In most prisons, news that some of the inmates have gotten hold of hand tools and are going to work on a wall would ordinarily be cause for alarm.

But every rule has its exception, and in this case it’s the Lewis Arizona State Prison Complex, west of Phoenix. The inmates are prisoners with fewer than 60 days to go on their sentences. And the wall is a structure inside the prison, overseen by a local contractor called Top Quality Masonry, that is used to teach the inmates skills that could land them jobs when they are released.

“We have a wall that’s put up and taken down again. It goes up again, it comes down again,” says Karen Hellman, division director for inmate programs and reentry at the Arizona Department of Corrections. “Construction is booming in Arizona, which is a fabulous thing, but [home builders] are short of labor. In this case it was a perfect marriage. They needed workers, and we had people who needed work.”

It’s part of a collaboration between the state prison system and Arizona employers called the Second Chance program. Since 2017, at Lewis and two other prisons in the state, selected inmates have been offered intensive vocational training before they are released. What sets the program apart is that private-sector employers are going into the prisons and setting up training programs tailored specifically to the kinds of jobs they are trying to fill. Members of the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona (HBACA) have mocked up a construction site inside the Lewis complex. They started with electrical work— teaching inmates to run wires through three framed walls—and painting. The training has expanded to include drywall, framing, door and trim, plumbing—and, yes, masonry.

“From day one they start with a trowel in their hands,” says Michael Summers, general manager of Top Quality Masonry, an HBACA member. “It’s hands-on, five days a week.” Summers says, “I’ve got about eight guys out of the program who are really good,” and he’s planning to hire more. “I’ve been involved in a lot of high schools and trade schools, and this has been my best avenue for employees,” he says. Asked if there are risks associated with hiring people straight out of prison, he says, “I’ve had no issues. A lot of these guys are minor offenders. We’re not hiring from death row.”

And yet the Second Chance program doesn’t only deal with low-risk offenders. It also tries to help inmates whom the experts think have a moderate to high risk of committing new crimes after they are released. “If they’re low risk, we don’t need to intervene,” says Hellman. “What we do is we identify inmates who are at high risk of returning to prison—the more difficult ones. There’s a battery of assessments— types of crimes, how many, age, behavior inside, all those factors. Then we say, ‘In your last 60 days, let’s really prepare you.’ We don’t want them coming back through the door.”

Hellman says that of 2,116 inmates who have gone through the program so far, “We’ve had 1,284 job placements. So about a 50 percent placement rate.” She keeps her expectations realistic—“It’s not like we’ve had a magic wand to fix them and suddenly they’re going to be a model employee,” she says—but she has noted pleasant surprises. “We’ll get women going into electrician jobs, which is great because it’s atypical work for women. It sort of cancels itself out: they’ve got a criminal record, but they’re women in an atypical job, which is attractive to employers.”

It’s too soon to tell what effect the Second Chance program is having on Arizona’s recidivism rate, which is around 40 percent, although Hellman says “it’s trending well.” She says, “We’d like to get it down to 30 percent.”

HBACA chief executive Connie Wilhelm ticked off the benefits for her association’s members in testimony last April before the U.S. House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources. “First, 60 percent of Arizona’s prison population is between the ages of 18 and 39,” Wilhelm said. “Due to the physical nature of construction, this age demographic was generally interested in more physically challenging jobs, and many have previous construction experience. Second, inmates recognize the opportunity to enter a career that would allow them to support themselves and their families. Third, when we allow ex-offenders to work we assist individuals to become productive members of our communities, we assist our employers to address the labor shortage, and we assist taxpayers and our communities by keeping former offenders out of prison.”

Even so, Wilhelm told the subcommittee, there are hurdles to making a program like this succeed. “First, there is the challenge of finding employers who are willing to take a chance on a former offender. We have had employers join our program only to leave after an incident with a former offender. Additionally, we have had employers tell us that they don’t want the liability of hiring a former offender.”

