Finding jobs after prison
Xavier Ferguson strolls up and down the aisles of an EbLens store in Providence. Though it’s his favorite store, everything feels foreign. He’s overwhelmed by the hundreds of shoes, offered in every combination of shoe leather and Nike swoosh. He has trouble processing all of the snap...
Xavier Ferguson strolls up and down the aisles of an EbLens store in Providence. Though it’s his favorite store, everything feels foreign. He’s overwhelmed by the hundreds of shoes, offered in every combination of shoe leather and Nike swoosh. He has trouble processing all of the snap back hats pinned to the walls.
Flooded with options, Xavier ends up buying four pairs of shoes — two Jordans, and two Nike Air Forces. Some cost upwards of 100 dollars. But Xavier doesn’t care. This is his first time shopping in four years.
In 2012, at 21-years-old, Xavier robbed three teenagers at gunpoint. Intoxicated, he pointed a gun with no bullets, and took everything the three boys had in their possession.
Xavier calls it the stupidest thing he’s ever done. “I lost four years of my life behind thirty dollars in a wallet, a bootleg old Walmart TracFone and a dime sack of marijuana,” he says.
He sums up his motives as desperation. “I felt as if the world was crumbling around me… If I couldn’t beat it, join it: be as destructive as I felt everything around me was.”
Charged with first degree robbery and conspiracy to commit assault with a dangerous weapon, Xavier was sentenced to serve six years at the Adult Correctional Institute in Cranston.
Xavier was released one month ago for good behavior, two years ahead of schedule. Though he says he’s glad to be out, adjusting to freedom is taking time. Xavier still stands involuntarily at 3:00pm, an internal clock from his time incarcerated telling him it’s time for count. He says he feels overstimulated in stores by the aisles of products after years of limited commissary. Even solitude can be alarming. “It’s overwhelming to finally use the bathroom by myself,” he says. He sums these up as his “institutionalized quirks.”
But Xavier says he had no trouble abandoning his prison attire. After four years in the same outfit, Xavier spent his second day of freedom at EbLens buying himself a new wardrobe. “It felt good to finally have pockets, it felt good to be able to put on a belt,” he says. He exhausted everything he had earned at his $2 a day prison job on the four pairs of shoes.
After depleting his savings in an hour and a half, Xavier asked EbLens if they were hiring. They said they were, and he filled out his application on the spot.
This was Xavier’s second time filling out an EbLens application. Four years ago, he had applied to work in the store. But, two days before the interview, Xavier committed an armed robbery, patting down three boys at gunpoint for thirty dollars and a flip phone. By the time the interview rolled around, he was in jail.
Now, Xavier was reapplying for the same position in the same store. But, this time, his application didn’t pass the first step. EbLens didn’t even give him an interview.
Two days out of prison, Xavier received his first rejection. Since then, he has applied to 100 more jobs. Most have ended in the same outcome as EbLens.
“I heard 96 ‘nos’ before I finally heard, ‘yeah, I’ll give you a shot,’” Xavier says.
These ‘nos’ came from retailers and warehouses across Rhode Island. Each place said they were hiring. But after either looking up Xavier’s record on Court Connects, Rhode Island’s criminal information website, or requesting official criminal background checks like BCIs, only five employers got back to him. “As long as they run background checks, you’re screwed.” he says. “That BCI is pretty much just a big X.”
Sol Rodriguez, Executive Director of Open Doors, an organization serving the formerly incarcerated, calls the criminal record a “scarlet letter that will follow [ex-convicts] for life.”
If a criminal record is a scarlet letter, Rhode Island has thousands of Hester Prynnes. A local nonprofit, Direct Action for Rights and Equality, estimates that roughly 25% of Rhode Islanders have a criminal record. Rodriguez and her staff serve these Rhode Islanders every day of the work week, assisting people just getting out of jail as well as those who have been out for two decades. Regardless of how long her clients have been in the workforce, Rodriguez still sees them plagued by the same barriers to employment. “You’re still confronted with the same obstacles that you were twenty years before,” she says. “There are still employers who will not hire you.”
A search on Craigslist for available jobs in Rhode Island reveals thousands of openings explicitly stating that no employee with a criminal record will be considered. Even after Rhode Island passed “Ban the Box” legislation two years ago, which forbids employers from asking about criminal history on job applications, many people still find it near impossible to find gainful employment post-prison.
Last week, after a month’s worth of attempts, Xavier got his first acceptance from McDonalds, which offered him a job behind the grill. It is, he admits, not the works he aspires to. Lingering stigmas around fast food work from his childhood prevail. “We had this saying when I was younger,” he says, “you’ll catch me flipping birds before you’ll catch me flipping burgers.” But now, barred from other options, Xavier flips burgers and says he’s grateful.
