Firms Becoming More Willing to Hire Former Prison Inmates

Help-short employers who had been reluctant to hire former prisoners have been reconsidering, according to a Federal Bureau of Prisons official.

“Many employers who attend prison mock job fairs are so impressed with our labor force that they want to hire them immediately,” said Washington, D.C., placement administrator Sylvia McCollum.

When the bureau began holding the fairs three years ago to teach inmates job interview skills, employers participated because they thought it was “their civic duty,” she said. Now they are becoming “enthusiastic” about hiring them.

“They’re amazed by their qualifications and the fact that they’re not violent and tough-looking but ordinary people looking for a second chance,” McCollum said.

One Los Angeles-area employer who taught interview skills to a sheet metal worker at the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution was so impressed he kept a job open for six months for the man, McCollum said.

Approximately 30,000 of the 100,000 federal inmates--94% of them male--are released annually, about 70% of them to halfway houses. “Either they find a job within two weeks or they may go back to prison,” McCollum said.

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Just as employers’ impressions of federal prisoners are changing, their new interest in hiring released prisoners is changing inmates’ perceptions of what they can expect upon release.

“Inmates are profoundly moved by the idea that an employer will hire them,” McCollum said. Many prestigious universities, she noted, “have been first-rate in their willingness to give them a chance.”

More than 400 companies--including some national hotel, supermarket, gasoline and retail chains--are hiring from the prisons bureau.

However, one human resources director, Gary Brown, of Springfield Remanufacturing Co. in Missouri, said: “Employers do not run rehab centers and cannot afford the luxury of additional supervision” to watch former prisoners.

But when a Springfield Remanufacturing employee volunteered to assume responsibility for a friend and former inmate seeking work, the company hired the man as an assembler. “We set some hard, steadfast rules; we made sure he understood the dos and don’ts, and we had a real good relationship,” Brown said.

“Most employers will take a chance,” he said, “depending on the industry they are in and whether the person is handling money.”

Employers increasingly are mailing help-wanted notices to prisons to be posted on bulletin boards, and prison guidance counselors give inmates the names of employers who advertise openings on the Internet, according to the bureau’s McCollum.

A major activity of the bureau is to upgrade the education and job skills of prisoners--only 60% of whom have a high school diploma. Inmates who want the better prison jobs must earn general-education certification.

Federal Prison Industries has put about 20,000 inmates to work at tasks from sewing uniforms and designing graphics to making furniture and electronic products for the defense industry. Their pay ranges from 23 cents to $1.15 per hour.

Studies of former prisoners, McCollum said, indicate that those who worked in prison industries or attended education programs committed 20% fewer crimes after release than those who did not. Overall, about 1 in 3 Federal prisoners wind up back behind bars.

Before the inmates are released, the prison helps each inmate assemble a portfolio with the necessary employment papers: birth certificate, photo identification, Social Security card and a driver’s license application.

“We try to get them to stop thinking of themselves as prisoners and to start thinking of themselves as employees,” McCollum said.

It seems that more employers are starting to think of them in that context too.