95 Jeffrey Korzenik

Joshua B. Hoe interviews Jeffrey Korzenik about fair hiring for people with criminal records

Full Episode

My Guest: Jeffrey Korzenik

Jeff Korzenik is Chief Investment Strategist for one of the nation’s largest banks.  He is a regular guest on CNBC, Fox Business News, and Bloomberg TV, his insights into the economy, markets, manufacturing, and the workforce is frequently cited in the financial and business press. His writings on economics and public policy have been published in Forbes, the Chicago Tribune, Barron’s, and numerous other periodicals. He was elected to membership in the Council of Criminal Justice in 2020

Jeffrey is the author of “Untapped Talent: How Second Chance Hiring Works for Your Business and the Community,” to be published by HarperCollins Leadership in April 2021.

Notes From Episode 95 Jeffrey Korzenik

To learn more about Jeff, or to order his book “Untapped Talent: How Second Chance Hiring Works For Your Business And The Community,” you can visit his website JeffKorzenik.com.

The books Jeff recommended were “Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration” and “Punishment Without Crime” by Alexandra Natapoff.

Full Transcript

DN95

Joshua B. Hoe

Hello and welcome to Episode 95 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.

I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.

Today’s episode is my interview with Jeffrey Korzenik about fair hiring for people with criminal records.

Jeffrey Korzenik is Chief Investment Strategist for one of the nation’s largest banks. He’s a regular guest on CNBC, Fox Business News and Bloomberg TV. His insights into the economy, markets, manufacturing, and the workforce are frequently cited in the financial and business press. His writings on economics and public policy have been published in Forbes, the Chicago Tribune, Barron’s, and numerous other periodicals. He was elected to membership on the Council of Criminal Justice in 2020. Jeff is here to discuss his forthcoming book, Untapped Talent: How Second Chance Hiring Works for Your Business and the Community, to be published by HarperCollins Leadership in April 2021. And he is also a longtime friend.

Welcome to the Decarceration Nation podcast, Jeff.

Jeffrey Korzenik

Thank you, Josh. I couldn’t be more pleased to be here.

Josh Hoe

Well, I always ask the same first question. It’s kind of the comic book style origin question: How did you get from where you started out in life to where you were getting interested in and becoming passionate about criminal justice issues and business and Second Chance hiring?

Jeff Korzenik

I have to tell you, this is a question I get quite a bit. People are surprised that I’ve been engaged with this. It’s not just a side project – the book was sort of a passion project – but this has been part of my professional work, guiding investors and guiding businesses for the last six or seven years. And it really started out by observing problems in the labor force. Why were people dropping out of the labor force? Why did we have low levels of participation in the labor force? And that took me there. But I think the real question people ask when they are testing those grounds is, what even opened my eyes to these issues?  And I always go back to a couple of points. In my distant past, my dad was the first in the family to go to college. He . . . . heavy lifting with son and grandson. He’s the son of immigrants. And he never lost touch with his roots. And although he was very successful, and we had an upper-middle-class upbringing, he would always go visit his old neighborhood, ostensibly to do errands, but really just to visit. And one day, and maybe I was 10, or 12, I went with him and he introduced me to a shop owner. And as we walked away after the conversation with his friend, he mentioned casually that he had spent time in prison. And I asked for what, and my dad said for murder, a crime of passion. And then my dad said something that has always stuck with me – and I’m in my late 50s – but I remember it clearly today. He said “he’s done his time”. And then you fast forward a bunch of decades, my kids went to school in the Chicago Public School System at a very, very diverse high school, and driving kids home to their own neighborhoods – it was a magnet school for parts of this region for this high school – you saw kids who were just kids, but had very different socio-economic backgrounds. And you saw how easy it was to make a mistake and get off on the wrong track. And then fast forward another couple years . . . on the suggestion of my niece, I went to a restaurant called The King’s Kitchen, in Charlotte, North Carolina. And that’s where everything came together. This is a very nice restaurant, in the heart of Charlotte, that specializes in not just great food, and it really is great food, but also in employing people with backgrounds of incarceration, addiction, even homelessness, and allowing them to rebuild their lives. And that was my aha moment that this could all come together; this is a potential solution to our labor force problems.