Around the time Xavier began working at McDonalds, Savers got back to him with another job offer, which he accepted. The company didn’t ask about his criminal record, which he thinks likely contributed to his placement. “A lot of people might not believe this but I’m working at the cashier,” he says.
Even with these two new positions, Xavier’s not finished with his job search. On his days off, he takes employment classes at Open Doors, which offers a two-week, six-class course for the formerly incarcerated on how to navigate the job market.
The group meets in the basement of Open Doors’ headquarters on Plainfield Street three times a week. At his most recent lesson, Xavier was one of only three people who showed up. Jon-Paul Capece, the class’ instructor, says attendance is always a problem with a group dependent on RIPTA
For the duration of the two-and-a-half-hour lesson, the three men sit scattered around a table, discussing ways to infiltrate an employment market that doesn’t seem to want them. Capece stands at the head of the table and tries to steer the discussion. He reads the three men practice interview questions off his phone. When the students’ responses turn into tangents, Capece reigns them back in.
Though Xavier is the youngest of the three, he dominates the conversation, recounting past interviews gone awry. Capece prods one of his students to tell the class about his own employment faux pas from last week where he sent the owner of a horse farm a five-page explanation of his criminal record in the hopes of scoring a job there. The man says he never heard back from the owner, but has since found a job selling cellphones at True Wireless.
For the entire lesson, nobody checks their phones. The only telltale sign of impatience stems from Xavier, who occasionally turns his head to check the clock.
Capece has been teaching Xavier’s class for the past month. Mostly, Capece says, he struggles with students’ level of maturity, as he tries to place people who were sent to jail at 18 and came out at 25. “Time has just gone from their lives,” he says. “They were one person in 2005, but now it’s 2015 and they’re starting over again.”
Because so many of Capece’s students have never held a job, much of his class focuses on interview basics. “If you could be any animal, what would you be?” Capece asks his students. Two of the men agree “dog” is the best, and likely, only answer to the question, while Xavier chooses wolf, though he finds the question absurd. “I’m not working to be a vet right now,” he quips.
The four men work their way through other interview basics: biggest weakness, biggest strength, why this job. The most difficult question the students grapple with though is the most open ended. Employers are no longer allowed to directly ask potential hires about their criminal record during the first job interview, but, Xavier says, many times, the question simply gets dressed up in vaguer language. “Have you been in trouble before?” is the most common phrasing.
When the employer finally broaches the question, “it seems like below the table, their toes are tight in their shoes until they can exhale when you say no,” Xavier says. “When you say yes, they clench up.”
Open Doors calls the answer to this question the “thirty second commercial,” a brief pitch on why your criminal record means nothing. “They’re selling themselves,” Capece says of his students. “It’s what anybody does during a job interview.” His students just need a slightly stronger pitch. “When they look you up on Court Connects, you’ve got to convince them that that person no longer walks the planet – that person is dead, buried and the earth salted.”
Xavier practices his commercial in front of the class. “I do have a background of wrong decision making skills, let’s put it that way, but I don’t want to be labeled for who I was back then against who I am today,” he rehearses.
McDonalds was the first company to accept Xavier’s pitch. He says places with kitchens are often more lenient to those with records, as they tend to be short-staffed. Rodriguez has noted the same trend, with many of her clients getting their first taste of employment at fast food chains. “Some people will stay there and just work in fast food forever,” Rodriguez says. “Some people are looking to move on.”
Though Xavier says he’s grateful for McDonalds taking a chance on him, he’s looking for something bigger. “A lot of us are really looking for careers, not just jobs,” he says. An aspiring fashion designer, he wants to keep trying for the retail job at EbLens. “Since I was young, I’ve always been fascinated by fashion – how people look, their appearance,” he says. He plans to one day pursue a fashion degree.
But in jail, where clothing options were limited, Xavier focused on other artistic pursuits. He began to write – letters to his family, short stories, poetry, raps. His writing skills earned him an extra income to supplement the two dollars a day he was making as a prison custodian. For mother’s days, birthdays, and anniversaries, inmates would come to Xavier to inscribe a poem in their cards. He says people bought his words “in the same way people would buy handcrafted art in New York City on a corner on a blanket.” The only difference was he charged an extra three soups and a meat log.
Xavier says “jailhouse talents” aren’t unusual. “In an ironic twist of fate, jail is consisted of the most talented people in the world,” he says. “There are so many prisons full of the next Lil Wayne, the next basketball stars, the next football players.”
These are the types of talents employers may never see. Despite the fact that Xavier served as the ACI’s Hallmark for four years, it was irrelevant to the minimum wage jobs he was applying to. “My resume was completely…naked,” he says. The only thing on it was his four-year prison job as a “custodial assistant,” though he omitted the location.
