 Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Mark Schmidt. I'm the director of the political reform program here. And for various reasons, which may become clear and may not, I'm going to get this discussion started on the topic of locked up and locked out and creating second chances for people who have been incarcerated. That's a terrific, terrific program here. I want to mainly acknowledge the organizers of this event, Alita Sprague, Rachel Black with the Assets Program, and Reed Kramer of the Assets Program of New American. Part of what this event is is I think we've been talking a lot within New America about the concept of second chances and the idea that a lot of what we should be thinking about in how we think about the economy and how it works for people and doesn't work for people and what we do when we want to provide savings and encourage people is really, are we moving towards a society where it's much harder to get a second chance? I mean, I've always believed that one of the things, if you say to me, what is American exceptionalism? Part of it is that we do have a different way of thinking about the human life cycle, that you really aren't locked in in the way that you are in Germany. You're kind of put on a track, and that's the track you're on for life. In the United States, we build a lot of institutions that in theory give you second opportunities to go back for more education and community college or things like that to move your life in different directions as it goes along. And I think that's part of the, to me that's a big part of the promise of American life. And I think as we look at the economy, we're seeing a lot of ways in which we're creating a lot of folks who really aren't getting that second chance. The paper that came out recently at the Brookings Institution by Alan Krueger about the real consequences of long-term unemployment and the fact that people who've been unemployed for a very long time are not just unemployed for a very long time. They're actively discriminated against in the workforce. They're losing skills. They're encountering a lot of difficulties with their own mental health and things that are gonna kind of knock them out for good. The way we handle credit, I mean, we've seen enormous explosion of using credit checks for employment. And when you think about all the people who in the course of 2007, 2008, 2009 bumped into problems with credit or bankruptcy or foreclosure through no fault of their own, you'll see what an enormous barrier that kind of thing can be. And of course the biggest barrier that's always been there, but with the sheer number of people who we've incarcerated since the tough-on-crime era began in the 80s and 90s is people who have felony convictions and moving out of that, moving beyond that zone. And that can begin early. I mean, there are a lot of folks who talk and smartly about the school-to-prison pipeline that even begins with school discipline and those things. And largely we're talking about relatively young men who may have done something when they were 19 or 20 that has consequences well, well, well into their future. And in the American Prospect article by Monica Potts, Joe Jones is here, I think, refers to himself as a former knucklehead. I think any of us who've been 19 or 20 were knuckleheads in one way or another, but a lot of us just had more second chances and more ways to move on from that. So what we're gonna do is start with a conversation between Monica Potts, who wrote this article in the American Prospect, is their hope for the survivors of the drug wars, which really focuses largely on Baltimore. And I'm just gonna say a couple words about Monica because I was the former editor of the American Prospect when Monica came to work at the Prospect, I mean, I was the editor at the time, I'm now the former editor, when Monica came from the New York Times to work at the Prospect and it was a great joy to work with her. And also to see in the subsequent years, as she's written a series of articles about poor families in Colorado, rural poverty in Arkansas and this experience in Baltimore and a number of others, I've said this a million times, I've said it to her, I feel like we've seen Monica kind of emerge as really the preeminent writer about poverty in America right now and the lived experience of life on the economic precipice. And she does it because she writes with, she really just writes about life and she draws out people's experience and she's not putting a theory on top of it or telling you, it's all just, it's right there in a kind of beautiful realism that's vivid. And this article to me really represents what the concept of second chance is all about and Joe will talk about it, but there's a lot in the article about some of the programs that are helping young men figure out a way to put their lives back together, support their families, support themselves and get back on track. And one of the striking things to me about the program was that it's simultaneously very, very tough. You know, they're pretty strict rules and if you fall off those rules, you're out of that program. But at the same time, it's kind of, if you fall out, you can then come back and you're still starting over. But you know, you're not off the hook but you're not done forever either. And I thought, I think it's a really interesting balance of the second chance with a real, the kind of toughness that people do sometimes need to make those moves back into their own families and communities. And the program of course is the program founded by Joe Jones, the Center for Urban Families in Baltimore and before founding the Center for Urban Families, Mr. Jones developed the Men's Services Program for the Baltimore Healthy Start Initiative and has been, is a lifelong resident of Baltimore and has built, I think, one of the really most important men's fatherhood programs in the country, a real model for what's out there. Years ago, when I worked on Capitol Hill, I did a lot of work on child support enforcement and we were sort of seeing the beginnings of a lot of focus on, well, those deadbeat dads and there was the beginnings of a recognition, well, it's not just deadbeat dads, it's parents who want to support their children and need a lot of help, need a lot of supports and structures in order to figure out how to do that. And I think we've, I feel like this whole conversation has moved a long way towards a recognition that that's what it's all about. So let me bring up Monica and Joe. The two of them will have a, we'll kind of engage with each other, I'll come back up and we'll moderate a conversation, we'll moderate some Q and A about it and then we'll have a second panel that a leader Sprague will introduce and we'll all learn a lot, thank you. I'm getting makeup with this. Thank you so much, thank you so much, Mark and thanks everybody for coming. I wanted to say first a little bit about how I met Joe Jones. I was very interested last fall in writing an article about low income men, including low income fathers and former people who had had some contact with the prison system, the criminal justice system. And everyone said, you need to talk to this guy, Joe Jones and Baltimore. So I went there first in September and then you couldn't get rid of me. And that's when I worked on the article for the American Prospect in which I really followed when two guys journey through the program. But you guys don't call it a program. It's a workforce training. And it really focuses on teaching people soft skills to transition from the skills that they have from the streets to the skills that they need for the legal workforce. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is to tell us a little bit about how you came to found the center and what its ethos is. Why you have this tough love kind of ethos with them. You know, in part I created the center with a lot of support because of my personal journey. You know, as you mentioned, being a former knucklehead, I thought that I had some sense of what it would take to work through challenges that many of the folks who come through the center would face. And so I worked at the bottom of health department in maternal and child health for close to a decade. And it was really striking that the way in which the health department approached addressing the issue of infant mortality in this maternal and child health division, it didn't do anything with fathers. And so I was charged at one point with being a case worker with a case load of substance abuse in pregnant women. And so I was really good because I'm a recovering addict and I spent a lot of time in endowment incarceration. So I knew the street game and I could get these women into prenatal care and I can get them into drug treatment. But they were going back home to guys who they were pregnant by, whether they lived with them or lived in communities where these men existed. And the health department wasn't tapping this untapped resource to help us help the women stay on course so that she could have a healthy birth. And so as a result, I cajole the folks at the health department letting me, they basically said, go pit-a with the guys but don't lose focus on these women. And so I began to work with these men in the early 1990s and found out that they were around and that they cared and they wanted to be good dads but they had a number of barriers. And eventually we started the fatherhood program. We then replicated the strive program to Baltimore under my leadership at the health department. And then in 1999, I had been in a bureaucracy for about 10 years. And for those who work in bureaucracies, it has advantages and has disadvantages. And I had about enough of the disadvantages. And wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do but I didn't want to stay in government. So I cut a deal with the mayor, Mayor Kurt Smok, who was a really good mentor and friend and Dr. Peter Bielson, who was the head of the health department, who allowed me to take the program staff and funding. I was responsible for at the health department out of the health department into the center which was founded in 1999. And what do you think for guys coming out of prison or guys coming out of addiction? Women too, but the focus on men is unusual because most of the time when you're talking about anti-poverty policy, it's women and children. Right. What are some of the biggest challenges they face just right away and then also, you know, through the immediate future after you get done? You know, all guys, we give off that impression that we got it all together, you know. And when you get released from incarceration, you know, in the Albury entry policy in this country is relatively, you know, new. And so I remember on many different occasions I was released from an institution whether it was in a state of Maryland, New Jersey, New York. And I would simply be released with whatever personal items I had, usually without the identification I had when I went in if I had it. And so I'm faced with, you know, being released sometimes not even knowing in advance that I'm gonna be released on a particular day. And so I'm back on the street outside of the institution and they may give you a couple of dollars and tell you to go for it. And if you happen to be on parole and probation, you know, so some people complete their sentences, they're not on parole and probation, others remain on, you know, parole. And so you have to report to a parole agent at some particular time. And folks usually say you need to get a job, right? Well, one, you don't have any identification, right? Your prospects for getting a job, almost slim and none. Today we add administrative fees onto your parole so that you have to pay to be on parole. And so there's a lot of pressure to do the right thing without adequate supports, including finding some place to lay your head. So, you know, and oftentimes, you know, we burn bridges and so we don't have the ability to go back home to the place that we used to live. And so we gotta figure out immediately where we're gonna stay. And so we gotta figure out one, how do we meet our, you know, our basic needs in terms of shelter? And that's a really big challenge. If we find shelter, how then are we gonna take care of ourselves in terms of, you know, sustenance, in terms of eating, clothing. And then if you happen to have had a child or children while you were in your previous life, and those children happen to be associated with the TANF system, the Welfare Program, and you have child support, those child support arrears typically accrue while you're incarcerated. So not only do you have the basic needs you're trying to meet, you have debt you're trying to negotiate. And in your mind, you wanna do the right thing, in your heart you wanna do the right thing, but you start facing rejection and challenges. And so all of a sudden you find yourself in a very uncomfortable place. And the one thing I can tell you that I know as a reality, the street will always be there. The opportunity to go back and do the wrong thing exists and it doesn't go away. And so at some point in time, you know, it becomes more practical to go back and do what you did before that got you incarcerated than it is to fight through the uncomfortable space you find yourself in trying to do the right thing. The young man I focused on in the article, Travis Jones, his story was similar. It took him a year to get his ID back and he tried to get jobs and he got a few and he lost them and he went back to dealing after five years and about it, but it's also a rational choice because we talked a little bit about the money pumping through the streets. Can you talk a little bit about that? Just how this is a really actually very vibrant economy in the... Yeah, I'm not sure if it got passed around, but I asked if the sheet would be printed out. If you don't have it, before you leave, just grab it. I'm just gonna talk you through it. So here is, this is my life in numbers, right? So at the height of my addiction, so I went into drug treatment for the last time in 1986, right? So probably between 1984 and 86, I was using approximately $800 a day in a combination of heroin and cocaine, right? So $800 a day, that turns out to $5,600 weekly, $22,000 monthly and about $270,000 a yearly for one individual, right? Baltimore purports to have about 60,000 addicts. So if you multiply 60 times that 268, that is approximately $16 billion and some kind of economic transaction that takes place just in one urban community, Baltimore City, right? And you can say, well, Joe, maybe your addiction was so severe, it's somewhat of an outlier. But even if you come down to $400 and even lower to $200 a day, right? You multiply that times 60,000 addicts, that's still over $4 billion in some kind of electronic transfer of resources, right? And sometimes that's cash, sometimes that's stolen property. Sometimes it's just people who are functional addicts who work every day, they use all of their disposable income to pay for their addiction. And so one of my challenges with the American drug policy is I don't purport to have the answer to this, but unless you take the economics out of this, it will never, ever go away, ever. We can try to depress it, but it will not go away. And so for us in our communities where we live and we're in the underground economy and the underground economy is not always illegal, you got some guys who, they're selling t-shirts, they're selling all kinds of things that they produce to create commerce in a legitimate economy, somebody legitimate economy, they're not paying taxes, right? So don't wanna get into a social security conversation, right? But we know that they are not accumulating any kind of benefits that ultimately as they grow old, they will have some way to take care of themselves. So ultimately taxpayers will pay for it and ultimately their children will also likely follow their patterns of lifestyle and end up in similar circumstances. So it's a very complex set of issues, but for us when we're on the ground in this economy, it is normal behavior because that is the number one way in which many of these guys feel that they can earn a legitimate, in their own minds, legitimate income to be able to take care of themselves and their families. The numbers too in West Baltimore are astounding more than half of the prisoners released in the state of Maryland every year return to these neighborhoods around the center. And can you talk a little bit about the ability of that neighborhood or Baltimore City to sort of, even if those guys could find jobs, could they absorb all those people coming back with some of the challenges that they're coming back with? Yeah, I