Josh Hoe

It’s really amazing if you read the book, how many of the people that you know are people that I know and we’ve come into contact with over relatively the same period of time. You, as you mentioned, have been speaking publicly about this and working on this for a long time. And thanks to our mutual friend – I always am glad to be able to mention him on the podcast – Tom Decker, you and I have known each other for several years. And so I know how much time you’ve put into learning from people who are doing this kind of hiring well. Can you give people an idea of all the places, or a synopsis of all the places where you’ve been, investigating this [and] what both went into the work you’ve done speaking across the country, but also into the book?

Jeff Korzenik

Sure, you know, one of the aspects of my job is I speak publicly on economic outlook and investment outlook around the country. And as you know, there’s no directory of companies that offer these kind of second chances to employers; it’s word of mouth. And working for a bank, and a bank that does a lot of work in middle-market, midsize companies, often privately-owned, my colleagues tend to know who these companies are, if it’s within our geographic footprint. So every time I travel to a region – and I was doing, prior to the pandemic, 125 to 150 flights a year, every year, for most of the past decade – so I’m in a lot of places around the country, and I would try to find these employers and meet with them and understand their business. I have employers in California, I have employers in the Midwest, in the south, In the Northeast; I’ve been to Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, of course, Texas; but a lot of the action is in smaller cities, or in suburban locations of larger cities, where employers did not have access to a gigantic labor pool and started to take innovations and realize that this was a very viable path of offering supportive employment, getting great engaged employees, and also helping people rebuild their lives.

Josh Hoe

Now let’s get to the book. The very first part of the book is a letter from you to formerly incarcerated folks. Can you talk about why you started there and what you wanted people in my community – the formerly incarcerated community – to know?

Jeff Korzenik

Actually, the foreword is intended for the currently incarcerated, but it’s absolutely just as much for the formerly incarcerated, and I kind of like the symmetry of the book. The very last paragraph of the book is also a note to people who have a criminal record, whether incarcerated or not. But the note to the currently incarcerated is in response to the reaction I’ve gotten to my work from people who have been incarcerated or are currently incarcerated. A lot of this started when I published a column in Barron’s, which is a very large financial magazine; I think their circulation is something like 400,000, and it is disproportionately CEOs and C-suite executives. So that was the target I was trying to talk to about Second Chance employment. And after it got published, I started getting letters from prison. And the reactions were really incredible. There was a gentleman who was incarcerated in a federal institution in Colorado who said: “Your article hangs on the wall of our library, and it gives us all hope”. And then as I traveled and talked about this, I’d have people come out of the audience and tell me about either their child who was or had been incarcerated, or that they themselves had been incarcerated. People hugged me; people asked for their picture with me. And it took me a while to sort this out. And I went to some of my friends who were formerly incarcerated, I said, you know, what’s going on? And they helped me understand how when you go into a facility, particularly if you’re young, you think your life is over. And it was really important to me that even though the main audience of this book is business owners and business decision-makers, I’m trying to affect change here. But I thought it was really important that people who had lost hope, who felt that they were a burden, understood that they’re not, they’re really a resource, and they should know that. And I think that, if there are people plugging for you; if you know that you shouldn’t be considered a burden, but you’d really be considered a potential resource; you’ll make good use of your time. You’ll understand, I hope, the business perspective, [which will] make you much more ready for employment. You know, I have no illusions. This is a very, very tough thing, to come out of prison or even to have a felony conviction and to have a good career and be able to take care of yourself and your family. But it is possible, and I wanted people to have that message of hope.

Josh Hoe

I think maybe when I read it, I probably misallocated that simply because it’s so rare for new books to get into prison. And so, do you have thoughts on how to get the book to people who are inside when it comes out?

Jeff Korzenik

Yes, it’s actually a project we’re working on. I’m not quite ready to announce it yet, but I’m working with a nonprofit that has specialized for years in sending books to prison, and as you know, there’s no easy way to do this. But they have as good a mailing list as any, and they’re starting to do outreach. Again, I’m not quite ready to release all the details, but I have a philanthropist in the Philadelphia area who is very generously financing sending 500 books out. As you know, one of the problems is that hardcover books may be rejected. Although a hardcover is generally considered more prestigious, I guess, and that’s what I was contracted for, I went back to my publisher HarperCollins Leadership and said it’s really important to me that there be no obstacles to getting this book into prison. That’s not going to be the bulk of the readership. I’m not expecting that. But it’s important that people who are incarcerated have the ability to access this. And so we converted it to a softcover book.