But the biggest obstacle to the successful employment of released inmates, according to people involved in the Second Chance program, is a mundane one: transportation. Many people coming out of prison have no car, no money, and suspended driver’s licenses due to court fines or other penalties. In the construction trades the problem is especially severe. New housing developments are often far from public transportation. And temperatures in Arizona get so high that the workday starts early; employees sometimes need to leave for work at 3 a.m. The governor’s office has begun talks with the major ride-hailing platforms to see if some kind of arrangement can be made for people in the Second Chance program.

Summers of Top Quality Masonry sends a truck to pick up his Second Chance masons, or helps them out with bus passes. He believes the program is good business. “There are challenges no matter who you’re trying to hire,” he says. “These guys are serious about turning their lives around.”

Summers adds, “One thing I do want to say is that most of the guys who come to me really care. I get a lot of Christmas messages.”

Have a look around the next time you’re having dinner in one of your favorite restaurants. There’s an increasing chance one of your waiters—or the chef or a kitchen worker—has a prison record.

It’s not hard to understand why. The restaurant business struggles with finding good, hardworking employees, and the staff turnover can be crippling. That’s why some food businesses have made a policy of giving a second chance to people with criminal records. In fact, restaurant owners are among the most committed and innovative when it comes to job training for ex-offenders: some of these businesses run their operations as schools where individuals with a criminal record can get a culinary education—and a paycheck.

Restaurants have provided opportunities to millions of people across the country. Rob Gifford, executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation, says the industry is committed to helping people acquire the skills they need to thrive. “Restaurants continue to open doors for people from all backgrounds—including previously incarcerated individuals looking for a second chance,” he says.

Two of the stars in this field are EDWINS in Cleveland, which was the subject of Knife Skills, a documentary nominated for an Oscar in 2018, and Café Momentum in Dallas, which has been featured in numerous TV and newspaper reports. While broadly taking a similar approach, EDWINS founder Brandon Chrostowski and Café Momentum chef and founder Chad Houser each work with a different segment of the prison population. EDWINS is about rehabilitation: its students are adults with criminal records trying to rebuild their lives. Café Momentum is about prevention; its paid interns are kids who have been in trouble with the law but aren’t old enough yet to have adult records.

Here’s how they both do it in their own way.

EDWINS

Cleveland

EDWINS is an upscale French restaurant launched in 2013 by Brandon Chrostowski, a veteran chef who has worked in Chicago, New York, Paris, and Cleveland. While living in Cleveland, he taught cooking courses in local prisons—and liked it so much he decided to do it full-time. He got backing from his boss and other donors and launched EDWINS.

Chrostowski came by his passion honestly. He was inspired to hire ex-offenders by his own experience with the law as a young man in Detroit. After he was arrested on a drug charge, the judge gave him the choice of going to jail or getting a job. Jail didn’t sound all that great, so Chrostowski found a job in a Greek restaurant, and cooking turned out to be his life’s work.

So far, so good.

Over the last few years, EDWINS, a nonprofit, has expanded to include prerelease programs in 13 Ohio prisons, an EDWINS butcher shop, and a residential facility for students while they are training. In addition to culinary training, EDWINS helps students get reestablished in the world by showing them how to obtain driver’s licenses, professional accreditation, and bank accounts. The name is an abbreviation of “education wins.” So far, the prison program has graduated more than 400 people; another 286 have trained at the restaurant itself.

Chrostowski says the six-month restaurant course is designed to give students a crash course in every aspect of running a restaurant, from chopping mushrooms to the ins and outs of restaurant finance.

The biggest problem many ex-offenders bring with them is a lack of self-esteem. “You can tell,’’ Chrostowski says, “just by the energy that they answer certain questions with. Like ‘How’s your day going?’” He has learned that those who have reflected hard while behind bars and have decided that they want a taste of winning tend to make the best students and employees. “Once people think that way, teaching a skill on top of that is easy,” he says.