mean, Monica, you bring up a real issue. In addition to the majority of the men who are released from incarceration in the state of Maryland coming back to the zip codes that are near the center, there are about 20, about 2,400 men in those near zip codes who owe more than $50 million in back child support. So you're talking about folks who can't get into the legal economy because they have all kinds of barriers. They have debt that realistically will never ever be paid off. And so a community has to absorb them because they're not going anyplace else. We're not putting them on spaceships and sending them to the moon or to Mars. They're gonna live in these communities. And if they're gonna be in these communities, they're gonna have to do things to survive on a day-to-day basis. And the things that go on in that community, while we wish they were all positive things, many of them are not. And that is, it destroys the quality of life in the community. And more importantly for me, it is little people, our children, who see these men and they think that manhood is what they see in these men. And so they see people who don't have hope. They see people who don't have opportunity. And so it really becomes a challenge for the community to absorb these men and to figure out what to do with them. And you can't have that many men, idle in any neighborhood, any community, and think that the community can thrive and the quality of life will improve. And that means that we're gonna have to invest tax dollars into either hiring more police to try to keep the crime statistics down and all the things that just necessarily don't work. And I believe you've gotta create an opportunity for people to take their best hopes and aspirations and translate that into an opportunity that leads to an economic opportunity for people to win and be successful and stop being selfish in terms of our own personal behavior. And I speak for myself knowing that I was selfish and how that translates to me caring about the people in my community, particularly the little people. And about the idea about your best hopes and aspirations, one of the things that really struck me about Strive is that that's what you spend four weeks trying to draw out of people, what they really want to do. And it actually takes them a long time to kind of say that, what they want their life to look like. It takes a few weeks for them to formulate a good answer to that sometimes. But then can you talk a little bit about translating that into the job market, the work that you do with employers and how difficult it can be or not difficult, what the challenges are with them, getting employers to hire these? You know, the way in which our HR system in this country has evolved, we're at a point now where sometimes you don't even get an opportunity to submit a resume to a real person. There are a lot of online profiling tools, software tools where your resume is actually analyzed. And if it doesn't check box A, B, and C, you will never get to a real person. And so for us, it really, a key for us is to be able to engage employer partners, to bring them to the center, to get them to see a person real time to have a face-to-face conversation. How many of us, in our own experiences, you know, even when you dated somebody, you know, if you really, if you just looked at them, you may not give them a chance, but the time that you sit down and you get to talk to somebody, they become human, you begin to see the qualities in the individual that you typically wouldn't see if you just looked at a resume that said, wow, this person has a seven-year gap in work experience. And that person is not there to explain why that seven-year gap is there. So you simply take that resume and discard it. So that human connection is critically important. I think one of the more enlightening and heartfelt moments I've ever had is this employer partner, Rich Beatty, with Mechanical Engineering, who is a self-professed conservative, right? I love Rich dearly. And a few months ago, back in May last year, President Obama came to the center and the conversation was organized around bringing out graduates together with some of our employer partner. Now, Rich is an engineer by training, ex-military, and Rich hired guys from the program, and he got a subcontract to work on our new building. And so he hired the guys to actually work on construction of the building, right? And he's held them accountable. And I said, Rich, you know, the president's coming. I really want you to come and kind of have a conversation with the president, you know, and because of politics, Rich didn't want to do that, right? But I was ultimately able to convince him to come. And we had this rich conversation between our employer partners, which included Johns Hopkins Hospital, which is the number one employer in the state of Maryland, the University of Maryland Medical Center, right? And Rich Beatty, and with the president and our graduates, including this incredible guy named Marcus Dixon. And Marcus is a guy who, he has tattooed his face like Mike Tyson, because he was in a very, very bad space. But Marcus has learned to dress like I'm dressed. And in fact, some days I've wondered if he stole one of my suits, right? And he has compensated the tattoos by putting on makeup. And so here is the president of the United States, and Marcus, with our employer partners and other graduates, and great engaged in this conversation about ladders of opportunity. And no one knows that Marcus's face is mocked up like that. But that's the kind of metamorphosis that people can go through. But you have to create spaces in our community that will allow these young men and young women to feel like they're worthy and that individuals challenge them. You got to have a space where discipline and structure is a part of that. And when your life is in chaos and you get exposed to discipline and structure, you kind of can feel it, and it's kind of like an incentive, right? But nobody will knock on the door and say, hey, I'm looking for, you know, structure and discipline. You know, it's kind of like once you get it, you kind of know it. And we don't pay anybody. No one gets any compensation, any stipend for going through a program. But I do think it's that structure and discipline that makes it convenient for people like Travis and others to come in and ultimately challenge us, right? Because you know how Travis is, you know, he is, if you haven't read the article, you should really read it because Travis is a piece of work, right? He, but the fact that you have Travis who's willing to take chances with us, take chance with Monica, right? And let's be clear, Monica, can you see your skin color? She's a different skin color, right? She's a different gender. But when you create that kind of culture and space in community, it allows trust and relationships to build. And that's ultimately what we want to do with employer partners, with our clients and with guests to make sure that we help the American public understand what it takes to change around a tough community with tough people. I spoke with Rich Beatty and he told me the first guy he hired, he was interviewing him and he could just see the hunger and advise. He could just see that he was ready for the opportunity. And he's employed a dozen graduates over the years. And more importantly than just hiring them, Rich Beatty, this conservative man, did this against the interests of his partners, and he has paid for their apprenticeship. So all of the guys that we're talking about, these 12 guys have now completed the four-year apprenticeship program and are earning between $25,000 to $30,000 an hour in career jobs. And that is true of a lot of employers, right? They're willing to do hard skills training. It's the soft skills that they need people to come in. You know, guys like me, when we're coming out of their lifestyle, we think we know everything, right? First of all, guys, we usually know everything anyway, don't we? All right? And when you just a really, really knucklehead, you know, you try to tell an employer how he or she should run their jobs, right? And when employers tell us consistently, give me somebody who can show up on time, dressed appropriately with the right attitude who can take direction and instruction, and I'm willing to invest in them. We have this really unique partnership going on now with Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Baltimore City Department of Social Services where welfare moms are who come to the center to go through the training. They maintain their state benefits, their public benefits while they're in the program. If they successfully complete, they go to Hopkins there in a five-month internship program. If they successfully complete that, they also maintain their public benefits while they're in the internship program. They then are eligible for full-time jobs at Hopkins with benefits. And right now we have about 30-something of these moms who have transitioned from welfare to full-time employment at Hopkins with benefits including tuition and assistance. So that's the kind of trajectory and opportunities we want to create across the nonprofit sector. I want to ask a little bit about some of the other financial challenges. We've talked about the money that can be spent and made in the drug economy and we've talked about the debt that guys come out of prison with a lot of times. But what are some of the other financial challenges? I mean, do the people you work with, do they have credit at all? Or how do they sort of, what is the ladder that they can kind of, besides getting a job? Sometimes they don't know that they have credit. They're not, you know, many of them have never seen a credit score or credit report. And so many of them, we do, with each class over the last several classes, we started doing this financial condition survey. So we surveyed them because we're trying to find out what are their financial circumstances beyond what we get in intake. You know, in intake, you get basic demographic information and we do some assessment, but the trust has not yet been cemented. So they only give us a part of the story. But once they get inculcated into the program, we get more of the reality. And that's when we administer this financial condition survey. And there are so many people who have taken out these loans with proprietary schools, where there was no completion of the education, or if they did complete the education, there's no connection to a real job or career. So they owe between on average $5,000 to $8,000 and debt for student loans, right? That, you know, they have no job and they owe this debt. And it's really unconscionable that this exists. And, you know, people borrow money from friends and family, so they have these informal loans that exist. And so, and then you have, you know, folks who work, who, you know, who, you know, when it comes to, you know, doing their taxes, they go to these predatory tax preparation places that, you know, make available to them these rapid advance loans, you know, where you pay a 200, 300% interest on top of, you know, what the fees are. And they're basically not getting anything back but because of the immediate need for resources, you know, to sustain themselves, they take, you know, they take these, you know, these bad deals. And so this goes on uncheck. And so one of the things that we've done over the last several years, we've actually become a volunteer income tax assistant site so that our folks can have their taxes done for free by qualified and non-predatory tax preparers. And I think, you know, it's the bundling of these kind of job opportunities, tax preparation services that will allow a person to over time come out of the abyss, right? When you don't believe that you can trust in other people and you want to create those spaces. And I think, really, it comes down to trust and respect, you know. And Monica, I really, you know, I can't let this go without telling you that one of the reasons why I believe you were able to uncover what you did in that story and your story is because of how you respect people, right? You were in our building longer than I thought you were gonna be there. And I was telling you earlier, you know, some days when I came in and saw Monica in the building, it was just, hey Monica, see you later. You know, that's the kind of respect and trust I had for her. She wasn't biased in what she covered in her story, right? Because it was gritty. But the reality of it is you've got to treat people with trust and respect regardless of where you come from if you really want to have relationships and help people to move forward. Can you talk, I wanna, before we end up, I don't know how much time we have left, I do wanna get to the policy aspect. I know you spend a lot of time in the Maryland State House and, you know, talking with people in DC who have effects on policy about the kinds of policy changes you would need to see an easier second chance for these guys. Yeah, you know, a couple of years ago, you know, I got on a soapbox because I believe states are complicit in breaking their families. I really do, particularly when it comes to moms or expected mothers who are pregnant, who need to support other state in terms of welfare benefits for short terms while they're going through their struggles. And for a subset of these women, they are in relationships with the guy, with the guys they're pregnant by. However, generally speaking, when a woman goes to the welfare office applies for benefits, and the case worker says, hey, you meet the income eligibility guidelines. However, there's one last thing we need. We need your guys' information because we need to establish paternity and a child support order so that the benefits you receive, he can begin to pay back the system through the child support program. It would work much better for me if the system said at the time of application, hey, tell us a little bit about Joe. Let's get you and Joe to the table at the same time. So I went off on a soapbox for a couple of years and one of our state legislators, delegate Sandy Rosenberg, heard me give a talk at Hopkins and he basically challenged me to ask, did I know what I was talking about? And I said, well, I think I do. So he contacted the National Conference of State Legislators, had them do the research and it came back. Said, yeah, this is a challenge. And so he introduced the bill in the Maryland General Assembly in 2012. It didn't pass. Fast forward to 2013, reintroduced it and ultimately passed both chambers and Governor O'Malley signed it. And it's called Maryland House Bill 3333, Couples Advancing Together. That requires the Maryland State Department of Human Resources, where the TANF child support and family investment offices are to work with the center and we partner with the Annie Casey Foundation on the evaluation side to reform the way that the system engages moms and dads at the time that they come into the center to apply for benefits for that subset of couples who are in a romantic relationship. And so that's an issue that we are very, very proud of that we were able to advance. And ultimately what we believe that we'll do is help to stem the accrual of child support arrears that really suppress these guys and put them in these underground economy, the illegal underground economy. And so, and ultimately it will allow them to grow their families and have their children being closer to intact families, however they define themselves. Because otherwise what happens, I don't know if we've covered this, but the mom has to provide the financial and other information for the father who, and then the state goes after him to recoup some of the costs of the programs that she's on. So there was an astounding figure that you gave me that a few thousand men in West Baltimore owe more than 15 million in state and overdue child support. And half of that is just due to the state of Maryland. The families will never see it. So there's a real disincentive because those guys, if they got jobs, some of their paychecks would be, what's the word, they would garnish, yeah. So that's another challenge that you just made. We actually have a really unique partnership with our state child support office separate from the couples bill where we're working, if a guy comes into the program, he owes that debt that we're talking about. He participates in the fatherhood program. He gets a percentage of that state debt abated. If he graduates from the workforce development program and gets a job, he gets another percent. So he actually over time can get 80% of that state debt abated. And so that's the kind of policy initiatives that we're interested in. One of the biggest challenges is we don't have a policy office, right? So we're kind of, like many of us do, we wear multiple hats, but we do it because it's an absolute need. I don't think that we could ever just do programming because some of the folks that we're talking about are gonna run against policy barriers you can never program your way out of. Yeah, that's right. You said something to me one time that was like you're asking these guys to change their lives in the class, but other people need to change their ways too, right? To kind of help them get on the ladder. