For People Just Leaving Prison, a Novel Kind of Support: Cash

“It’s gone from a moral imperative to a business imperative,” said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the chief executive and president of the Society for Human Resource Management.

Villara Building Systems outside Sacramento, which manufacturers heating and plumbing systems, for instance, found itself with a huge demand for personnel because of a boom in residential construction.

To address critical labor shortages, the company’s president, Rick Wylie, who emphasizes his Christian faith, gravitated to “an untapped labor pool that most of the marketplace isn’t interested in or capable of addressing.”

He started a program called New Start and recruited Cory Henderson, 52, who spent three years in prison for grand theft auto, to lead it. Mr. Wylie was bracing for questions about why he was hiring former inmates. But, he thought, “if we can get our company’s leaders to learn how to work with the challenging needs of returning citizens, who need a little more care, we’ll be so much better with the regular population.”

Many companies regard such hires as “employees of last resort,” said Jeffrey D. Korzenik, chief investment strategist for Fifth Third Bancorp and the author of “Untapped Talent: How Second Chance Hiring Works for Your Business and the Community.” Businesses committed to hiring this population “have to approach this with, for lack of a better word, intention,” he said.

Second-chance hiring got a big boost last year with the Second Chance Business Coalition, co-founded by Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Craig Arnold, the chief executive of Eaton Corporation, an electrical equipment manufacturer.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/business/cash-assistance-incarcerated.html