Shufling through job aplications, managers are inclined to have various piles: the maybes, the perfects, the overqualifieds, and the forget about its. Often times, there are certain red flags department heads look for that can send a job applicant straight to the trashcan – misspellings, short stints with previous employers, lack of a high school diploma and an affirmative answer to “Have you ever been convicted of or pleaded no contest to a felony?”
Many offenders have trouble finding jobs after being released from jail. That may not seem like a personal concern, but officials in Travis County believe it’s a county concern, as studies have shown that inability to gain employment is one of the leading causes of criminal recidivism.
While it’s foreseeable that some tough-on-crime advocates may argue that the difficulties are just another repercussion to doing the crime, or that those without criminal histories should have a leg up against their counterparts, Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe said he believes it’s a public safety issue if ex-offenders cannot find employment in their communities. After all, these are people who have shown they were willing to break the law before; without help or resources, many return to their prior associations and habits, including drug usage and theft, which means the county spends more money on inmate housing costs and law enforcement. Having a job gives ex-offenders a true alternative set of choices and helps them repay their debt to society, not to mention child support, fees, fines and rent.
“From a safety point of view, if you reduce recidivism, you make our streets safer,” Biscoe said. “If you are in trouble with the law, the first thing the judge tells you is to get yourself a job.”
Job hunting isn’t as easy as it sounds, and it’s an even greater challenge for ex-offenders, since many managers and business owners don’t even consider applications coming from ex-offenders; a criminal history checkmark will most likely to wind up in the trashcan.
Many managers and business owners are predisposed to check employment applications for criminal background histories and target those applicants as being unsuitable or ill-qualified, even for jobs that don’t require experience or education.
That predisposition or stigmatization may not be a conscious act. Biscoe found that when he surveyed his county’s department heads, many of them said they would consider hiring an ex-offender if he or she was qualified to do the job. They just weren’t allowing ex-offenders a chance to get far enough through the hiring process to get to that point.
Commissioners court members decided to fix the problem by removing the criminal history question from employment applications. According to the county’s new policy, applicants may still be required to divulge their criminal background histories if they have one, but only after they’ve been interviewed and are deemed qualified for a position. A manager could still choose to hire someone else, but at least the person had a chance to impress a potential employer. “We haven’t said, ‘Hire an ex-offender.’ We’ve said, ‘Give an ex-offender a chance,’” Biscoe said.
There are other obstacles to hiring ex-offenders, too. Sometimes the obstacle isn’t necessarily an employer’s fear over hiring a bad employee that keeps ex-offenders from getting jobs, but fear of liability — all the potential things that can go wrong in the workplace.
What if someone has a greater history than what’s seen on paper and threatens other employees or somehow creates havoc around the office? And many managers also just don’t feel trained in how to work with ex-offenders, Biscoe said.
But after the commissioners court began encouraging managers to consider ex-offenders, and the county changed its hiring policies, several department heads changed their tune. There are now ex-offenders serving in administrative and clerk positions, as well as in the county’s facility and transportation departments, among others.
“I have talked with our taxpayers, and when you tell them, ‘Look, we’re trying to get more people to pay taxes and a lot of these people aren’t bad at all, they are good people who got into bad trouble with drugs and alcohol,’ then it becomes a lot more relevant and also a lot more acceptable,” Biscoe said.
Not all employers would be outspoken over having ex-offenders in their workforce, but Biscoe said he feels it’s important for the county to set an example for other employers in the area, to practice the solution it is preaching.
“What we want to do is expand the public and private employers who are willing to hire ex-offenders. If I were a private employer and somebody from the county came to me and asked me to consider hiring ex-offenders, my first question would be, ‘What are you doing?’” Biscoe said, adding that he has personally seen how valuable ex-offenders can be as employees. “I’ve referred several employees who I thought were outstanding individuals who had minor problems with the law. I know there are some who have been here several years… you wouldn’t know they are an ex-offender.” The county is currently collecting data to determine how successful the policy change has been or will be. The county’s human resources department implemented a tracking system to determine how many ex-offenders actually apply for jobs in the county versus how many are hired (since the box has been removed from applications, though, the county cannot track how many ex-offenders applied but just didn’t make the first cut).
The county has also increased ex-offender recruitment opportunities by holding job fairs at local and state correctional facilities. The job fairs are popular, and attendance alone illustrates the desire among ex-offenders to gain employment: The county had to close the doors during one recruitment effort, after 1500 ex-offenders showed up to a job fair held at a Windham Hotel.
The county’s decision to remove the criminal history box from some applications came from a recommendation made by the Austin/Travis County Reentry Roundtable, a committee that includes members from the Office of the Attorney General, the City of Austin, the Travis County Sheriff’s Office, the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, Goodwill Industries, Travis County MHMR and other stakeholders interested in reducing jail overcrowding and criminal recidivism.
Darla Gay, a community justice planner with the Travis County District Attorney’s Office who is active on the five-year-old roundtable, took a leadership role in getting the county to remove the boxes and is hoping other counties follow the lead. But she said any successful effort to reduce recidivism must be larger than simply removing the boxes.