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the fatherhood classes. And I said in on fatherhood classes for about the four months I was there and I didn't end up writing about them that much, but what are some of the challenges to being a father that the men you work with? I think fundamentally for the population of folks that we're talking about, so many of these guys have grown up without dads in their own lives, right? So their sense of what manhood is or what it means to be a father or a parent is misconfigured. It's based on pop culture. You know, it's based on what they see from their peers, right? And I can tell you my first stab at being a dad did not work well, right? And so for anybody who looked at me and thought that the way in which you should parent based on my behavior, you were lost being a parent, right? And so that is so common. But then you have these guys who, they don't know how to look at a child and understand that, you know, your child is one year old, my child was one year old, but your child was throwing a ball already, but my child was not yet ready to throw a ball, right? So I feel like I got to force my child to do the same thing. So we don't understand that children develop differently at different rates at different paces. And so that parenting piece is really important from a male or fatherhood perspective. And many of the parenting programs in our country are built around, you know, what is needed from a maternal standpoint, right? And so we really don't know what it takes to really work with guys around parenting skills. But the other part of it has to do with, you know, how do you manage the relationship with your child's mother? You know, they're like two buckets of dads, if you will. One bucket is a group of dads who are non-custodial. They are no longer in a relationship with the child's mother. So it's teaching them how to manage that relationship, you know, and unfortunately, more often than not, the woman, the mom is the custodial parent. And so if he really wants to see that child, he's gonna have to make nights, right? Because one, this is not something that from a judicial standpoint, they will have the economic or system ability to fight against, you know, the legal aid system and the public defender's office don't handle these cases. And they don't have the economic means to hire an attorney, right? So they really have to make nights and then they have to do some negotiation, and mediation to really get the child. And then you have the other guys who are in relationships with the child's mother. And we want them to understand how you have to nurture that relationship. It's no longer just about you. You know, there's compromise, there's negotiation, there's communication that's really critical if you wanna have a relationship and you wanna maintain that relationship with your child's mother. And then ultimately getting these guys to think about what does it take to get into the labor market? It is very difficult to be a father in the United States of America if you don't have a job. This is as basic as that. And so we wanna translate that in the fatherhood programs and then also cross refer those folks into the strive program. So we create a set of systems and within the organization so that for guys in a relationship with his child's mother, he can go through the couples advancing together program, he can go into the workforce development program and reciprocally, somebody who's in the couples program who doesn't have a job, then can get into the workforce development program. So it's a combination of all of those kind of supports. But ultimately in the fatherhood program, one thing is really critical is having space where guys can talk among themselves about the stuff that goes on. It's hard for guys to really release the challenges they have without having space to do so. We don't like opening up. We're very superficial, but this is no disrespect to women, but you know y'all can talk, talk, talk, and you all can talk about deep below the surface stuff where guys, we're gonna talk about what's on a sports center, but we're not gonna talk about those really sensitive things that hurt, that bring up emotion. And so we really had to create spaces to allow that to happen to move people from one place to another place in terms of building, competency to really take on the tough issues and challenges that folks have. They do get pretty deep in the fatherhood classes. And when they trust you, it doesn't make a difference if you're a woman, you can testify to this. They will open up and talk about these things. Yeah, they really did. The last thing before we start taking questions is that I wanted to ask about this. One of the things that all the guys in fatherhood told me and all the facilitators in the fatherhood program told me is that we started this conversation talking about a lack of hope in a lot of communities, and they all said that the thing that does it for a lot of guys is thinking about their children and sort of re-centering their relationship around their children. Can you talk about that dynamic a little bit? Yeah, it's funny, you know, guys will make all kinds of excuses why a situation is what it is, why he can't do this. But when we start focusing their attention on their child, it always comes back to, maybe I can start thinking about life a little bit different. So when we don't introduce the child at the very beginning because we want it to be about the issues that they've been grappling with, but I've not met one guy who is the travestist in all who said, I don't care about my child. When you start talking about their children, you talk about their fathering experience, it's probably one of the most emotional conversations that we can have with them. And what they really want is an ability to learn how to have a relationship with their child. And it becomes very difficult when either they don't live with the child anymore or they're no longer in a romantic relationship and they start having multiple children by multiple people. It gets so complex that it's so easy to forget the child that you originally had and be a father to somebody else's child. And so what we're trying to do is say, this is very complex stuff, but come in and let's dissect this challenge for you. Let's not try to eat the whole pizza at one time. Let's take it one bite at a time. And we have some guys who have multiple children by multiple partners, where he's been able to make amends with one child's mother and have a relationship with one child, but the other mother does not care to have him have a relationship with that child. And that's okay. We're gonna still work on her, right? But don't feel like your failure because you couldn't have a relationship with both children's mothers. It's okay to have a relationship with one while you work on the other. This is complex stuff. If it was, if this was easy, we'd be doing it, but we are very, very new in our country in terms of what it takes to work with men. And most of our schools of social work or where aspiring helping professionals are trained, we don't even teach them how to know how to work with men. We still have a maternal and child health construct in this country that we have to kind of get over if we really wanna train helping professionals to be the adequate agents of change in the non-profit sector. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, thank you both. I think we'll just open up for questions now. Before we do that, I just wanna say, I think if you read the article or listen to this, you will, I feel like I'm upset at just hearing people who talk about the idea that people don't wanna work or don't wanna be good parents, which you do hear somewhat in Washington, D.C., and it's just astonishingly, not the case, yes, please, in the red shirt. Chris McGuinn, the Interpretary Service. Yes, coalition. I wanna know why you don't speak about traumatization. Been traumatized before they go to prison while they're in prison and when they come home. PTSD and some of the other stress and emotional aspects of that should be addressed even while they're in, because they're supposed to be in every prison some type of psychology, help with things of that nature. But I would like to know why you don't address that because if you don't fix the problem, when they come out, they'll be the same way with that mental illness. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that is a real challenge. And more recently, we partnered with the University of Maryland School of Social Work and we have now, I guess, within the last 18 months, we administer a mental health assessment at intake. And it is, some people are walking around like it's normal to have the issues that you just represented. I mean, we have so much violence in our communities where in some communities, you can walk down the street and you feel just as safe. You're walking your dog and everything, a car goes by and there's no issue. But in the communities where we're talking about, right? When a car goes by, a guy has to look over his shoulder. He doesn't know if it's gonna be a drive-by, if it's a gang hit. And a lot of this trauma that you referenced, people internalize as just being normal. And unfortunately, most of the guys that we're talking about are not gonna formally embrace a mental health or clinical setting. And so we're looking at ways in which we can bring those services and create nontraditional interventions so that we can address those particular issues, but you're absolutely right, they're critical and they do exist in ways in which I don't think most of us comprehend. We think about it in terms of military vets coming back to you from deployment. But we don't think about it in terms of what goes on in urban communities that people just have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. You do have a PTSD assessment too, right? Yeah, and I just wanna add to that really quickly. I think untreated mental health issues are one of the biggest things that I feel like I see on the ground when I'm reporting places. I mean, I have no skills to diagnose people, but the grind of applying for jobs that you're never gonna get and not working, that is, it leads to really severe depression, I think. Yeah. In the beige jacket. Hi, thank you for being here, this has been great. My name's Catherine and I work at DC Central Kitchen. We're a nonprofit here and one of our programs is a culinary job training program and many women coming through that have histories of incarceration. One of the questions I have for you is about keeping in touch with people who maybe leave your program after they're gone and some strategies you have for continuing to engage people so that you can not only continue to support them, but also continue to track your success and improve your programs. Yeah, well, you know, within the nonprofit sector, you always feel good when people say, well, how many people did you recruit? I recruited 5,000 people and you're hoping they don't ask you the other question. Well, how many people did you retain, right? And that's a real big question. One of the things that we've done historically and we've gotten a little bit better at is we follow people for two years, post the time that they graduate from a program and we have staff that are dedicated. We have a human services software tracking system. We also have a board committee that's called our program quality committee. So at the board level, we've developed dashboard reports. So we're looking at data real times in terms of progress and follow-up. But for us, our strategic vision going forward is something we call family stability and economic success. So for our graduates, right, we're really, really good. I mean, we're really good at getting people into entry level jobs at hourly wages between 10 and 11 dollars an hour. And that's something to be above the current minimum wage at 725 in Baltimore, but no is near family sustaining wage. So what we're looking now to do is to go deeper with our graduates. And that means bundling education, some kind of career certifications like the culinary work that you talked about and others like Rich Beatty, who's invested in apprenticeships, so that people have a career trajectory. And there's a sense of I can achieve beyond just being in menial jobs. If you read the article in Travis, talks about working at KFC. You know, that's great, but the challenge of an adult male who happens to have children, you know, KFC is not gonna do it for you. You know, at some point in time, you're gonna have to do what everybody else likely in this room has done. You had to work and go to school, sometimes have multiple jobs while you're in school, go full-time, part-time, you know, maybe stop a year, you know, restart after a year. That's exactly what has to happen. And what we're trying to do is create a culture of expectation and that you can do it, but it requires a lot of support. And I think that if we continue to do that, we bundle services and we look at policy issues and we move them as we can over time, then you create more of a sense of people can achieve in community and substantive numbers. In the front. Hi, my name's Dave Price. I'm an educational consultant. I've worked 30 years saying the young men before they get to you. It's all been an urban work. And I think the fallacy a lot of times is that people who find themselves are stupid because, you know, in American education, it's really about reading in a certain type of education. And they're really not because they can survive on a street that gives them skills that far surpass probably our ability to go into that community and survive. But I just wondered, what about the educational challenges there? Because it's so difficult. I mean, I'm working in DC, Syracuse, Baltimore, other cities now. And just to set the stage for anybody who's not here, just if they're not aware. Yesterday I was in a school in DC working with them where 80% of the students already have a parole officer. And the average reading level is 4.7. That means fourth grade, seven month and they're in high school. And they're gonna be in yours. So I just wanted to talk just a little bit about the educational challenges and what you're doing there. Yeah, one of the things that happened to us, I guess about a year and a half ago, we recognized that even with our graduates, one of the things that we try to do is to partner with other organizations that have existing resources that we can leverage, particularly when it comes to kind of like career certifications. And so we had, they had all the soft skills. They had the attitude, the dress, they could show up on time, but they didn't meet the basic reading and math criteria. So we expanded our three week model to four weeks where we now include what's now called developmental math. Used to be called remedial math and reading. We infused that into our four week model. So we began to address those issues and then we collect the assessment data upfront so that we know what somebody's reading and math comprehension level is using the test of adult basic education. And then we partner with the community college to come in in the evening to provide, you know, adult basic education and GED support. And then on top of that, the GED program changed this year, right? It is much more rigorous. And I would challenge most people in this room to take the GED exam right now. And I guarantee you more than half of the folks in this room could not pass the GED on the first go. Do you, can you figure out which half? Start with me. All right. In the back corner, black shirt. And again, please identify yourself and make sure you're asking a question. My name is Samar Chatterjee, Safe Foundation. I want a lot of good services that you're providing and there are available in this country. But my beef is with the concept locked up and locked out. Now, you know, when you come to this country, you hear big talk that once you pay your debt to society, you're free and you should be able to do that. But that is not true. And absolutely not true. I mean, in fact, we tend to