EDWINS’s restaurant program is designed to rebuild the confidence of its students by giving them a steady stream of increasingly challenging tasks to master. The first week of the training program involves memorizing culinary math (e.g., how many teaspoons in a tablespoon); this is followed by segments on safety and sanitation, gastronomic history, knife skills, sauces, and pairing wine with food.

Giving students a sense of accomplishment fast is important to keeping them motivated. “If maybe the streets are looking kind of tempting early on,” says Chrostowski, “we want the student to think, ‘Wait, I’m winning here at a certain clip. This is where I need to be.’”

When businesspeople from other industries tell Chrostowski they want to replicate what he is doing, he encourages them enthusiastically. “Just give me a call,” he says. His advice is to ask three questions before you start. “First is what and how are you going to teach?” he says. “The second thing is how are you going to make it sustainable, and the last is where are you going to get the people?” While answers to the first two will vary from business to business, Chrostowski says, the last is usually answered easily with a call to a state or county office for prisoner reentry.

 

Café Momentum

Dallas

Café Momentum hires and trains minors coming out of juvenile detention as two-month paid interns. The restaurant, which serves New American cuisine, provides these young men and women with caseworkers, teachers, and counselors. It also gives them referrals for permanent jobs at Dallas-area restaurants and hotels.

“The idea here is to create an ecosystem of support for the kids on all the issues and barriers that have prevented them from achieving their full potential in life,” founder and chef Chad Houser says.

The program started in 2009 when Houser taught some kids in detention to make ice cream for a competition. The enthusiasm of the teens he taught inspired him to launch Café Momentum. Between 60 and 70 percent of the restaurant’s workers at any time are young people with juvenile records. Houser says 751 kids so far have come through the program and only a handful have gotten into trouble with the law again.

One of the biggest lessons Houser has learned is how to win the trust and respect of kids who are often labeled “throwaways.” Changing old habits is tough. “Of the kids I’m dealing with, 62 percent are homeless,” Houser says. “When we first opened, some would just walk away from their stations, walk out of the restaurant, and go around the corner to a taqueria or 7–Eleven to get food; then they’d come back, sit down, and eat.” He lectured the kids about it, but they kept doing it. “I felt defeated,” he says.

It took him a while to realize that it wasn’t a matter of the interns’ disrespecting him or the restaurant. They were poor kids who couldn’t wait around until the restaurant served them lunch late in the afternoon before it opened for dinner.

“They’re working all day with food, and they weren’t allowed to eat it. They were hangry,” he says. The problem was solved by a large box of granola bars. “I said, I’m going to make a deal with you. I’m going to give you two granola bars; whenever you get hungry, go ahead and eat them but don’t leave your station, don’t leave the restaurant. If you’re still hungry, I’ll give you more. And then at 4 p.m. we’re going to sit down and have a big meal; we’ll feed you like always. And they said OK.

“And I never had a problem again.”

Houser believes that businesspeople inspired by his example don’t need to build big or ambitious programs. “The best piece of advice I got,” he says, “was to focus on one kid. Help that kid. Then help another one, and another one. There are 14,000 restaurants in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, and if only half of them hired one juvenile offender a year that would cover every kid in the juvenile justice system.”

 

 

 

The value proposition for Uplift’s workforce training program is pretty clear: spend six weeks in the classroom learning some of the soft and hard skills required to succeed in the workforce, and one of the group’s partners will give you a job. Uplift’s goal is to keep ex-offenders in and around Philadelphia from returning to prison. Thanks to its partnership with local employers, Uplift reports that only a tiny percentage of the people who complete the training program are rearrested or reincarcerated.

A Q&A with David Rattray, executive vice president of the Center for Education Excellence and Talent Development at the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

Representing more than 1,650 member companies with 650,000-plus employees, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce has taken a prominent role in supporting education and career pathways for formerly incarcerated men and women. That includes advocacy work, such as supporting California’s Proposition 47, which decriminalized certain drug offenses, and the Chamber’s Creating Opportunities and Real Experiences (CORE) internship program, which trains young adults and helps them obtain work experience.