Josh Hoe

That’s amazing and great to hear. One of the first things you say in the book is that “the path to a more equitable society must be paved by the business community”. That made me kind of go . . . that’s an incredibly well-written phrase. Can you explain why you think that’s the case?

Jeff Korzenik

Well ultimately, rehabilitation is very dependent on employment. The term I use is that employment is foundational to rebuilding your life and to lowering recidivism. Right now, the numbers are astonishing. The statistic I really hone in on is the number of people with felony convictions; 19 million people in the United States have felony convictions. And how can we have that many millions – and millions more of course, with misdemeanors – how can we have that many people who have unnecessary and severe obstacles to rebuilding their lives and be a just and equitable society? And this obviously spills over into racial justice as well. Again, the book is not about these things. But it’s clear to me that when you have, as we do, in our society, one in three black men with a felony conviction, for all the commitments we’re hearing today for diversity, [they] have got to be coupled with a strategy for allowing opportunities for people who are burdened with a criminal record.

Josh Hoe

And in a lot of ways, this book is, it seems to me, directed at people who own businesses and companies; you build a strong case for why people who own businesses should care about hiring justice-impacted folks. And you start with this notion that America is facing a looming labor shortage. Could you talk about that a bit?

Jeff Korzenik

Yes, and you’re right. I mean, especially at the time this book was written, the only audience I expected was business owners; I really didn’t think it would have such general interest. And of course, all of that changed during the pandemic. Just to kind of put everything in a time frame: The manuscript had originally been due in April, we had pushed to April of 2020. As soon as the pandemic began, and unemployment was soaring, I said, let’s push everything back a little bit. And we had limitations of how far back we could push that, but the manuscript was due in June. So if you think about that, you know, most of the book was written before social justice issues came to the forefront in America. So that’s kind of an important factor for me, but I realized also that there’s a lot of issues that everyone should understand about this book. One of the things that I’ve seen is a tremendous disconnect between nonprofits in this space and businesses that could solve a lot of these problems. So all of that really came together once the manuscript was written. But you’re right, it was written essentially for a business audience. But that doesn’t mean its topic and the information is limited. I like to think of this as something that obviously business owners should read for this labor shortage, which we’ll talk about, but also has interest for others as well. With regard to the labor shortage, a truism in economics is that there are very few things that economists agree on. Famously, economists are, “on the one hand, on the other hand” people. But the recognition is –  it’s formulaic, it’s like saying two plus two equals four – for long-term growth potential of any economy [there are] two things: how fast can you grow your workforce? And how fast can you grow their productivity? With regard to workforce growth, it is, at least in part, a matter of simple demographics: birth rates, fertility rates, female labor force participation rates, things like that. And my observation is that, again, no one disputes this, that if you think about those two pillars of long-term economic growth, workforce growth and productivity growth, we’re in trouble. And we’re particularly in trouble in terms of workforce growth, because we’ve had declining birth rates in the United States. Birth rates tell you sort of where you are here and now; fertility rates is the measure that’s probably more important: how many children would a woman be expected to have over her lifetime? And to just replace your population, you have to have a fertility rate of about 2.1. So mother, father, that’s two. And then there’s an allowance for infant and early mortality. So we are, in the United States, below 1.8. And we’re actually one of the better, more fertile countries. So if it were not for immigration, we wouldn’t even be replacing our population. So if you think about what that means for the future, that is damning you in many ways to very slow growth, and very slow growth has all sorts of problems associated with it; very slow growth can turn into negative growth too easily; very slow growth does not seem to support the kind of institutions we want, and the kind of government we want. So a lot of the protests we’ve seen in Europe and in the United States are also a reaction to sluggish growth. So we have so much at stake. And the solution is to make the most of your population; in other words, help people who’ve been marginalized, who want to work get back into the workforce, and invest in your workforce and make them more productive. So that’s the path to faster growth. And that’s why businesses have to care about this. We’re heading for a workforce shortage, it’s going to be a workforce shortage, not only like in 2018-2019, when this was the top concern of many business executives, but one that extends for decades.

Josh Hoe

And as you just said, or suggested, that the answer is people who are missing from the workforce, since you’re not replacing them with new human beings . . .  if I understand your argument correctly, there are three major factors you say that are playing into what we have as a missing workforce right now? And those are . . .