perpetuate all these myths in this country, you know. Once you've paid your debt to the society, you should be free. But once your record goes in, you are in for a real rocky ride in the rest of your life. And not only that, after 9-11 and whatever the new things, that's even made it worse. I had a problem with the United States government long before that, 1986 or 87. And that has still dogged me, even now I go through airports and I'm searched, you know, every inch, almost like a strip search, you know. So whatever it is, it's- That doesn't sound like a pretty picture. May I pardon? That doesn't sound like a pretty picture. No, it is. And it should be unconstitutional. I mean, if the way we present these things that you've paid your debt to society, should be okay now, you're not, unfortunately. And then we should be frank and open about it because a lot of these idealistic things and myths we perpetuate in this country, they're patently false and they're not really practiced. We should tell our younger people that that is the truth of life. And given that, what can we do to change that situation? That is an important thing. I'm glad that after I came out of that doghouse and we tend to paint our federal prisons as what? Club fed and all that, but that is not true too. I mean, maybe some people get that treatment. I think you phrased the question right. Right. So given that, how can we change that situation? Well, I think in part I would ask Monica based on her interviews with particularly Travis and Dante, you know, her thoughts on that relative to how they have responded to, you know, to Monica, basically unveiling their lives, their frailties as it relates to, you know, second chances. And really, I think second chances are Ms. Norma because sometimes it's like 13 chances. How Dante and Travis have responded. They both really liked the article actually, which surprised me. I thought they were gonna be a little shocked at how intimate it was. I tried to prepare people and they're usually always shocked anyway, but they both liked it and they're also both really ready for their lives to change in a way that I think a lot of people, it takes people at some time to get there. So Travis has already gone through several missteps, right? He's, you know, he's 32 and he's really ready for his life to be different. And Dante, I think probably, he had a little bit of a better start, I think. He finished high school. He has had legal jobs most of his life and he had a very stabilizing relationship for six years with someone with whom they were basically married. And so, you know, I think he felt his life was very normal and then it got derailed. And so I think it feels easier for him to get back on track. But I think for that, so they were both very open with me and they understood that I was gonna be open with the world, that I was an counselor and that I was gonna tell this story. Some of the other guys never wanted to talk to me. And I think one of the things, but I mean, they did talk to me a little bit and one of the things they all said was that it wasn't just their resume and it wasn't just the criminal background searches. People looked at them like criminals from the start. And I think that's really important. It's very racialized. And so if you're talking about a second chance society, there has to be something about the stereotypes of where a black man from Baltimore are coming from. That has to be something that's also worked on. Because even people without bad records, it was assumed that they had a record. Great. In the middle here. Thank you. My name's Jim Knight. I work with Jubilee Housing here in the district and we're doing some new supportive housing work right now. What are your connections to housing in Baltimore? How are you dealing with housing? Well, I'll tell you, it's been a challenge over the years because outside of employment, housing, request for housing assistance is at the very top of the list. And we have, with fits and starts, one thing we are clear about, we don't wanna be a housing developer. We don't wanna be a drug treatment provider. And so we look for partners. And over the years, we've had folks like, somebody who retired from the NFL or the NBA, they've got a little bit of cheddar. And they said, look, I wanna start a housing initiative. You wanna partner with them. We don't have the capacity to deal with the human lives that we're dealing with and help somebody with a start-up housing initiative. So fortunately for us, about three years ago, there's a mega church across the street from our New Charlotte Baptist Church. They introduced us to a housing developer called WOTA, W-O-D-A that's out of Ohio. And they said, look, we wanna start using tax credits to build new affordable housing in Baltimore. And so they said, we need a partner. We said, well, what does that mean? And they said, well, we need somebody to hire folks from the community to work on a construction project. Well, that was number one, that helped out. Secondly, they said, once the units are completed, we need somebody to help us to vet people to get into these units so that the quality of the units will stay over time. And so we started to do that. And then thirdly, once the units are occupied, we need somebody to help provide the kind of services you provide at the center. And so that relationship has grown. So we've done now three projects with probably close to 300 units in Baltimore City's all-new construction. And our first project, the developer, when they acquired the land, they had six vacant properties on it, six homes. And they said, after the first year, once we got to know one another trust, the trust and respect thing, they said, what about a pilot home ownership program? So we actually, at the end of last year and to the first quarter of this year, two of our dads actually became homeowners, right? And we used a combination of what's called City Lift Money and Vacance to Value. We have a lot of vacant property in Baltimore. So our mayor came up with this Vacance to Value. So they actually became homeowners. And their mortgage payments around less than $600 as opposed to what they were paying between $9,000 and $1,200 a month on a rental unit. And so those are the kind of things that we're able to do with our housing partner. But it took us many, many years to even find a partner like that and then have the trust and respect and believe that there was credibility and scalability with respect to housing. I'm really struck by all the different partners you talk about as a reminder. Like, not only do these individuals need, you know, they can't do it on their own. They need a lot, you know, even the project like yours needs a ton of other, you know, galaxy of other kind of services. The other interesting thing we're doing now relative to partnerships. So we know that we have to leverage those partnerships, but we're trying to evaluate what those partnerships mean to us reciprocally. What does it mean to us? What does it mean to the partner? So we recently entered into this relationship with T-Roll Price. And T-Roll Price is working on a model to evaluate what those partnerships mean, what those partnerships mean, so that when we start thinking about what our budget is, right, we can calculate that into our overall operating costs. So where you may think it may cost you around 25% of your overall budget, that's actually, that overall budget would be decreased based on the value of that partnership that we don't necessarily have to raise funds for. So this is really complicated and new stuff for us, but we think it's the way for the future for the nonprofit sector. Reed, did you want to? No, I was kind of signaling that I need to transition. Okay. Well, consider the signal received. I really want to thank both Monica and Joe. I found this a wonderful conversation. I strongly recommend you, Monica. Thank you. And then we'll move into the second panel, which we'll dig deep into some of the particular policy issues here. Good morning, everyone. We have coffee. I know. Feel free to get some more coffee, but we're going to continue with our next panel. My name is Alita Sprague, and I'm a policy analyst here in the asset building program at New America. And it will be my pleasure to moderate our next panel, which will look at some of the financial consequences of incarceration and further explore some potential policy responses. As we shift from Monica and Joe's really insightful conversation to a broader policy discussion, I want to just take a moment to provide a little more context for how this relates to our work here at the asset building program. At its core, the asset building field is really about equipping people with the tools and resources that they need not just for day-to-day survival, but for the type of long-term growth and stability that can disrupt intergenerational poverty. So there's already a lot of thematic overlap with reentry efforts. The foundational research that informed the asset's perspective showed that access to even small amounts of savings can help instill a future orientation and that even people with very little income can and do save, it provided with appropriate structures and incentives. The asset building field has not developed an explicit response to the ever-increasing rate of incarceration, but its insights into the role that savings can have are valuable to consider in this context. So as we already heard a little bit from our initial presentation, I mean, largely due to the war on drugs, the incarceration rate has really exploded over the past three decades with profound consequences for low-income communities and communities of color. Just to provide a bit of a snapshot about what the returning community looks like, every year around 650,000 individuals return home from prison and they are 90% are male, about 50% are black or Latino, and on average they're only 34 years old. Many are returning to roughly similar conditions of poverty that preceded their incarceration, but with new and imposing institutional barriers to basic financial stability. So as we'll hear from our panelists, people returning from prison often face tremendous challenges in accessing housing, employment, public assistance, or even a bank account, which are all really prerequisites to the ability to financially stabilize, save, and move out the economic ladder. And of course these financial consequences are felt not just by individuals, but reverberate through families, communities, and the national economy, contributing to widening wealth disparities and the racial wealth gap in particular. There are certainly no easy solution to any of these problems and more effective re-entry strategies are not a solution to mass incarceration, but they are essential for ensuring that we're a society that permits second chances and allows even those who've made mistakes to pursue economic opportunity. I'd just like now to introduce our panel of experts who will each make a brief presentation about particular financial challenges to reentry and then join me on stage for a conversation and questions from the audience. First we'll have Sharon Dietrich, who is the Litigation Director at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. Sharon's work focuses on removing barriers, removing employment barriers, facing low income clients, especially criminal records, and she will be initiating her discussion by providing an overview of the typical financial circumstances of someone who's just leaving prison. Next we'll hear from Michael Pinard, who is a Professor of Law and Director of the Clinical Law Program at the University of Maryland School of Law. Michael teaches both a clinic and a seminar focused on re-entry issues and has published several law review articles on the collateral consequences of criminal convictions, and he will be speaking about some of the barriers to employment, housing, and public assistance. Lastly we'll have a presentation from Adrienne Noti, who is the Special Advisor to the Director in the Division of Program Innovation in the Office of Child Support Enforcement at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she focuses on projects relating to incarceration and re-entry. Adrienne will discuss how the accumulation of child support debt can serve as a barrier to re-entry and what kinds of policies can ease this burden while ensuring families still get the support that they need. We'll have plenty of time for Q and A at the end, so please jot down your questions as they occur to you, and for those of our members of our audience who are watching online, you can submit your questions to us via Twitter using the handle at assetsNAF or the hashtag Second Chance Society. So with that, I will invite Sharon to get us started. Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. I came here on a train from Philadelphia at six o'clock this morning, so I guarantee you I'm tireder than anyone in this room. So I have been an employment lawyer for 26 years with Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, which is the largest of the Civil Legal Aid programs in that town. We are not a re-entry program. So for 26 years, my job has been to represent low-income people with employment problems. But I'm here today to talk to you about criminal records, and it's not because I decided that that was the kind of work I was going to do with myself, that work essentially chose me. And one of the things you may have picked up outside is a chart that shows my organization's work on criminal records and employment. The red bar is our overall employment caseload. The blue bar is the number of criminal record-based intakes that came in, and it shows that over the years, since the beginning of the century, essentially it's been an upward trajectory of client demand. And this was without us doing any kind of outreach whatsoever. Now, of course, we are in our community. We do, in a way, reach out for folks, but most of these people are coming in because they're desperately seeking help with issues around criminal records and employment. Now, I just wanna say, before I get into my assigned job, that it's not only people who've just come out of jail or prison who face these issues, nor is it people only who've been convicted of felonies or even misdemeanors. What we have found in our work at CLS is that having any mark whatsoever on your criminal record is going to cost you jobs. And the people that come to CLS are desperate because sometimes they have even non-convictions. They have an arrest record that has kept them from getting jobs. We have people whose records are decades old that have prevented them from getting jobs. We have some of the most minor things you can't imagine have prevented people from getting jobs. The case I often talk about is one that, unfortunately, I had to file an EEOC complaint for of a woman whose criminal record was a summary offense in Pennsylvania that's below a misdemeanor of disorderly conduct making loud noise. And what that meant in reality was that she was in a fight with her boyfriend at the side of the road and was cited for it. And now this was on her criminal record and she lost a good job because of that insane little citation. So the whole issue of criminal records and employment is a vastly important issue in our communities. In fact, I would submit to you that it is not as well understood as perhaps it should be the role that people with records having not being able to get employment plays in poverty in our communities. I said that very badly. Sorry about that. It's the 6 a.m. in the morning thing. To say it another way, one of a primary causes of poverty in our communities these days is, in fact, the inability with people with records to get jobs. And I think that any serious anti-poverty agenda has got to recognize that and address it. Okay, my assignment today is actually to describe what it's like for a person who's leaving incarceration with a focus on financial circumstances. And Mr. Jones has already done this to some extent so I will just briefly touch on some topics and maybe elaborate on some others as only lawyers can do. So to start with, it is true that often people are leaving jail or prison with a bus token, maybe a bus pass if they're lucky, and a couple of dollars. And that is it for their financial resources. If they are qualified for public benefits, whether it's cash, food stamps, Medicaid, chances are really good that nothing was done in the prison or the jail before they left to get them connected to those benefits. And as was mentioned earlier by Mr. Jones, you're probably leaving without identification or in many cases will be leaving without identification and that's gonna make