Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [44]
Historically, former prisoners have had a hard time starting again. They usually don’t get much education or job training while incarcerated and even when they do, many employers are unwilling to hire them. Most don’t have a home or a stable family to take them in. Without a job, they are likely to commit other crimes. The Ready4Work program is trying to change that. Ready4Work is a partnership between Public/Private Ventures, the Annie E. Casey and Ford foundations, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Labor. Since 2003, the project has worked with religious and nongovernmental groups and local government in seventeen cities to train newly released men and women, place them, and help them keep jobs. The results of their efforts have been impressive. Out of more than 4,800 returnees, only 1.9 percent of Ready4Work participants were incarcerated for a new offense within six months of their release, and only 5 percent were in jail within a year. In many states, the average recidivism rate in the first year is 20 percent. Moreover, the cost of the program is $4,500 per person a year, compared with $25,000 to $40,000 per year for incarceration.
Jacksonville, Florida, started its Ready4Work program when it received Department of Labor funding in 2003 under the leadership of Kevin Gay, who left a successful career as an insurance executive in 1999 to start his own NGO to redevelop a poor neighborhood in Jacksonville. All the newly released inmates get five weeks of basic training in job hunting, new suits for job interviews, and mentors, most of whom come from local churches. After the training period, the participants are matched with jobs, usually paying between $7 and $12 an hour, at one of one hundred participating employers.
One of Gay’s success stories is Gerald Dove, Jr., a thirty-six-year-old former crack-cocaine dealer and multiple offender, who used his third stint in prison to learn various trades, help other inmates learn to read, and study to become a minister. He found a job making custom doors for Granger Lumber, paying $10 an hour. Dove’s boss, Bob Bailey, had hired several inmates because he believes “if a young man made a mistake and paid for his mistake, he deserves a second chance.”
It’s difficult to overrate the importance of giving people like Gerald Dove that second chance. As Dove himself said, “It’s hard for a person to be something they’ve never seen. I had never seen a successful man or woman who shared a similar history to mine until I came here.” Ready4Work is succeeding in Florida. Just one in twenty of its participants is arrested within a year of release, compared with one in five of all those who are released from Florida’s prisons.
Getting an education while in prison further reduces the chances that an inmate will commit another crime when released. Before 1995, there were about 350 college-degree programs for prisoners. Today there are fewer than twenty, because Congress, over my administration’s opposition, eliminated Pell grants for state and federal prisoners in 1994. Four of the remaining programs are in New York, thanks to the Bard Prison Initiative, a privately funded effort organized by 2001 Bard graduate Max Kenner. The four programs have about 120 students, only 10 percent of those who apply for them.
Prison officials say inmates involved in education are much better behaved. Their professors say they work hard to learn the material. The student inmates say they love the classes. Why? In April 2007, Reshawn Hughes told 60 Minutes, “While at Bard, I learned that freedom is something much different than just a physicality, a space of physical existence. Freedom had a lot [to] do with your ability to think. Freedom has a lot to do with your ability to communicate with others. To see the