,” he said.

He also struggled with PTSD, and sought a work schedule that would allow him to continue his activism on behalf of others who, like him, were wrongly incarcerated. But on top of that was a stigma — the one he faced coming out of jail and trying to find work that offered “living wages with benefits,” he said.

Pina knows his struggles aren’t unique. He knows plenty of others have been rejected from jobs due to their criminal records or who don’t even apply for some jobs, fearing their past will be a barrier.

“I know guys who have gotten into jobs, and then there’s the background check, and they find out they have a CORI, and they say, ‘Well, you know, we didn’t know you had a CORI. We’ve got to let you go.’ Which really sucks,” said Pina. “A lot of guys will not even apply. And what happens is, when you can’t find work, you go back to what you know. And if you’re a hustler or a drug dealer, you know, something like that, you’re going back to that because you need money.”

The challenges faced on the job market by those with a criminal record are surprisingly common. Here in Massachusetts, one out of every five residents — more than 1 million people — have a criminal record, according to the Clean Slate Initiative. Nationwide, the ratio is higher, at 28%. About 70,000 people go to jail every year in Massachusetts, according to the Prison Policy Initiative — a lower rate of incarceration than most U.S. states, but higher than most democratic countries.

Nationally, about 60% of formerly incarcerated people don’t have a job, PPI estimates. The U.S. economy loses between $78 billion and $87 billion in GDP annually due to people with criminal records being shut out of the labor market, according to the Clean Slate Initiative.

For employers in Massachusetts, which has seen the fourth-largest decline in labor force participation of any state over the past decade, that means a huge swath of potential employees who are frequently weeded out by background checks or else who never apply in the first place.

“Because of the scale, it’s something that companies have to figure out how to do well, or else they’re going to miss out on a giant slice of the labor market,” said Brandi Mandato, senior director in the Center for Justice & Economic Advancement at the Boston nonprofit Jobs For the Future. “In many cases, (they’re) incredibly talented, incredibly well-trained and incredibly prepared, dedicated staff and employees. So you’ve got to figure out how to do this, because your competitors are figuring out how to do this, and they’re doing it well.”

JFF focuses on helping several underserved populations — including people with criminal records — get jobs. In December 2022, JFF acquired the second chance employment program from Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation, which promotes the use of so-called “fair-chance hiring practices” among companies.

Second-chance hiring data unavailable

JFF is one of several local examples of organizations working to lower the barriers for people with criminal records to find employment. They range from small efforts like Project Entrepreneur — a course at Boston College taught by adjunct professor Lawrence Gennari to help formerly incarcerated people start their own companies — to the Second Chance Business Coalition (SCBC), a national organization founded in 2021 with more than 50 corporate members. SCBC is led by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase; and Craig Arnold, CEO of Eaton Corp. plc.

However, there’s almost no reliable way to gauge how successful those efforts have been. Most involved in the space acknowledge no one collects data on the number of second-chance hires. When the Business Journal contacted 19 members of the SCBC, only one — JP Morgan — disclosed how many people with records it’s hired in recent years. Most did not want to talk about their second-chance hiring efforts at all, despite having their names prominently displayed on the SCBC website.

Dane Linn, senior vice president at the Business Roundtable, which launched the SCBC in 2021 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, said the coalition does not make hiring data available.

“We actually don’t collect it,” he said. The goal of the organization is to help companies learn from others how best to implement practices that reduce barriers for people with records. Companies are all at different stages of involvement in the effort, he said, and some are still new and reluctant to talk about it.

“Some are more forthright in sharing the data, but others don’t share the data because they don’t feel like they have enough of a record of success,” he said.

However, he says that based on the number of corporate giants that are now part of the SCBC, he believes that “second-chance hiring has picked up steam.”

Abby Diebold, senior communications manager with The Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, a nonprofit with primary locations in New York, London and Boston, said there are often legal reasons companies don’t want to talk openly about their hiring.

“Some of the bigger companies are a little bit wary of putting out something that they can’t run past their legal team,” she said. “I think because we’re talking about hiring, there are a lot of specifications on what they can and can’t say, from a legal perspective.”

While most companies are reluctant to share their data, many are willing to do so anonymously. According to a 2023 survey SCBC conducted of its members, about half of them track the number of their workers with criminal records, and of those, “nearly three-quarters said that more than 5% of their new hires are second-chance candidates.”

But that data is a snapshot in time, and trying to identify trends is more difficult. At least one source of data, however, suggests hiring of formerly incarcerated people may have fallen in recent years.

Through a public-records request, the Business Journal obtained information on tax credits awarded by the Internal Revenue Service to companies for hiring people convicted of felonies. The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) allows employers a tax break if they hire members from certain groups who’ve faced barriers to employment. The numbers of WOTC credits in the category of “ex-felons” show a significant decline in the numbers of such tax credits awarded in the past three years compared to the decade prior to 2020, both nationally and in Massachusetts.

Some who work in second-chance hiring cautioned against reading too much into the data, however, saying many companies who hire former felons don’t apply for tax credits.

Technical support needed

Pina describes himself as "free but still fighting,” meaning he was released from jail after he raised questions about evidence that was withheld in the trial in which he was convicted for a 1993 murder. While living on his mother’s couch in the South End the first year after being released, Pina took a job at an athletic sneaker company where he had worked decades earlier. He also started making and selling T-shirts as part of his ongoing advocacy for others who are incarcerated, and today he lives in a subsidized apartment in Charlestown, where he continues to grow that business while applying for other jobs.

“It just evolved,” Pina said of his company, Never Not Working Enterprises. “We ended up coming up with this logo…. and we started putting it on shirts, and I started selling the shirts to friends and family. I wanted it to be a shirt where, when you wore it you felt a sense of power, resilience.”

T-shirt sales have netted Pina only a few thousand dollars over the past couple of years, however, so he continues to apply for and interview for jobs, many of which involve working with other formerly incarcerated people. But his lack of tech-savvy is a constant barrier.

“When you fill out a job application, and you got to have Microsoft, and you have to have Windows…. I barely know how sometimes, you know? If there’s more than, like, four or five emails, I’m lost,” he said.

Helping provide technical skills to the wrongfully incarcerated is the goal of a program at the Boston office of Deloitte LLP, which started collaborating with The Innocence Project in 2021.

”They face trauma and social stigma coming after this, and even though their names have been cleared and they’re back on a path to reintegration, we’ve recognized that they still struggle to find employment gaps. Some of that’s due to perception, and some of that’s due to education and skills,” said Rebecca Chasen, the New England managing partner at Deloitte.

Chasen said the work involves “a pretty extensive network of volunteers” at the company, who aim to ease people’s re-entry into the workforce. One of those is Joseph Emerson Lee, an audit senior at Deloitte & Touche LLP who’s been working on the project for years. He said the company offers trainings in the office for five or six people at a time.

“We’re really just there to help them with whatever they want,” he said. “Oftentimes, that starts off at very basic skills, like how to join a Zoom meeting, how to write an email, or how to log into your email.”

Pina says he’s done some technology training, but his PTSD makes it hard for him to remember much. Regardless of those challenges, Pina says he’s had a couple of positive interviews recently and he’s willing to wait for the right position. Meanwhile, he continues his activism on behalf of those who’ve been wrongly imprisoned as well as anyone working to regain their lives after incarceration.

“One of the things that I try to advocate is, you’re not the worst thing that you’ve done,” he said. “A lot of us, if we were judged by what we did when we were 16 and 17, we wouldn’t be in the positions we are now. And that goes for CEOs.”

— Reporter Cassie McGrath contributed to this report.