Formerly Incarcerated Job Seekers Need More Than Training

600,000 people are released from prison every year. The field of "prisoner reentry" has focused on helping people who were formerly incarcerated build employment readiness in order to prevent recidivism.

Tech companies have begun to recognize a social responsibility to train people who have been impacted by the criminal legal system through a racial equity lens. The Grow with Google Career Readiness for Reentry program was launched in 2021. Fortune Society and The Last Mile are two nonprofits that receive funding from the program. The Next Chapter Projec t provides training, apprenticeships, and coaching in tech and engineering, recently helping place three formerly incarcerated people at slack, and has plans to expand to 14 more companies. A number of companies, such as the restaurants Mod Pizza and All Square, have made hiring people after prison a priority.

Employers have benefits. People with criminal records are often seen as hard workers. Two out of three employers have hired someone with a criminal record, and a strong majority agree that employees with records perform as well as those without records, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resources Management.

Black men are more likely to be denied employment due to criminal records. Employers don't hire people with legal system background if they say they're willing to. What is going on with this? What can technology companies do to make a difference?

A large body of research has documented how race and criminal stigma negatively impact hiring situations, especially when employers report concerns with workplace safety or negligent hiring liability, and even when these concerns aren't based in legal reality Less attention is given to how employers screen and hire people in the digital age, and how this may make it harder to get a job, even for the most qualified applicants.

The average federal sentence is around 12 years. This means that recently released people may have never seen an iPad, but are competing against a workforce that uses online resources in their employment search, and in an environment where companies increasingly use digital and virtual screening processes. Many people coming out of prison don't have a digital reputation because of their criminal conviction. People coming out of prison don't have the skills needed to land a job. Programs like the one at Google help with digital skills but they don't always address the component of digital reputation by allowing people to request their old mugshots be removed from search engine results