David Rattray, a 20-plus-year veteran of the food service industry, spoke about why employing formerly incarcerated adults is good for business, what gets in the way of hiring, and how companies can and should adapt. He is executive vice president of the Center for Education Excellence and Talent Development at the Chamber and president of UNITE-LA, the school-to-career partnership of Los Angeles.

For businesses, what’s the benefit of hiring formerly incarcerated workers?

There’s an enormous amount of talent, and it comes in every shape, just like the overall workforce. These are not only people who can do low-wage, low-skilled work. There are a lot of high-skilled workers and people who are super entrepreneurial and know how to get stuff done. Every type of skill, personality, and character trait exists in this population, just like it does in the larger population.

Are employers turning to ex-prisoners because they have no choice in a tight labor market?

This is a moment in which we can get a lot of ex-convicts back into labor markets. What I wouldn’t want to do is create an impression that this is a marginal pool for when you’re desperate. I’d rather emphasize that there’s real talent here, in some cases the best talent, regardless of economic swings.

Even if it’s not about economic swings, why is this especially important now?

This was a smaller part of the adult population when we had much lower incarceration rates. As sentencing laws became harsher, it’s become an enormous portion of our adult workforce. That challenges us to think differently about something that 30 or 40 years ago seemed like a marginal issue. Employer practices, in some ways, are a relic. Companies can’t afford to exclude a huge portion of the talent pool.

What gets in the way of hiring?

Companies get flooded with resumes. It’s time-consuming to examine 100 resumes or more for one position. It’s natural for a company to come up with pretty simple criteria, like not having a criminal record, to just skim off the top of a bunch of resumes.

Companies are often prohibited by law from asking about criminal records. How do you talk about it in an interview?

Like in any job interview, interviewers should invite candidates to make their case. As they do, the natural thing is to walk through their work history. Somebody who’s been incarcerated is going to have gaps. Employers often find out someone has a criminal past without directly asking.

You want the candidate to acknowledge their experience and say, “Here’s the truth. Here’s who I am, and here’s what’s happened to me,” and take it as an opportunity to explain their own fallibility, the realities of what they faced, and what happened. You would hope there’s something that demonstrates growth.

How realistic is it for job seekers to volunteer that information?

It’s so natural and rational for someone who’s been incarcerated to think that if I tell you this, it’s a guarantee I will not get the job. Why would I think that I somehow would score points by being candid? It is important that employers understand that fear.

How can senior management help when it comes to hiring applicants with criminal records?

In most cases, there’s no reason for a criminal record to rule out a candidate, but many employers come up with a blanket policy. Senior management has to give hiring managers cover to avoid knee-jerk noes and balance risk with a hiring policy that’s proactive, that increases the possibility of a lot of yeses.

By Johnny C. Taylor, Jr, president and CEO of the Society of Human Resources Management

One in three working-age adults has a criminal record—more than have college degrees—and one in 100 currently is in prison. It is not just families who are hurt: over-incarceration damages our businesses and economy.

Last year, Congress made history with the First Step Act, bipartisan legislation that aims to revise prison and sentencing laws and do more to prevent recidivism.

But it will never live up to its promise if people leaving prison remain barred from the workforce. Almost 700,000 of them will be released this year to rebuild their lives and livelihoods. One year later, 75 percent will still be looking for work.

Studies show that recidivism is closely linked to unemployment. So when employers overcome their fears to consider candidates with criminal records, they are doing a service to society. When ex-offenders are rejected from work, we are resentencing them to a life of instability and hardship. And we are wasting a vast, willing, trainable segment of the workforce during a time of critical skills shortages and ultralow unemployment.

The “next step” of the First Step Act is for business leaders to act. As the voice of all things work, SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, has teamed up with Koch Industries, Inc. on the Getting Talent Back to Work campaign, which calls on corporate executives and association leaders to pledge to give individuals with criminal histories a fair chance at gainful employment.