Even with a bare-boned application, Xavier has now landed two jobs. But given the time commitment needed to fulfill his parole stipulations, he might as well be working three. Currently on home confinement, Xavier has to be home by 5:30 pm everyday unless he’s working. Meanwhile, he must schedule his shifts around his required intensive outpatient program, which meets from 1-4 pm, three days a week. And, he’s at the mercy of the bus schedule, meaning it takes him an hour and a half to get to any one of these destinations. But Xavier says he’s not concerned about the cramped calendar. “I don’t need to sleep. I slept for four years.”
Xavier has support in his quest for employment. There’s his grandmother, who never missed a phone call while he was in the ACI. There’s Open Doors, which offers Xavier fully subsidized housing in Olneyville as part of their Nine Yards program, in addition to providing him classes in prison and assigning him a case manager. And there’s his instructor, Capece, who helps him tackle interview questions three times a week.
Those no longer involved in Xavier’s life are the ones who helped formalize his scarlet letter – the police that arrested him, the public defendant that argued for him, and, finally, the judge that sentenced him.
Most judges will never know the fate of person they sentence. “Once you sentence somebody to prison, that’s the last you see or hear of them,” says Judge John J. McConnell, a United States district judge for Rhode Island.
McConnell didn’t like the mystery of what happened post courtroom. “I was really curious about the effectiveness of my sentences – did it work or not in terms of rehabilitation,” he says.
He began reaching out to the people he had sentenced, asking them to meet with him during supervised release, the federal version of parole. He wanted to know he had chosen the correct sentence length for rehabilitation, neither too lenient nor too harsh.
Over time, though, McConnell began to see a force impeding this readjustment process outside of either his or the defendant’s’ control.
“I was finding over and over again the difficulty that these folks were having obtaining a job,” he says. He came to view employment as “the key to success or not success.” When the legal ways to make money were blocked from people with records, McConnell noticed illegal paths often drew them back into the criminal justice system. “People who were convicted of selling drugs primarily did it because that was their job – that’s how they made money,” he says.
“It dawned on me that these folks needed a little bit of extra help to get beyond the prejudice that we have on ex-offenders,” he remembers. And so, seven months ago, he reached out to Ocean State Job Lot president Marc Perlman, asking if his company might consider employing Rhode Islanders with records.
McConnell says he chose the discount store because it primarily serves low-income communities, where many of his old defendants were living. He also knew Perlman, as the company was a big supporter of Trinity Repertory Company, where McConnell resided on the board. The two of them had spent time together in New York while Perlman was on a theatre trip.
With the assistance of Michael Primeau, a probation officer, Judge McConnell met with Perlman, and broached the idea of Ocean State opening its doors to those with records. Perlman agreed. He says it was the right thing to do. “There’s a fine line between getting it all right and screwing it up… we’re all capable of making a mistake.”
So far, since McConnell met with Perlman, Ocean State has accepted two people with criminal records. One woman is working at a branch location and has already made employee of the month, according to Bob Selle, chief human resources officer for Ocean State. Another is working at Ocean State’s distribution center in North Kingstown. Selle says these employees are paid the same as any other worker and can apply to any position.
Despite opening its door to the broad category of people with records, Ocean State will still, like many employers, weigh the nature of people’s crimes when considering hiring a candidate. Selle says someone convicted of stealing would be less likely to be hired than someone charged with drug possession.
Many employers have specific crimes they will not touch. Rodriguez says she personally has the most difficulty placing sex offenders, though she’s found them to be “the most educated population in the prison [with] the most work experience.” But their education fails to stand out on a job application when placed next to their charges.
Xavier says this stigmatization of certain crimes hurts employers, as well as the potential employees. “You would learn more off of a person in a one on one interview then you would off of a piece of paper,” he says, using drug dealers as an example. “They’re the biggest businessmen on the planet…in terms of customer satisfaction, dealing with their finances, they have to reapply for inventory.” But they’ll rarely get the chance to interview.
Rhode Island’s scarlet letter problem is becoming a recidivism problem. Ex-offenders in Rhode Island have a 48 percent rate of going back to jail within three years of getting out.
Unemployment has been proven to be at the root of this rate, as it leaves ex-offenders with no means to pay the bills and no meaningful way to contribute to society. With no prospect for jobs, one in two ex-prisoners end up back at the ACI.
Xavier has seen this transition from unemployment to incarceration first hand. As Xavier points out, “money’s not as hard to obtain, except for when you need to do it legally.”
During his sentence, Xavier saw the same people return four times to the ACI with four new sentences. “Every time it’s the same excuse: It’s hard out there,” he says. Crime was “the only water they know how to swim in.”
Employment provides a floating device.
As Xavier says, jobs are “the only thing that’s going to keep me from being back in the streets.”
Without them, he worries he’s “just going to end up walking back through those revolving doors.”
Credit: Xavier Ferguson. Xavier has now landed two jobs, after 96 rejections from businesses across Rhode Island.