it even harder when you go to the welfare office or you go to the social security office to try to establish a claim for benefits. One of the scariest pieces of this is the inability when you leave prison to have medical coverage, especially in our states that have not expanded Medicaid, where you have to be able to prove that you're disabled to get medical coverage. In those circumstances, you may be leaving as I think of a client of mine sitting across the desk from me one day describing I've left prison, I was given this many psychotropic meds to take with me. They are being reduced every day so I have a short number of days before I'm totally gonna lose it and I've got to get medical assistance, I've got to get this prescription refilled or I'm going right back. So that is a very real issue. Yes, they are very heavily in debt and I would commend to you a nice paper put out by my friends at the council and state government's justice center called Repaying Debt. It was a 2012 paper, essentially three types of debts. Ordinary consumer debt and yes, student loan debt tends to be prominent among those. Child support debt, which we'll be hearing more about this morning and the accumulation of that debt is of course a problem. And finally, a criminal debt. And in addition to having to pay for the cost of your being supervised by your probation or parole officer, which Mr. Jones talked about, there are other kinds of criminal debt as well. So for instance, you probably had fees and costs assessed as part of your sentence. So that probably is something you haven't paid yet. You may be paying for the privilege of having been incarcerated, like it's a hotel stay. So that is a significant debt. Restitution to victims, bail for a pitcher, interest. It may be that while you were incarcerated, the interest has been accumulating on all of those combined debts. So the amount of debt that people face when they come out is often thousands of dollars. And sometimes it's in the five figures and occasionally it's in the six figures. And so if the interest is accumulating on that principle, it can of course be just an astonishing number by the time people come out. This is something a lawyer will tell you that we are very cognizant of. Ordinary consumer protection on debt typically does not apply to criminal debt. So things like being able to declare bankruptcy may be foreclosed to you. Debt collection rules may be foreclosed to you. In other words, debt collectors are not required to abide by the same rules that civil debt collectors are if they're trying to collect criminal debt. Wage garnishment protections may not apply to you. All of these statutes tend to exclude criminal debt. Extraordinary collection remedies may apply. So for instance, the child support, if you're lucky enough to have a job and be expecting an income tax refund, chances are that under the Treasury Offset Program that may be snatched away from you. That was featured in a story today in the Washington Post. Even worse, it could be a violation of your probation or parole if you're not paying these debts. Talk about extraordinary collection remedies. The idea that you may go back to prison is certainly a significant one. So cumulatively, when you take the criminal debt, the child support debt, and the ordinary consumer debt, this is just a crushing amount of debt. Possibly you have no place to live. It probably hasn't been arranged in advance if you didn't know what day you were going to leave. Your family doesn't necessarily want you back. Your family may want you back, but can't take you back. I think Michael's gonna talk somewhat about the rules on housing. There are some public housing rules that prohibit some tenants from having in their residences people with certain convictions. So if you go back to live with your mother, your mother is now at risk of being evicted as well. If you're lucky enough to have money to rent a place, and that's not gonna be the case for a lot of these folks, landlords are gonna run background checks on you the same way that employers are. So finally, chances are that you can't really function in the financial mainstream because you don't have a bank account. Probably wouldn't have anything to put in a bank account anyway. But when you take all of these issues together and you imagine yourself having to confront them at the same time, just think about how overwhelming that would be. And that's even if you do have really good problem-solving skills, even if you do have coping skills, even if you aren't mentally ill, even if you don't have substance addiction, if you're on the wrong side of any of those equations, this can be a really astonishing menu of difficulties that people are confronting. So when you think about all of this, I think you will understand why recidivism is as high as it is. In fact, it's something of a wonder that it's not higher and that some people manage to get on their feet and cope somehow and move forward because the array of difficulties that people confront at the time that they're let go is simply astonishing. Moving some of the stuff out of the way. Okay, so as Alita mentioned, I teach a reentry clinic at the University of Maryland, Francis King Cary School of Law in Baltimore. And in the clinic, we represent individuals who are attempting to overcome the obstacles of later to having criminal records. And we also work on legislative and policy projects that aim to ease these obstacles with the overarching goal of allowing individuals to move past their criminal records and move on with their lives. And each week we do an expungement workshop at a one stop reentry center in Baltimore City and for the vast majority of individuals who attend this workshop and for the vast majority of my clients, employment is the most significant barrier they face as well as housing. These same obstacles obviously exist for individuals across the country along with obstacles related to public benefits. And I wanna talk about some of these obstacles related to employment, housing and public benefits. In the context of the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Baines Johnson's worn poverty and the related great society programs. And these programs were aimed to help poor people simply live or to move out of poverty. Yesterday we had, well I wasn't there, but there was a great celebration in Texas regarding the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. We had President Obama down there, three of our former living presidents were there as well. But earlier that year in January of 1964, President Johnson introduced a worn poverty in the state of the Union address. And 50 years later, many of the programs that he helped to start, criminal records exacerbate poverty, actually eliminate people with criminal records from participating in these programs and these issues disproportionately impact poor individuals of color because they disproportionately interface with the criminal justice system and bear the permanent mark of a criminal record. So let's take a look at a couple of these programs. So 1964, the Food Stamp Act was passed. Food Stamp Act provided a way for individuals and families to live. These are SNAP benefits, supplemental nutritional assistance programs. 1996 Congress passed a law forbidding individuals convicted of felony drug offenses to receive food stamps as well as temporary cash assistance. They gave the choice so to the states to either opt in or opt out of the law. It's very, very technical. 34 states today either fully or partially enforce this SNAP ban. The ones who enforce it partially, you can get the benefits, but there are conditions that are attached to obtaining the benefits, 37 states either fully or partially enforce the TANF ban. And a sentencing project has reported that this law disproportionately impacts and burdens African American women. Women are much more likely to receive TANF and SNAP benefits than men. And in 2011, 25.1% of women in state prison were incarcerated for a felony drug offense compared to 16.5% of the male prison population. Then in 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act. The Fair Housing Act prevents discriminatory use of race, religion, gender, national origin and housing determinations. It was later expanded to include disability and familial status. Again, this decade, 1990s, federal laws were passed by Congress that imposed a range of hurdles to those with criminal records who lived in or want to live or need to live in public housing and you heard Sharon allude to this. So under federal law, individuals convicted of manufacturing methamphetamine or offenses that will require them to register as a sex offender for life cannot live in public housing. They are forever barred from public housing. But again, as with the public benefits law, it gives it to local jurisdictions to expand on the list of excludable offenses and local housing jurisdictions to have essentially created zero talents policies with regarding criminal records. So for instance, in Baltimore City, any misdemeanor conviction will render a person ineligible to live in public housing for 18 months. Any felony conviction will render that person ineligible for three years. And again, Sharon's point is one that should not be lost on anybody. We are not talking about a distinction between incarceration and non-incarceration. We're talking about everybody with a criminal record. In terms of employment and economic mobility, in 1966, President Johnson gave a special message to Congress on crime and law enforcement. He talked about the impact of crime on individuals and families throughout the U.S. He then talked about what his administration did in response to these issues. And in his address, he mentioned the passage of the Prisoner Rehabilitation Act. He said that hundreds of prisoners were working day jobs and finishing their sentences at night, and that they were learning skills that, quote, will bring dignity to themselves and support their families. He further said that, quote, the best correctional programs will fail if legitimate avenues of employment are forever closed to reform offenders. So today, five minutes, okay, today, I'm sorry, it's a big sign, just distracting, but it's okay. So here we are, 50 years later. We know that serving time in prison reduces employment and employment opportunities for those formerly incarcerated individuals who are able to land a secure job. Their incarceration results in a 40% reduction in lifetime earnings. Far too many African-American men without a criminal record experience extreme difficulty finding a stable job, and for African-American men with a criminal record, finding a job has essentially become impossible. They must confront the tens of thousands of laws and regulations that disqualify individuals with criminal records from an array of jobs. The American Bar Association for the last several years now has been engaged in a project I wish on nobody. They are supposed to collect all of the state and federal collateral consequences. These are the legal penalties that attach to having a criminal record and put them in one source so that we all know what all these laws state. And at one point during this process, they were up to 38,000 of these collateral consequences, 80% of which dealt with employment. Perhaps more burdensome though than these laws, and this is getting to what I think you were saying, Ms. Potts is the stigma that attaches to them and their records and thus this doesn't even give them a chance to land a job. So these are now I'm getting sort of into the non-legal realm. So Diva Page, I'm sure folks are familiar with these studies, but she has conducted, I think the most well-known empirical studies on criminal records, race and employment. And in Milwaukee, she found that criminal records reduce call back interviews for white applicants by 50% and for African-Americans by 60%. In New York City, she replicated the study. She found that criminal records reduce interviews or job offers for white applicants by 30% and for African-American applicants by 60%. Most disturbing in Milwaukee, she found, to me at least most disturbing, she found that white applicants with a criminal record were more likely to receive a call back than the African-American candidates without a criminal record. So African-Americans with criminal records suffer multiple stigmas during the job application process. Number one, just simply being African-American. Number two, having a criminal record. And number three, obviously is being African-American and having a criminal record. So the result is that it is more difficult to move past a criminal record today than perhaps at any point in our nation's history, particularly for poor individuals of color. One of the main reasons is that we have easy access to criminal records. In Maryland, I can look up anybody's name on the internet, punch in your name, punch in a case number, and I can see everything about you relating to your criminal record. So employers have more access. Housing authorities have more access. Landlords have more access. Just anybody who's nosy and interested has more access. So it's much more difficult to escape the shadow of a criminal record. We have the range of collateral consequences that attach to all convictions. We have the multiple stigmas that attach to race and criminal records. All of these factors stand in the way of moving past criminal records and participating in a great society that President Johnson envisioned. Thank you. Oh, great. Hi, everybody. I'm Adrienne Nody from the Federal Office of Child Support. I'm very honored to be the sole bureaucrat here amongst a panel of just distinguished scholars and community lawyers and advocates and great agents of change like Joe Jones. So thank you for having me here. And I have a brief presentation. Okay, so I thought I'd start with a small overview of the child support program. The child support program is a national program and the policies and practices vary a whole lot by state. So this is important in the reentry field because as we talk about best practices and ways to engage with local partnerships, there's a lot of variety on the ground. The child support agencies at the state and local level are typically called the 4D agencies. For the lawyers in the crowd, that's title 40 of the Social Security Act. And what you probably know is unlike a lot of social services programs, the child support program is an open entitlement program which means that there's no end to the funding that the federal government reimburses the states for 66% of the cost of operating that of their state program. So the federal government has powerful tools to establish, to locate parents, to establish child support orders and then to enforce those orders. But in recent years, and I think why we're here is that the focus of the federal child support program has really changed to include a much more family-centered outlook and a focus on rightsizing orders. And what rightsizing means is making sure that the initial child support order that a parent receives reflects their actual real income and their true ability to pay. We wanna get out of having orders that are too high and don't reflect someone's actual circumstances. So we do view child support as an anti-poverty program. As you can see by some of the numbers here, the child support program serves 17 million children. So that's a lot of families. And it's one quarter of all children and half of all poor children. Most of the families in the child support program are poor or below 200% of the poverty line. At the same time for the families that receive child support, it accounts for 40% of the income of that family. So it really can be a powerful way to provide necessary source of income for children in poor families. Child support also, the receipt of child support lifts a million families out of poverty each year. So turning to reentry, child support is an important issue for the reentering community. We know that the majority of federal and state prisoners has a child. So improving services for incarcerated and reentering individuals and unemployed parents will help make child support a reliable source of income for families and children. So a large portion of the federal child support work concerning reentry comes out of our work with the federal interagency reentry council. I see some familiar faces in the crowd today. If you don't know about the federal interagency reentry council, check out their website and their work. They've done a whole lot to assist reentering individuals and as you probably know, Eric Holder has emphasized the importance of providing assistance to returning citizens. So we're fortunate to