A diverse coalition representing more than 50 percent of the workforce has signed the pledge—including Koch Industries, Inc., American Staffing Association, National Retail Federation, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A growing number of private employers, such as Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation, Butterball Farms, and Checkr, are taking the pledge too.

CEOs may worry about pushback from their human resources team, which must be rigorous about safety and compliance. The good news is that SHRM/KII research shows that nearly half of HR practitioners believe having a criminal history should not be a deciding factor in hiring. I expect that number to grow as more employers develop formal policies and strategies for hiring workers with criminal records. To help them, SHRM developed the Getting Talent Back to Work Toolkit, offering best practices for screening and evaluating these candidates.

Giving a second chance to people who want to reenter society is a win-win-win. It decreases the risk of recidivism, promotes a valuable U.S. talent pool, and helps reduce the growing skills gap.

People who have made mistakes want and deserve the dignity of work. We hope you will join us and sign the pledge today.

By Coss Marte, founder of ConBody

What if you were known for the worst thing you’ve ever done?

Think about it.

Well, I am. At 19, I was making over $2 million a year running one of the largest drug delivery services in New York City.

I was raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the mid-80s. I watched my relatives sell drugs on the corner, and that’s who I wanted to be. I wanted to be rich. We lived on a couch in my aunt’s tenement apartment with eight other people. Going down my front steps I would see heroin addicts lining up to buy drugs off my cousins.

At 13, I started selling drugs and getting locked up. I realized I was getting arrested because of my appearance so I came up with a different way of selling drugs. I started wearing business suits and ties. I made 10,000 business cards. I had a team using a whole different strategy for drug delivery. I had 20 people working for me, a few vehicle dispatchers. It was a crazy, crazy thing.

At 23, it all ended. I was sentenced to seven years in prison.

When I went inside, I was told I was going to die there because of my weight and other health issues. I started thinking, I cannot die here. I had a two-yearold son at the time and wanted to come home for him. So I started doing dips and push-ups and jumping jacks in my small, nine-by-six prison cell. I started running laps around the prison yard. After six months I had lost 70 pounds. By the end, I had helped more than 20 inmates lose over 1,000 pounds combined.

I didn’t think I was doing anything special. I was just working out and helping the inmates move forward. Then, with two months left, I was thrown into solitary. For the first time, I started asking how I could give back to society.

I was released from prison a year later. When I got home, I started looking for a simple retail job—minimum wage, I didn’t care. I was looking for anything that would keep me out of the system and let me do the right thing.

I was faced with applications that asked, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Every time I checked “yes” and handed it back, the manager saw it and would say, “We’re going to call you back.” In the back of my head, I’m thinking, No you’re not.

Out of desperation, I started going up to people in the park and pitching them on a prison-style boot camp led by people coming out of prison. All body weight, no equipment. It started growing, from one person to two people to now over 20,000 people we’ve trained.

ConBody opened on the same corner where I sold drugs and first got arrested. I built a prison gym where the people we train take a mug shot, go through a prison gym gate, take five-minute showers, get screamed at by an ex-con, and have a lot of fun.

Sultan Malik was my first hire. He spent 14 years in prison, including seven years in solitary confinement. He is now one of the top trainers in America, according to Reebok. From there, ConBody started growing and growing, so I started hiring more and more people.

But this is about more than my business. There are 70 million Americans today with criminal histories and 76 percent of them return back into the system within five years. (I fit that description; I was arrested nine times between the ages of 13 and 27.) My mentors said, “You got a gym, you’re hiring a couple people. That’s cute. Think scale, how are you going to blow this up?” We came up with an innovative idea called ConBodyLive, which lets people virtually work out with their favorite ex-convict in a small prison cell space from their home.

Then, after I shared my story at a wellness conference, one of the attendees came up to me to say she was inspired and wanted to help. I gave her my card. She emailed me with the subject line “Saks Opportunity.” This led to an invitation to open a prison gym in the bougiest store in America. We had ladies wearing Louis Vuitton and Gucci who started changing their perspectives on people with criminal records.