Jeff Korzenik

Correct: long-term unemployment, the opioid epidemic, and the incarceration recidivism cycle, and all of them, of course, are interconnected.

Josh Hoe

And you conclude that the last one, incarceration, represents the biggest opportunity for re-entering workers. Is that correct?

Jeff Korzenik

Yes, for two reasons. One, because of just the size of the potential population you can add to your workforce, right, 19 million people with felony convictions. They’re not all unemployed. But I would say that most of them are underemployed, they have not had the labor mobility, they’ve not had their ability to be a resource taken up seriously. So it’s a size issue. And then the real key is, we’ve seen, I’ve observed, and I share in my book and in my talks, that there’s a model of success. And so the combination of size and models of success that truly work is pretty powerful.

Josh Hoe

I think you argued that the ultimate loss could be as high as 1 trillion in forsaken growth; am I still with

you?

Jeff Korzenik

So that’s simply a calculation of, how many people could we bring into the workforce and grow our workforce? And I use very conservative numbers. And what does that mean in terms of economic growth? And so, you know, this was a calculation I was doing before the pandemic and saying, look, we’re running out of labor, you know, pre-2020. This is how many years bringing this many in would add to our expansion. So there are all sorts of ways of thinking about this, but it’s big money. It’s not some obscure amount. It is not just a tiny sector; all of our prosperity benefits when we can have a more inclusive economy.

Josh Hoe

And so now I think we understand why both people who are invested in the economy and why companies and business owners should care. But I suspect – well, I know – because I’ve read the rest of the book, that those businesses can’t just go out and start hiring folks. What should be the expectations of a business owner in considering Second Chance or justice-impacted hiring?

Jeff Korzenik

Yeah, it’s really important to understand that employment is not enough; it’s got to be coupled with a process for identifying who is ready for employment. And that’s not meant to be disparaging for people who are, say, coming out of incarceration. A lot of people with that background, they’ve had no mentorship, may have trauma or emotional management issues to deal with. So you have to get to a certain point of stability before you are truly employable. And a business owner may not be able to discern who is ready. And then the second process that you need for success is again, recognizing the background that many people who are burdened with a criminal record have, and that they need additional support, or mentorship or some accommodations. A lot of these accommodations are not to adjust for someone because they have a criminal record. But it’s because people who have criminal records often come from extreme poverty. So issues – and to be sure collateral consequences complicate this – but issues like housing security, transportation, all of these issues can sometimes require some extra support. As one of the business owners I quote in the book, Ray Dalton says – and I paraphrase – people who have criminal records are more work upfront, or more investment, but they’re worth it. And that’s been the experience.

Josh Hoe

I think at one point in the book, you say, to put it bluntly, there’s a right and a wrong way to hire people with criminal records. You just explained I think, in short form, some of the right ways; what are some of the wrong ways that people go about it?

Jeff Korzenik

Well, you know that there is a model out there, and I don’t want to be too condemning of it. But we all know what’s out there: people who are focused on an employee who is a cheap employee, someone who has a very low effective wage rate. So maybe you’re using the Work Opportunity Tax Credit to lower their effective wage. And that’s a model of you get what you pay for; I refer to it as the disposable employee model in the book, where all you’re looking for is a cheap employee, who’s going to stick around for however long they want to stick around. And, you know, I don’t condemn it. Because at least it’s an opportunity, and some people will be able to build off of that, and it’s better than refusing an opportunity. But more commonly – and this is something that has come up time and time again, when I speak around the country – I’ll have business owners come up to me and say, you know, I tried it, and it didn’t work. And a very common phrase that I’ve heard is, they were either my best employees or my worst employees. And I think what has happened is that this becomes what I call the undifferentiated model; you have the best intentions of being open to hiring, but you don’t understand what it takes. And so you’ll hire people who perhaps are largely ready emotionally for employment and have the commitment. And the ones that are able to navigate all the other issues do really well and are kind of those best employees. But you’ll also have some who might not be ready with emotional management, have not had any experience with how do you deal with tension with coworkers, criticism from coworkers, or don’t know how to navigate when a car breaks down, and they don’t have money for repair, so they just don’t show and those become your worst workers. And that undifferentiated model – again, those employers have good intentions – they just don’t know what they need to know to support this type of employment. And the problem with that is – I think I say in the book – that it would seem that the average of best employee and worst employee is average and that should be okay. But the practical reality – and any of your listeners who have managed people know – one bad employee, one unreliable employee, or one problematic employee, undoes the good of multiple good employees. So these employers over time tend to drift away from considering Second Chance employment. The chapter or the section of the book that is sort of a sidebar that talks about this was really important to me, because one of the things that I think reformers don’t always recognize is that many, many employers have tried hiring people with records, they just haven’t had a good experience. So how do you tell business decision-makers who tried it and had a bad experience that it’s not the people, it’s the model, and that there is a viable model. And that’s what I tried to do with that section of the book.