be working in this space. So at our office, we believe strongly that realistic child support policies can support successful reentry. We've heard a lot today about the challenges that parents face when they're reentering and there are many barriers. We also know that recently released parents who can successfully enter the workforce and establish relationships with their children are more likely to pay support over time. And we also recognize that having the safe and consistent presence of both parents in the lives of children leads to their social stability, their economic stability, and is psychologically and socially beneficial. So we really believe that it's important to have both parents involved and that our policies can help make that happen. So we heard a lot about debt today. It's a very big issue. Here's just a sample number that the average person entering state prison enters with debt. So they enter with the barrier with an average of $10,000 and they leave with an average of $20,000. So what we can do is reduce the barrier, we try to reduce that debt going in, but also prevent it from accumulating. So Jojo mentioned one example of a debt forgiveness or a rears management policy, that's something that we support. Another strategy to avoid the accumulation of debt is that for the parents who are incarcerated, because their child support obligations don't automatically stop typically, somebody has to ask for a change in circumstance, ask for a change. So this usually means asking for a lower support order. Gosh, this time is just fine. Okay, sorry. So how to change a support order? This is the idea here is that it's important to ask for your order to change because for parents, if they don't ask for it to be lowered, it's probably not going to change and then you have this build-up of debt and we have much more ability to change the order to make it right than to try to get rid of the arrears. So, but that is a challenge that you have to ask for and that the burden is typically on a parent to ask for a change. Although the laws are good and only a handful of states, there's a legal barrier, typically called voluntary unemployment, which means the state won't let you change your order if you're incarcerated, but that's only the minority of states and most places you have the ability to seek an order if you've had a substantial change in circumstance. So this is the take-home point for the practitioners in the room, the message for parents or people who work with parents is to encourage the parents to contact their local child support and see if they have a 40 case, to try to ask to have their order change because it won't happen automatically. And at the federal level, we don't actually change the orders, it's the state and local people. So I always like to share the link for how to contact your local child support office. So this is probably the most important slide I have on best practices. I'm not in the policy division, so we call it best practices. We try to get evidence-based research to support some of these innovations. The idea here is that there are steps that state and local child support agencies and offices can do and there's a lot of movement in this field and a majority of states do work and at least one of these best practices. So just to highlight a few, data matching would be the process where the child support program and the correctional institutions are collaborating to identify which incarcerated parents have child support orders so they can provide outreach and assistance to try to have those orders changed. Some child support programs have child support workers who are physically stationed in correctional institutions to provide modification assistance and they are involved in the intake of inmates to help make that happen. More commonly, child support case workers visit correctional institutions and provide outreach and assistance there. Other states, California has a great new incarcerated video that walks parents through the process. It can often be a complicated legal process to try to ask to have your order changed. Other states are making the processes simpler to have your orders, to request an order change, so having a tear-off form rather than having to file a complicated legal motion. So these are all tools that child support offices are doing to try to engage with incarcerated parents and to play a role in trying to make the system easier. So in my remaining minutes, the Child Support Office has a new, the Federal Office has a new resource, a new guide that is available for parents and people who work with parents that explains the different state-by-state laws and policies regarding how to ask to have an order changed. In this resource, in our collaboration with the Bureau of Prisons, this resource will be available in all federal institutions. It's also right now on our website and the link is there so you can see some of it. This is a resource that's designed for parents and for those who don't know a lot about child support so you can learn how to ask to have your order changed. We also have a new re-entry page on our website that compiles all of the resources and highlights some of the collaborations that the Federal Child Support Office have undertaken with other federal agencies. And then lastly, let me just close with a note on partnerships. We know that partnerships are essential to this work. Joe Jones really explained how he's going out and it takes a village to figure out how to help these families and how to remove some of the barriers to incarceration and some of the stigma. And we know that to be an effective child support program we have to address the underlying barriers to non-payment. You need more family engagement. You need early intervention strategies. You need to work with workforce development and domestic violence agencies and expungement. You need all of these services to help the families make sure that the fathers are involved and that they're complying and they have the ability to pay and that their orders reflect that actual income. So that was eight minutes of a federal child support overview. Thank you. I wanna thank all our panelists for those really insightful and somewhat sobering presentations. And I definitely want to reserve plenty of time for questions but I just want to maybe pose one or two of my own first and also encourage our panelists to respond to each other's presentations if you have any comments. That's the first thing that I would ask. We heard a little bit from Adrienne in her presentation about some of the best practices and responses to the child support debt that imposes a real barrier to reentry. So I wanted to return to Michael and Sharon and see if you wanted to talk a little about some potential policy responses or best practices to the particular challenges that you talked about in your presentation. Well, I just wanna follow up on Adrienne's point about the Federal Interagency Reentry Council which I think holds a lot of promise that's brought a lot of high-level officials together to really talk about the issues of reentry and criminal records. So first of all, it's just great that there's attention to these issues but around critically important areas dealing with employment, housing, child support, et cetera. So just as an example, Ron Ashford's in the audience, he's from HUD and I had the pleasure of meeting him over the telephone about a year ago. I was doing some research around housing obstacles and so one example of the Federal Reentry Council's work is that HUD now is working on busting these myths that also exist in all these other areas about the housing restrictions and also trying to get local housing authorities to sort of broaden their perspectives with regard to individuals of criminal records and they've created, I believe, these reentry contacts or point persons in all 82 field offices. So there's a lot of work, I think, being done at the Federal level. At the State level, you know, look, there are a lot of great programs out there but Mr. Jones, I think, his point is well taken. I think his quote was, you cannot program your way out of policies and laws and so there is that clash there but there's certainly a lot of efforts at the local levels to sort of reform some of these policies and laws that are really impacting large groups of people. We can go into it in more detail, but. I would say what doctors often say first do no harm is a principle that should come to pass. On an annual basis, my colleagues and I are in Harrisburg and in Washington fighting things that are gonna make situation worse. Particularly, certainly on employment but particularly on criminal debt because there's anything that's politically unpopular. It's not only a criminal or a debtor but a criminal debtor put together. So there are forever new policies being proposed, new statutes, new collection mechanisms that are gonna make matters worse. So one way to make things better is not to make them worse. We also see that in the food stamp area as well. Right? There are many ways to address the criminal debt idea including first of all, how can you reduce people's debts? There are many ways to do that. General goals to deal with criminal debt would be reducing debt, making for reasonable payments so that people are not being forced to pay something that they can't, same as in the child support arena. Reasonable collection efforts and there are many different ways of implementing those overall goals which you can talk more about later. In terms of recommendations related to employment, my top ones are number one, we really need to expand expungement as much as possible. Expungement, sealing, whatever you wanna call it, record mitigation, people need to be able to get away from the stigma at some point. And whether it's how we do expungements or what is expungable under law, we need to do that. I think that transitional jobs are really important response to the employment crisis among the community of people with criminal records because quite honestly, the private employment market is not going to employ all these folks. There's no doubt in my mind about that. So if they are to have jobs, it has to be jobs that we have put into place through transitional work programs. And finally, there are some interesting proposals floating right now about expanding the earned income tax credit for childless individuals, which could increase income for people who are lucky enough to get job. No, it would be to expand it for childless individuals. Adrienne, do you have anything to add? Yeah, I think that the leadership is important, having the messages come from the top matters and also expanding the evidence base so we know what works because we know that this is a hard population and they have a lot of challenges. And so identity, the trying new things, testing and evaluating and really building the research on what works is also effective. Sharon, I just wanted to pick up on one thing that you said about how this is sort of a politically unpopular group to advocate on behalf of. But I think we have been seeing a lot of discussion and sort of convergence around sentencing reform recently on a bipartisan level. And it seems like some of the arguments that have brought more conservative voices to the table from that perspective have been these economic arguments and looking at the sort of macroeconomic effects of mass incarceration and the barriers that are putting in front of people. So I wondered if this is sort of a question to all of you if you could speak about some of the macroeconomic effects of these barriers and if you think that would be, if that's a viable messaging strategy for bolstering support for more of these robust re-entry efforts. No doubt. Certainly the cost of incarcerating people is enough to make anyone change their attitude about what they think ought to be done with people who allegedly commit crime, have committed crime. And certainly the fact that people who aren't working can't pay taxes, these are strong arguments. What I find discouraging on the advocacy front is that often that's not the playing field that we are on. We're on the playing field of so and so did this to so and so and it's now called so and so's law that we're putting forward as a bill. And by demonizing people, many elected officials quite frankly come up with things to run on or they come up with ways to challenge incumbents. They're not tough enough on crime. So I think a real challenge is how you deal with the anecdotal fear mongering that often results in some bad policy choices. I agree with all of that. I also think in terms of broadening the base of support, I do also think that thinking about this with regard to notions of redemption is something that catches sort of tugs at the heart a little bit. I mean, redemption is very much rooted in sort of religious notions and sort of second chances. President Bush is the one who said America's the land of the second chances in the state of the union address with regard to the Federal Reentry Act that Senator Brownback actually co-sponsored. I also think talking about this in macroeconomic terms is incredibly important. I also think talking about it in the context of families is incredibly important. So your stats are adoring about all those children of incarcerated individuals and we have to think what will happen to those children when they lose their parents to incarceration, what will happen to their children when that parent comes back into the home, if they come back into the home and what kind of services are necessary for those children? What should be done so that their children don't stand in the footsteps of their parent at least in that regard? So I also think we have to think about it sort of as a family oriented approach to reentry and the impact of criminal records. If I could add one more thing, we need to do the opposite of demonizing people, which is we need the stories of the people who are being hurt by these policies more so than we've seen, which is why the story that you've written is really valuable contribution to the field. If I could just add, within the child support community, we do talk in numbers and economics in terms of compliance and we have the research that says that realistic child support orders lead to better, more realistic, more reliable payment and father engagement leads to more compliance so we can make the economic argument that doing family outreach, working on family-centered policies, collaborating with partners, it all leads to a more effective child support program so we can make that economic argument. Great, thank you. I do have a couple other things jotted down but I want to make sure we have plenty of time for audience questions, so just raise your hand and we have a microphone at the back. Thank you very much, I am from HUD and if you want to talk to me later, please feel free and we are in the re-entry council and we are trying to move this needle, right? And one of the things we're doing is we've reached out to universities that have clinics that deal with expungement and legal aid offices that deal with expungement and ask them to partner with our housing authority, right? So I'm gonna talk to you later to see if you can do that with the Philadelphia Housing Authority but something you said scared me to death, Michael, because you said that an employer can go online and find out, right? So if you have your record expunge, does it still exist out there in internet space? Right, so that's one of the conundrums, right? And so what is supposed to happen and I'm talking, those records I'm talking about online are quote, unquote, unofficial criminal records. They're essentially court records that are made available online. So yes, once it's been expunged, it will come off the court record. The problem is that if you have these bulk data collectors who make good money collecting records and then selling it to employers, then they might have records that have not been updated. So one of the things that we need to do, well, obviously that's a huge issue, but North Carolina and Texas actually, they actually have, at least on paper. I don't know how they are in practice, but that would actually penalize these bulk data collectors if they essentially trade in old records that have been expunged. I mean, I need to look at the enforcement of it, but what we need to do is really ramp up the laws and ramp up the penalties for collectors and employers who rely on records that have actually previously been expunged. But no, that's a huge, huge issue. And in addition to formal record keeping is Google. So one thing that always scares me as somebody who's asked to provide client stories to the press