And that became our mission: to change the way society sees formerly incarcerated individuals. Everybody on this planet, everybody in this world, makes mistakes. What we’re asking for is a second chance.

Coss’ Story

Coss Marte, founder of fitness company ConBody, shares how he went from the streets of New York City to felon to entrepreneur with a gym inside of Saks Fifth Avenue and a team of employees with criminal records of their own. Marte’s stated mission is “to change the way society sees formerly incarcerated individuals.”  This is Coss’ story.

The tight labor market makes it hard for businesses of all kinds to hire enough workers.

Welders are among those in demand, especially in Indiana, where a new program responds to employer needs by giving female inmates the skills to join the workforce when they’re released from state prison.

More than 200 women have gone through the Ivy Tech Community College program since December 2017, including a number who now belong to the small community of women welders.

Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb singled out the program during this year’s state of the state address. “Given the urgency around strengthening our workforce, we can’t afford to overlook anyone, especially those who want to earn a second chance,” he told lawmakers.

To the north of San Francisco and Silicon Valley sits California’s renowned San Quentin State Prison, home to some 4,000 inmates. Those two worlds, far apart in nearly every respect but geography, are forging a connection that is changing lives.

In December, Google announced a $2 million grant to The Last Mile, a nonprofit that was founded in 2010 to bring entrepreneurship programs to San Quentin and went on to introduce a groundbreaking coding curriculum designed to give inmates marketable skills and a better chance at success in the outside world. The group now trains software developers in 13 prisons in California and three other states, with plans to be in 17 facilities in six states by year-end. To date, it boasts a zero percent recidivism rate among its graduates.

“We’re optimistic in our belief that computer science can play an important role in helping people develop skills needed for today’s economy,” says Maab Ibrahim, criminal justice lead at Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the search giant. Education, workforce development, and economic opportunity are centerpieces of Google’s charitable efforts, and that includes addressing racial bias and inequity in the criminal justice system. Over the past five years, Google.org has given more than $32 million to nonprofits advancing criminal justice reform.

Leaders at Google.org first visited The Last Mile at San Quentin over a year ago. “We were so impressed by the students that we immediately funded putting laptops into the hands of recent graduates, and wanted to do more,” says Ibrahim.

This grant will help The Last Mile educate and train 525 incarcerated men, women, and youth around the country over the next two years. “The tech field and society will benefit from what they can bring to the table as digital creators,” Ibrahim adds.

Partnering with the business community is nothing new for The Last Mile. Founders Chris Redlitz and Beverly Parenti come from the venture capital and technology worlds. Volunteers, guest speakers, and mentors from tech firms play a hand in the prison coding classes, which run over three six-month semesters. “We’re starting to see a growing consciousness in the tech world of how tech can integrate with the larger society,” says Hayley Benham-Archdeacon, business account manager at TLM Works. (TLM stands for The Last Mile.)

In TLM Works, a one-of-a-kind development shop within San Quentin that was launched in 2016, inmates earn about $17 an hour building websites for outside clients. (Due to prison rules, inmates must work without internet access and within highly restricted hours.) To prepare those employees for jobs on the outside—a first job ever, for some—TLM Works tries to replicate a professional tech workplace. “We put a heavy emphasis on teamwork, collaboration, and stand-up meetings,” says Sydney Heller, TLM Works technical manager, “so it’s less of a shock when they go out in the world.”

At mentor days every other Wednesday, software developers from a variety of tech companies including Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Dropbox, and Pandora, to name a few, stop by The Last Mile classrooms to answer questions from the inmates. “Through that socializing with people from the outside they become more comfortable and a transformation happens,” says Benham-Archdeacon. Google employees have long been among those who’ve volunteered at The Last Mile. Now as part of this new arrangement, Google software engineers, program managers, and designers will help review code and expand the curriculum.