Josh Hoe

I think one of those sites of resistance might also be this notion of accommodation. And you did talk about it quite a bit in the book, for instance, that there’s lots of other ways that people provide accommodations, that are having to provide accommodations now, outside of trying to hire formerly incarcerated, justice-impacted people. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more?

Jeff Korzenik

When you tell them – our audience of employers – that to do this right, you have to make accommodations, I can see them – at least mentally – reaching for their wallets. It sounds very expensive. But I try to put it into context. First of all, not all of these accommodations cost anything; it might be a room to meet a parole or probation officer in private; [it] might mean calling that local head of parole and probation and saying don’t meet with people during business [hours], during the shift hours, can we work around that . . . that those kind of accommodations really don’t cost you anything – but some do. And, again, it’s important to put that into context. Think of how many companies have relocated to places where young, highly-educated, workers want to live, right. So in Chicago for instance, you saw McDonald’s move its headquarters from a suburban location to the west loop, which is an attractive place for young people to move. That’s an enormous cost to do something like that. At a smaller company level, it’s putting in the foosball table or the ping pong table. But more realistically, we see parental leave benefits; that’s a real cost to companies, but you do it to attract talent, or in some cases, where it’s been mandated by law. You know, back in the day offering medical insurance was not nearly as widespread as it is now. And then, of course, mandated, at least for certain size companies; all of these things were investments that you make to attract and retain talent. The combinations I’m talking about are just another part and parcel of that very important investment to make.

Josh Hoe

I think you only mentioned it a few times in the book, but we’ve talked about it. Maybe [it] goes a little bit beyond just the conversation that the book covers, but I think you’ve referred to it as “safety net capitalism”. Can you talk about that concept a little bit?

Jeff Korzenik

You know, it’s very funny. So I’m of an age where it was kind of understood, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, that socialism doesn’t work, communism doesn’t work. And here we are today with young people who, at least according to surveys, say they like socialism or prefer socialism. You know, the offset there is, when a further survey asked what [socialism] is, they don’t necessarily know. So it’s kind of this amorphous concept. But I think what most people really want is this concept of safety net capitalism, where you have the growth and economic mobility, opportunities and wealth generation that capitalism can provide and has historically provided across most of the world, but at the same time, you realize that what economists called “creative destruction”, [some] elements of capitalism can leave some individual harm in the wake. So the safety net capitalism is this concept of a society where it’s fundamentally free enterprise with of course, some rails on the outside with regulation, but that there’s also a safety net. So if you’re one of those people left behind, that is not as harmful, you have some protections. And I think that the employers in an environment where you have a permanent shortage of workers – a talent shortage – I think a lot of these employers will come up and essentially are moving towards it. So when I look at the Second Chance employers who really do a great job, I don’t think – wow, what a neat niche. I think this is a great model for our economy in a much broader sense.

Josh Hoe

And I think you mentioned – I don’t know how much of this is nostalgia or how much is real – but I know after World War II, the assumption was that anyone, if they worked hard, could get a house or a car or whatever, and take care of their kids and at least be okay. How does this notion of safety net capitalism, juxtaposed against what I think they call the gig economy, play? How do you see it playing out?

Jeff Korzenik

It will work; it’s important to understand that the late 1940s/1950s period was a period where you saw that it all came together, but really only in the United States in many ways. After World War II, you had the decimation of the industrial economies of Europe and of Japan; Asia didn’t have an industrial economy to that degree; South America didn’t have an economy to that degree. So, in a sense, the American economy had not exactly a monopoly, but a pretty good stranglehold. And that allowed for a lot of luxurious benefits that simply aren’t available to that degree in a more competitive economy. That being said, I think the shift that has been going on towards, if you look at it, as sort of capital and labor, the shift that has advantaged capital is starting to shift back towards labor. So I think that, while it’s not back to 1950s America in economic terms, I think it’ll move in that direction. And even in a gig economy, I think that’s viable. And remember, a gig economy has all sorts of other kinds of benefits, you know, where you can work flexible hours; often these things are, one spouse has a more traditional job with benefits, and one is more gig economy. You know, there’s a lot of models that can work for workers and for the economy as well.