is it's against their interest. It's against my client's interest to use their names in the press, especially if I'm gonna be able to expunge their record because then they're still traceable by background check companies, by employers. So that's a bit of a problem as well. And let me just tack on another problem when we're getting to these unofficial records. But again, these are unofficial records. I've had many situations. While I'm arrested, I use Ron Asher's name, right? Particularly if Ron Asher, a lot of siblings. You see this with a lot of siblings, but I'll use my brother's sister's name and all of a sudden on the unofficial record, this person has a record that actually doesn't exist with regard to that person. So they have a lot of dangers of actually putting these records online. Are you up here in the front? We have a microphone coming to you. Thanks everyone. My name's Jesse Genetta. I'm a researcher at the Urban Institute in the Justice Policy Center. And I wanted to ask you a question about misdemeanors. I was in a conversation with someone recently who had some resources to do some strategic planning and looking at their justice system. One of the areas she was talking about was looking at what they're doing with misdemeanors, recognizing that their justice system produces a huge number of misdemeanor convictions every year, but it's not necessarily something that they think about very much relative to felonies and other things. And she asked me what I thought and I said, boy, I don't think that much about misdemeanors either. I tend to think about felonies and other things, but it seems like a good idea. So when I hear you saying anything on your criminal record is a problem. And when I hear you saying that misdemeanors can lock you out of housing and these other things just as much as felony convictions sort of reinforces this sense that that's important to look at. So I guess what I wanna ask you is, is it the case that it's really important in thinking about barriers to be thinking about misdemeanors and what guidance would you have to task, jurisdictions that wanna take a look at that or people in the research policy community wanna sort of interrogate what our practice is around how we handle misdemeanors? So I think it's really important to break down these walls between incarceration and non-incarceration and between felonies and misdemeanors, right? Again, all these records will create these huge issues. And so you're absolutely right. I think that local jurisdictions and states and the federal government need to look really critically at just for example, collateral consequences. And one of the things of the Federal Reentry Council that Attorney General Holder charged every state attorney general to do was to look at their collateral consequences in their respective states and eliminate those that are counterproductive and unnecessary. I don't think much action has happened at the state level in reaction, but with regard to misdemeanors, first of all, they are the bulk of the cases in our criminal justice system, number one. So number two, again, all these collateral consequences pretty much attaching misdemeanors as well. So I'll give you two sources. You need to, Jenny Roberts, who's a law professor at American and I forgot where it was published, but she wrote an article about misdemeanors in this context, collateral consequences and the need for lawyers to engage these issues with their clients. And Alexander Natapop, who's another law professor in California, she wrote a law review article titled, misdemeanors, that's it. Some one word title, that's all that needs to be said, where they both talk about these issues in some detail. So you should take a look at those two publications. And following up on something Michael just said early in his comment, I think it's also really important to study what happens to people who serve no time because if you find numbers about people who only got probation as their sentence, you'll find that that's the vast majority of the criminal justice system. And those folks have really severe consequences as well. They're not coming home per se, but they're facing a lot of the same things that we've talked about and they often get shut out of these discussions. From the child support perspective, the idea is to engage with the parent early on and whatever there's been a change in circumstance. So in that sense, the distinction between misdemeanor and something else isn't as relevant as you're engaging with the family and you want the parent who is incarcerated or unemployed or recently lost a job or lost hours to at that point ask to have the order change rather than waiting until the years have grown up. But it might be worth studying the different points of intervention as different triggers. Well, I think the financial thing as well, I guess if I can add, because often there's fine restitution and other things, so the change in circumstances could be the debt burden that you have now to the justice system, even if it's now a costly time. You know, part of it is also then getting down to the court level because when you go to courts and please the plea mills to a certain extent, particularly with misdemeanors, but judges will often say, this is not really a big deal. This will not be on your record. It is a misdemeanor. And I don't know, but countless people come to our sponger road shops and there was a myth in Maryland that you could expunge a misdemeanor conviction. That there's a distinction between families and misdemeanors. That's not the case. Yes. Rebecca Ballas, Center for American Progress and a protege of Sharon Dietrich. So my interest in this issue is entirely because of her. So I wanted to ask if you guys had any remarks that you could potentially offer about projects that you know of that are kind of on the local level, maybe partnerships with courts or alternative courts that are geared towards kind of front end prevention so that we're not just looking at collateral consequences on the back end, but rather preventing people from coming out with the records. So perhaps alternative court systems that result in at the end of successful completion expungement and you don't have any criminal debt tied to you. Curious if you guys have any examples you'd like to speak to or whether you think those are effective. Well, there are many, I'm sorry, the name of any escaped me right now, but let me give you a couple of thoughts. So there are many programs in courts, diversionary programs, for instance, that if a person makes it through diversion, they won't have a record as a result. Many states have diversionary programs. That's one sort of macro program that's out there. There are also some law offices and I'm a criminal defense lawyer, so let me think of it from that perspective, but there are a nice handful full of public defender offices that advise their clients about collateral consequences prior to entering a guilty plea, but also then bring those conversations into their negotiations with prosecutors because 95% of these cases will actually result in guilty plea. So public defender service in DC incorporates this into their practice. Bronx Defenders in New York incorporates this into their practice. I'm sure the Defender Association in Philadelphia probably does, it's another great program, but there are programs out there that are really taking these into account in the front end practice. My brain's a bit, you froze me with that question, so that's all I can really think about this time. I would just say another front end approach is pre-release planning. Before you send people off into that list of horribles that I went through, wouldn't it be smart if somebody sat with you and said, hmm, you seem like you're disabled, maybe we can start thinking about getting you back on SSI or at least give you information about how we can get you back on SSI, get you medical benefits, where are you gonna live? You know, it doesn't seem like rocket science, obviously it takes some resources, but, and there is a growing understanding that this is a really important part of trying to get people to re-enter better, but still there's so much more that needs to be done there. There's also a project in San Francisco run through the district attorney's office. It's really interesting to see prosecution offices around the country engage in re-entry issues, but the Clean Slate Project in San Francisco was actually a diversionary program run by the district attorney's office that again will allow people to come out of those programs without a record. So there are many programs out there. Thank you. Good morning, my name is Angeline Fraser and I'm with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. How are you doing? Thanks for your article for our journal and Sharon, nice to see you. We have embarked on a two and a half year study of collateral consequences and relief mechanisms that exist around the country for people who have convictions on their record. One of the recommendations someone just mentioned here, so I'm not gonna say it, because our report is coming out in probably a couple of weeks, but I really encourage, and Jenny Roberts actually wrote our report. She was a reporter. She was a reporter for our report. I saw the video with her in Chicago. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a couple things, one thing definitely in terms of misdemeanor and felony that we saw around the country was people were actually thinking that the misdemeanors were not gonna affect them, but in actuality they did. Not only misdemeanors, just being arrested, just being arrested, there are companies that get your mug shot, put it on their website, and you have to pay them to take it off. And there could be several websites. Your mug shot could be on 10 websites and you're paying on average $100 to $150 to take your mug shot off. So that's just one of the things in terms of trying to find people. I mean, this is a huge, huge problem. I wanna say that some of the things that you asked definitely, there's the collateral consequences database, there's the ABA that you mentioned, Mr. Pinar. And so to the extent that we have all of these resources out there to try to get on the front end to make sure that legislators understand this is gonna be really critical. When there are, when there's bills coming up, Sharon, to let us know, this bill is really important. This is to ensure that people can actually come back into society. So I don't have a question. So to speak, I just wanted to say, Jenny Roberts is doing a report and we are coming out with this comprehensive report that we'll have. 10 recommendations on the federal and state level to try to combat some of this stuff that we do. We can't wait to see that report. But also, and Sharon, you talked about this as well, but non-conviction dispositions. Again, criminal records being made available online. What I've seen is that number one, employees won't hire because of the non-conviction disposition, either because they just don't wanna deal with it. But also, employees may not even understand, some employees may not even understand that while landlords as well, that this actually is not a conviction. And so one of the things we have to do for clients sometimes is if they're applying for a job, we'll write a letter to the employer explaining the record and say, you should know that these are not convictions if you have any questions called. So all these are, yeah, that's it. Which gives me an opportunity to say something positive since I feel like we're bringing this room down. One really good and crucial development of the last couple of years was the policy guidance put out by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2012, which updated a policy that had originally come out under the signature of Clarence Thomas when he was the chair of the commission back in the 80s. And boy, do we get mileage out of that. And EEOC's guidance, for instance, says specifically that it is illegal for employers to turn down people for a rest that have not led to convictions. And so, yes, there are employers that are still violating that rule, but we are seeing progress being made. I wrote a paper that's on my organization's website if you're interested in this issue about progress since the policy was passed. I talked to general councils who talk about how they have been revising their own organization's policies to conform with what EEOC had to say. So it's slow, but I do wanna at least put out there into this room that we are making some progress on some of these fronts. Dave Rockster, Research Institute for Independent Living. This is a question that was almost answered, but the information we have is there are many people that are incarcerated with disabilities. You have mental health conditions, substance abuse, you have infectious diseases. And my question is that there are social insurance disability insurance out there, and you have an SSI program. These are programs that people who are incarcerated would be eligible for. And so my question is, are there initiatives to hook people who have been released from prison with these types of programs? I was gonna turn that one over to my friend Rebecca. No. No. No. Rebecca, why don't you speak to the issue of SSI, SSD, and coming out of incarceration? Good to see you. My former CCD colleague. I mean, that's a good question. I think Sharon's point about pre-release is a huge one. I think that's one of the most common sense. Policy solutions is that people often churn off and on of SSI and SSDI benefits when they get incarcerated. And especially in the case of SSI, if you've been off of benefits for 12 months, you end up actually being terminated. You're no longer suspended. And so what that means is you have to go through that process of determining disability all over again. And you've been incarcerated for whatever length of time, which means you arguably, and very likely, haven't actually had much in the way of medical treatment that results in records. So it can be even more difficult to re-prove your disability, which is a huge obstacle for people who are getting released. So that pre-release piece is actually a really huge policy direction that I think we should be looking at. And especially if it's coupled with quality healthcare treatment and especially mental health treatment while people are incarcerated. The other thing I would note is just that families end up getting impacted as well. And I think that's a point that's been made a couple of times here, but when you've got kind of head of household and you've got kids on the outside, this is especially something we see for people who face mental health struggles and who are churning on and off of benefits and in many cases, child benefits are impacted as a result. So the people on the outside can get impacted by someone who was the breadwinner or the source of benefits going in and out. But I think it's a really good question. There certainly are correctional institutions that have pilot programs to try to do this. Unfortunately, it's mostly from my experience in the nature of pilot programs rather than any broad movement. You know, Jo-Jo had spoke so eloquently about how kids are great motivators for parents, for parents to make changes and improve themselves. And just from the child support program, we are unique in that we do touch the whole family. A lot of the perception is that social services are just for women or women and children. But the child's program is, you know, we touch the whole family and we interact with a lot of men. So it gives us an opportunity to really focus on the family as a way to improve what's going on. Have that successful link to re-entry. Okay. Hi, I'm Mary Griffin with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And we have responsibility for some of the laws that have been discussed here, credit reporting and fair debt collection. And I'm just wondering if one, you've seen in your experience a lot of ID theft while in prison, if that's a big issue or other issues related to credit reports while they're in that they have to then deal with and pre-release or just when they get out. And if you have any suggestions for changes in the debt collection and the credit reporting, we'd love to hear it. Oh boy, would I love to talk to you. In addition to Title VII, my second favorite statute is the Fair Credit Reporting Act because that applies to the background screeners, the commercial background screeners and anyone who buys their product. And what I would really love to see come out of CFPB is regulations that set some standards there because that industry is like the wild west. So when Michael talks about