“Our concern with advocating for employers to hire this population was that if they tried to hire this population and then they had to terminate (the employee), it may turn them off from hiring from this population again,” she said. The county hired an Offender Workforce Development Specialist specifically for the purpose of helping managers and ex-offenders with any work-related issues, concerns or barriers. Managers are trained to look for signs of drug abuse, and the county works with employees to help them sort out address and transportation issues.
“If you have departments that are going to openly recruit this population, we need to give them training and support to understand how to manage this population,” Gay said, adding that ex-offenders do need some specialized help as well, especially when it comes to using current technology. “Correctional settings don’t lend themselves to problem-solving, because they kind of tell you what to do and when to do it. So that is a huge skill they have kind of lost.”
The roundtable was encouraged to make the recommendation partly because other cities and counties around the country — including Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Alemeda County, Calif. — have already tested the “ban the box” waters, though she said the concept of “ban the box” makes the policy changes sound more extreme than reality, since many positions within the county still require criminal background checks and disqualify applicants based on those results.
“(The county was) already hiring people with criminal backgrounds and has been open to that for a long period of time. … There were other city and county organizations across the nation that were taking this particular issue on,” she said, adding that it just hadn’t been institutionalized. “We were able to capture that into a document and say that we are not the only ones talking about doing this.”
As part of the policy implementation, department heads were asked to make a list of all the positions they felt a person with a criminal background could still perform well; the roundtable recommended giving each position a criminal background code or level, taking into account factors such as whether the person will work with money or the public.
Some positions do not require a criminal background check at all, while ex-offenders are automatically disqualified from other jobs, such as those that deal children, seniors and the developmentally or mentally disabled, or those that access the Texas Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (TLETS). The TLETS system, which pertains to the District Attorney’s Office and other offices that deal with criminal justice, is overseen by the Department of Public Safety.
DPS rules stipulate that anyone who has ever been convicted of a felony be permanently barred from accessing or visually seeing the system; anyone convicted of a Class A misdemeanor is prohibited from accessing the system for 10 years. Those with deferred adjudication are affected as well.
Gay said she’s disappointed with the DPS rules for the TLETS system, since those rules alone prevent many county departments from hiring anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime. “The judge thought you were a good enough candidate to give deferred adjudication to, but DPS says no,” Gay said. “Let’s be reasonable about this.”
Joe Gieselman, the executive manager of the county’s Transportation and Natural Resources Department, said he has hired ex-offenders for certain positions in the past and believes the policy change will benefit the county and other departments. “For most counties, a good portion of their budget is spent processing someone through the court system and putting them in a jail cell, and if you can do anything to prevent that, it’s cutting the county budget. Everyone benefits from that. I’d rather have more dollars for improving the road system… you have to step back and look at the whole view of county government and what we all do and what we can do to help each other and cut costs,” he said. Gieselman does not believe the ex-offenders he has hired have differed behaviorally or work-wise from the rest of his workforce.
“It’s not like I’m losing here,” he said. “We expect that there will be a certain number of those that don’t survive, but I’m not sure the rate of those is any different from the general workforce as a whole. We’ve had some really good successes.”
He said he recommends that his department’s supervisors treat ex-offenders as they would treat other employees, while familiarizing themselves with resources available for that population.
For instance, when one employee was having trouble making it to work on time because he lacked cross-county transportation, managers pointed him in the direction of the county’s Capital Metro carpool program.
“If there is a disciplinary problem, don’t flinch from that. Treat them as equal, and they will respond. We are not lowering our standards from this,” Gieselman said, adding that job requirements are still job requirements. For instance, road and bridge employees must pass random drug tests. “They know they have to stay clean, that’s just a part of the deal.”
The Travis County Reentry Roundtable published several reports after conducting its work, one of them focused on the results of two 2007 focus groups with community employers. During the focus groups, the employers revealed that they were “strongly opposed to hiring persons with a violent offense on their criminal record” and that they were unaware of the federal tax credit and bonding opportunities available to employers who do hire persons with criminal backgrounds. Employers also said that probation and parole requirements sometimes create too many obstacles when it comes to a person remaining employed.
“Many persons with criminal backgrounds seem to look at themselves as an offender and not as a contributing member of society, which impacts their employability starting from the way they fill out an application and interview for a job. They lack self-esteem and goal-setting skills,” a Roundtable report states.
The Roundtable is currently looking at additional solutions, such as promoting legislation that would reduce criminal background restrictions on operational licenses. Currently, there are 157 occupations that have some level of criminal background restriction, said Darla Gay, a community justice planner with the Travis County District Attorney’s Office who is active on the Roundtable. An additional approach is to find a way of ensuring that inmates receive necessary identification and paperwork when they are released; Gay said many leave jail or prison without a valid Texas driver’s license, social security card or birth certificate. About 53 percent of ex-offenders spend four to six months trying to get all that information, and are largely unemployable in the meantime.
But there’s greater liability in not having any policy or guidelines regarding employment of ex-offenders, said Gay, adding that federal money is available to employers who are victims of ex-offender employment and that insurance costs shouldn’t increase.
“We actually interviewed and did focus groups and surveys for employers. In the focus group, it was pretty unanimous that employers were saying a lot of the fears about hiring ex-offenders are not true,” she said. “This population is discriminated against more than any other population, as far as job opportunities.”