Jason Jones credits this kind of contact with tech professionals inside San Quentin with helping him land a position with the San Francisco company Fandom even before he left prison in 2018. (He has since taken a job with The Last Mile, building out the group’s virtual instruction program.) Jones, 35, had spent more than 13 years in San Quentin for assault with a deadly weapon. “Before The Last Mile I was getting into trouble, I was angry, and I saw no reason to better myself,” he says. “Coding blew my mind, it’s a whole other world.” As he trained, he treated every visit from an outsider as a chance to network—a mind-set that paid off.

This type of seamless transition from prison to the workplace is something The Last Mile would like to see even more of. One recent development is another step in that direction: last August the tech firm Slack announced a yearlong apprenticeship program for three graduates of The Last Mile, called Next Chapter.

Early clients of TLM Works were often other likeminded nonprofits who needed help with a website. Now the goal is to build more ongoing relationships with private firms. “If you can have established relationships with a company, the hope is they will be more open to hiring you once you’re released,” says Heller.

Even if graduates don’t join the tech industry, The Last Mile training can make a difference. “We’re teaching life skills, if not strictly coding skills,” Heller says. “It’s such an abrupt readjustment coming back to society. Does The Last Mile solve that? No. But even marginal steps in adjusting reduce the chance of failure.”

Google.org’s Ibrahim echoes that: “For someone who has been incarcerated, technical skills like coding, as well as business skills like teamwork and collaboration, can ease the transition back into their community.”

For Jones, The Last Mile prison program taught him a profession—and a new way of approaching problems. “With coding, you have to slow down and break apart the problem,” he says. “In prison, I started doing the same thing: think things out, weigh my options, and think about which is the best longterm solution for me. With coding you want long-term results, and that trickled over to my life.”

By W. Todd Johnson, Global Channel Leader of Entrepreneurship and Job-Creation,
Gallup

Two years ago, the founder of an innovative reentry program called RISE shared some staggering statistics about the way we deal with the millions of people imprisoned in the United States. The vast majority return to prison within five years, with many reoffending within 100 days of release. Most telling, for me, is that the vast majority of recidivists are unemployed.

That’s something I could help with, so I began going into prisons equipped with Gallup’s tools for job creation and talent development. These powerful tools show workers, managers, and others how recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior can be productively applied.

It didn’t take long to learn that most of the prisoners had never been recognized, let alone celebrated, for their strengths.

As I helped incarcerated men and women find innate potential within themselves for the first time, my role evolved from frustrated bystander to strengths coach for incarcerated men and women.

More than 100 prisoners have since signed up for strengths coaching.

Prison officials welcome the assistance. “Imagine a world where every interaction you had was focused on your failures and your weaknesses. A world where your past behaviors seemed to define your future,” says Scott Frakes, director of correctional services in Nebraska. “Welcome to the world of convicted felons.”

“What if we could flip the script, and define these same people by their strengths?” Frakes asks. “Our prisons are filled with incredible talent and potential, and 95 percent of incarcerated people are coming back to the community. Employers need talented workers, and people reentering the community need meaningful work.”

Warden Denise Davison has been using Gallup’s CliftonStrengths tool to foster hope—as well as confidence and communication skills—among the women housed at the prison in York, Nebraska. You can feel the positive changes to the culture inside the prison as women begin to view themselves— and others—through a strengths-based lens.

One man I’ve worked with at the Nebraska State Penitentiary found his life’s purpose in building up the men around him, men who, unlike him, will eventually return to society. “I have served 38 years of a life sentence and find extreme purpose in helping the men in this prison learn about their strengths, so when they get out, they can reenter the employment market knowing what they are good at,” he says. “We walk the yard and talk about what contribution they can make to an organization based on their strengths.”

We know from 17 years of global polling that all most people want is a good job, and we know from our strengths research that the likelihood of gainful employment goes way up when you, and ideally your manager, know your strengths.

This is just as true for ex-offenders.

Employment, rooted in hope and confidence, is a leading factor in reducing recidivism and increasing well-being. As CliftonStrengths coach Curt Liesveld liked to say, “When we help a person discover how they can fulfill their role within the context of their own soul, we have added value to both the person and their organization.”