expungements, expunged cases being reported, unfortunately we have class actions going on under the Fair Credit Reporting Act that we may have to be filing forever unless there's some more federal regulation brought to bear on those screeners. So to me, that's the most important consumer issue that I see. We don't see that much of the identity theft, the traditional identity theft. We see what Michael described, what we call criminal identity theft where somebody gets a criminal record associated wrongly in your name and the public records. But the stuff that happens in the background screening industry is just appalling. Hi, my name is Emily. I'm with Offender Aid and Restoration Richmond. And I had a question more generally about, I guess, regulation of sort of the privatization of prisons and the companies that sort of incarceration settings use, like for example phone companies, they use certain only like two and then they can charge really, really high rates for phones. So what sort of policy recommendations do you have to regulate this with the privatization of prisons, just sort of make sure that no one's really getting taken advantage of that much or if their goal is just to keep them full. So do you want to speak to that at all? It's not really an issue I can speak to. Yeah, the phone stuff, I call it the phone stuff, but that's not limited to private prisons. That also exists in state prisons. I do know that, yeah, there was some litigation around that and I haven't really followed all the litigation, but you know, look, I mean, in terms of policy proposals, it's kind of hard, right? Because it's kind of if they can charge it, they can get it, right? But I do think that obviously there needs to be some type of, I mean, everything in prison is an industry. You visit somebody, you go to the vending machine, you will be paying triple what you would pay at the vending machine in the lobby of this room. So I mean, the issue I think really is you need to have more people speaking about it, possibly litigating it, but really to create policies that obviously would not allow companies to take advantage of people like that. But understand you're going up against an industry that I'm sure has the ears of very, very powerful people. I'm sorry, I don't have much of an answer solution. It's not something I follow much other than anecdotally. I will note that while vendors can charge outlandish rates, prison labor is very poorly compensated. Minimum wage does not apply to prison labor. Often those wages are garnished to pay the court costs we've been talking about. So while you have these very heavy obligations to get what you need, your ability to earn any money to pay for them is next to nothing. I think there's been some movement in that area. So I would encourage you to check out the CSG's Justice Center website, which compiles all of the materials produced by the federal interagency reentry council. And there's some more information there about bones. My question is very similar to what she just asked. So apologies. But I'm not looking for policy recommendations, but I'm curious in your research, in what ways has the private prison industry complicated ideas on solutions to the problems that we face? When I think about the family aspect, in California they obviously are dealing with a big issue of overcrowding. So instead of letting people out, they send them out of state to private prison industries. And we know that when kids get to visit their parents, that decreases chances of recidivism. So I think that impacts the family in certain ways. And obviously, private prison industries have less resources because they wanna save more money. So chances of them going out adequately prepared to reintegrate back into society is a big challenge. So I was just wondering what larger complications do folks leaving private prison industries face? I'm not so sure, it's not unique to private prisons, but one of the issues that we see in our work is the absence of internet. So a lot of the great outreach programs and their new materials for parents and ways to engage with the family. And a lot of that depends upon being able to Google your local child support office. So that's why we created our guide that we're gonna have in prisons and prison libraries. But conceptually, we need to sort of think about how you reach parents who are in correctional institutions, whether whoever is running them, whether it's state or federal or private, we needed to figure out how we can connect with parents and connect the families and bring them in, even given some of the limitations, especially with the GED being online now, we talked a little bit about that earlier, which is not, there is not a blanket rule. Many facilities do have some limited access, but just it is something that we've struggled with at the federal level. Yeah, I mean, you know, the incentive is just fill those cells, right? And the film, as you said, very far away. So all the issues I think we're talking about are obviously exacerbated by distance and perhaps even more services. But again, this is not unique to the private prison industry. There was, I don't know if you followed what was going on in Danbury, Connecticut last year. They wanted this, the federal female facility, Danbury, they wanted to convert to a male prison to ease overcrowding in the male facilities, federal. And Danbury is the only female federal prison in the Northeast. It's the only one. And so the proposal was to move the women to Alabama. And then to sequester here, all these stuff, so it didn't happen right away, but the resolution has been that for the women who are from the Northeast, they stay at Danbury. For everybody else, they have to go to Alabama. But my point is, it was a really, I think, it really, I think, put a light on the lack of services, particularly for women. I mean, another conversation we could have is about women inmates versus men inmates coming out of prison and women with criminal records. That's a whole other conversation. But my point is that the distance that people have to travel to visit a loved one in prison and to connect to services is just not unique to the private prison industry. I'm Terry Siemens. I'm on the city council in Tacoma Park, Maryland. And we've heard from a lot of good organizations here today and a lot of the problems have been laid on the table. And I'm just curious if there's any organization that's really trying to bring together the different organizations to be a more powerful voice than the policy making or policy advocacy. It's certainly more truncated than you would like to see it be. And in part, it may be because not everyone who's important to the policy discussion is going to be prepared to be in a coalition together. So for instance, law enforcement, when they take the right position on some of these things is the best advocate we can get. We're trying to expand our expungement statute in Pennsylvania and it's the fact that the Pennsylvania District Attorney's Association is supporting it that makes it likely to happen if it were just me and my kind, not so much. So it's complicated. And these problems often do get that we've talked about today get pigeonholed. So you get your employment people and you got your housing people. And I don't know that I can say that there's one big coalition that's working on the whole ball of wax. Yeah, again, it's very, very segregated. I would agree. So for instance, if you look at employment and sort of the band of box movement, you could say all of us are none. Help started. And people draw motivation from that organization which is based in San Francisco. I'm sure at the federal level you have this collection of the federal inter-agency we at your council that serves as an umbrella and we could draw a lot of lessons from that. But even at the state level, I think it's also very segregated by where you are in that state. So Tacoma Park, I work in Baltimore. It's two different worlds almost. But I will agree with Sharon. There was a bill in Annapolis this year that sought to shield certain nonviolent misdemeanor convictions after a certain period of time. So it's not quite expungement, but it will remove it from the public record sponsored by Senator Raskin. And there were three state's attorneys this year who testified in support of it as well as Attorney General Gansler. Now even with all that effort, it didn't pass. But my point is that the coalitions definitely need to be broader. You definitely need to find common interest. And I do think one of the weaknesses in the reentry movement at the local level but also perhaps at the state level is lack of cohesion is not the right word, but there's no sort of magnifying force that brings everybody into the same room to talk about the broad issues and how they interact with each other. That's all I can say about that. So maybe we could have a conversation about starting something in Maryland. How about that? All right, that's good. I think we have time for maybe one more question. Hello, everyone. Thank you, everyone, for your presentations and the question and answers. My name is Mario Gutierrez. I work with the Financial Clinic, a nonprofit financial development firm. One of our projects is embedding financial development strategies into reentry social services. One of the issues we have found, though, amongst all the other issues that have been discussed already was the prevalence of nonprofit private institutions actually setting up in certain prisons and recruiting folks into their schools. And in particular, I'm speaking of Rikers Island in New York City, our partners on the ground have seen that. And I'm just... I'm sorry, we say schools. What schools do you talk about? Oh, nonprofit... I'm sorry, for-profit private institutions. So we're talking about... Well, actually, I don't want to... I don't know the names of the schools specifically, so I'm not going to take a guess at it. You actually didn't know what the schools do, but it's fine. Yeah, exactly. So I was curious to know if there were... if you all had any ideas in terms of what type of policy changes can be made, if at all, to try to address this issue. Can you just indulge me? Can you just give me a little bit more about what the issue is? Certainly. The thing is, studies show that a lot of enrollees in for-profit private institutions actually do not complete their time at the school and end up with more debt than they had before they enrolled. Yeah, please. I think one of the things I talk to you guys a lot about is that they'll be in situations where they're recruited by for-profit schools, either for truck driving or being a barber in schools like that, and there are actually things at the end of it with some criminal records they can't get a license for any for. Anyway, and then the other part of it is that even if they could get a license for it, there aren't places that are going to hire people with certain kinds of theft convictions to drive trucks across the country. So I think it's actually a big issue because they are in debt for those things, and even if they finish, they're not going to be connected to the jobs. So what about... So if I could react to that, because I wasn't... I mean, I was aware of people learning a trade and then can't get a job, but I didn't really appreciate the issue of being recruited to pay money to enroll the schools. And so it seems as though it's interesting because this issue actually came up in the context of the shielding bill, this session in Annapolis. And one of the things we advocated for is that once the record shielded, undergraduate institutions shouldn't be able to ask that about a conviction on a criminal application for college or even a graduate school, but kind of the pushback is what is sort of the ethical duties of a university or of a graduate school or I guess of these schools to advise the applicant, not to deny enrollment, but to really advise the applicant that look, understand that by you enrolling, this is a risk for you. We cannot guarantee that there's an opportunity at the end of it, it could be that your criminal record gets in the way, but then leave it to that person to make a choice, right? Based on all the information. So it sounds as though they should at least be advised that they may be wasting their money. And there is an existing way to eliminate some of this debt, which is that you can get what's called an ability to benefit discharge of your student loans if in fact there's a tight nexus between the law saying that you can't do the job and what you've trained for. I think the stickier cases are the ones where, okay, there's no law that says you can't work in a hospital with this record, but no hospital is gonna hire you for that kind of a job. The student loan discharge process has been a long and difficult system and need of reform as well. So I certainly agree that that's an issue that also adds to the debt and is problematic. And people both get kept out of training programs that they ought to be allowed into and they get accepted and recruited into programs where they have no business. So there's a real mismatch there. Got that? Okay, one more question. I just wanna follow up with the consumer financial protection bureau is looking at this. We do, we have an office of students and we're very concerned about the private lending in a lot of different ways, particularly the people are recruited, brought in and then they don't get jobs or they drop out and there was no way they could have success. So to the extent people could file complaints or reach out to our office of students at consumerfinance.gov, that would be great because the more we hear, the more we can do about it. Thanks. Thank you. Do we have a comment also? I guess just real quickly, because I do reentry work at local state level around the country and I think the other lever is the corrections agencies because part of it, it's incumbent upon them to be a good partner. I think you see places that do partnerships with community colleges or four-year universities that have job developers. So part of it's on them to be responsible about who their partners are and what capacity they're building in their transition planning to really help and advise people about how to get on a career track and how to make those decisions in a way that's going to help them get where they wanna be. And I think there's a lot of examples around the country of jails and prison systems that do that and it's also at the policy level incumbent upon you not to put up barriers for partnerships with colleges and community colleges or four-year. I think it's one of the reasons why it's disappointing what happened in New York State recently where they floated an idea and then went back on it. I mean, I think when you're restricting the access that people in those situations have to a lot of the educational pathways, inevitably that's going to create a situation where the choices available to them are, you know, not as good as, you know, they're gonna need them to be in order to be successful. Thank you. Do we have any closing thoughts from any of our panelists? I really would like to finish on a positive note. Sure. Yeah. Difficult though that may seem. I started doing work in this area in the late 1990s as our clients started to roll into our office and back then nobody was paying attention to any of this and some of the things that have happened in the last couple of years have been astonishing breakthroughs like the EEOC's policy and the number of people that are paying attention to this issue has grown and grown. I mean, we have an army of people now that are trying to fight back so please don't leave this room discouraged. We can and we will do even more to resolve these problems. So I'll add on to that that when I started doing this work, I don't know, 15 years or so ago there were the traditional silos between civil attorneys and criminal attorneys or between attorneys and non attorneys or between attorneys and social workers well between everybody. And so when you start doing reentry work and you go to these meetings and you would say, well, why are there no other lawyers here or why is there nobody from this organization here or from corrections or from whomever and I think that over the years you see that reentry or dealing with individuals with criminal records and impact really does require a village to help these individuals and to help deal with the policies and so it has brought people together who otherwise would never work together all with a common goal of making individuals and families and communities better than what they are right now. Thank you all for coming and please join me in thanking our panelists.