Josh Hoe

So, at least theoretically, we’ve got employers who should think about this as just another form of accommodation. Another thing you think employers need to do is find partners in this venture to succeed. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Jeff Korzenik

Sometimes, you see the Second Chance employers get a lot of experience and be able to do more of this on their own, or start nonprofits on their own. But for people starting out, you need someone who is going to help be your talent pipeline. And it’s interesting, employers understand this intuitively. But they don’t always understand how to think outside the box. So lots of employers make visits to colleges or business schools to recruit; they’re creating a talent pipeline. Lots of employers will offer bonuses for referring an employee that you know, a prospective employee that you know, if they get hired, so there is this recognition that you need pipelines of talent. In the world of Second Chance hiring, it’s no different; you need some vetting process to go on. That is often best done by people who can build a real relationship with the candidate. And this might be a re-entry nonprofit, it might be a workforce development nonprofit, it can be staffing agencies, especially some of these specialized Second Chance staffing agencies. And it can even be government authorities, like the corrections authorities or halfway houses, everything works in concept; it really boils down very often to finding the right partner that works for you. And once you do that, it can be very, very effective.

Josh Hoe

And what about resistance from inside the workforce? How have people best overcome when already existing employees push back against the notion of hiring justice-impacted folks?

Jeff Korzenik

One of the reasons I think that we’ve seen the companies that do this tend to be privately-owned and co-owned companies, is because in certain ways, those are really benevolent dictatorships. And so when the CEO is the owner, the CEO gets an awful lot of say, and it’s not it to be an effective leader. Of course, you have to do consensus-building and all that. But there is a reason that the best examples of this tend to be smaller companies with the CEO as owner or some public companies where you have effectively a benevolent dictatorship, [a] very, very strong CEO. And they will face a wall of resistance. I had a very interesting situation in a city in Ohio, where the owner was on one of my panels. And he came to me and he told me how he met so much resistance from his Chief Human Resources Officer and his Legal Counsel that he ended up firing them both, and asked me to come in and talk to the new team. You know, that’s an extreme. Usually what happens is that a well-meaning CEO who’s interested in this gets ground down, beaten down; actually a major motivation for me in writing the book was to give people more ammunition to see how it can work and how it can work effectively, and let employers that want to go down this path, know that they are not alone, and that others have done it successfully. The objections tend to revolve around – first thing is sort of physical safety. And, you know, you get to control this. So you know, you can say in truth, state flat out that you’re not going to compromise, that this is not about compromising physical safety of employees. There is often – and there is some legitimacy to this – fear of liability concerns. There are concerns over the quality of work and concerns over reputation. And one of the things I tried to layout in the book is that every one of these concerns is something that you can and should address, but you have to be prepared for it.

Josh Hoe

One version of this is what I’ve in the past called, in other contexts, the Hannibal Lecter problem. And I think you’ve responded to it in an interesting way. In the book, in terms of the safety question, you said, the plural of anecdote is not data. Could you expound on that a little bit? I like that a lot.

Jeff Korzenik

So we’re a nation of 330 million people, and on any given day, a certain percentage of those 330 million are going to behave very, very badly. And so we’re always going to have these stories of worst-case things like your Hannibal Lecter example. And I spend a lot of time in the book, really a chapter, talking about who really has been touched by the criminal justice system, and what are their characteristics? And I think those of us who care about criminal justice reform do no favors in trying to present everyone as non-violent, [in] possession of a joint of marijuana or something. No, the reality is that the plurality of people who are incarcerated have a conviction for a violent crime. And then the next biggest chunk is property crimes. Let’s not get around that reality. But if you do it right, I think you can position this and help people understand that people, particularly young people, make stupid mistakes. And that it doesn’t make them irredeemable. And I feel very strongly about this. People who have been convicted of a violent crime are not necessarily violent people. It’s a moment in time; it’s wrong place, wrong time. It’s, you know, hormones of youth. It’s a trauma in life. And it doesn’t relieve the responsibility of an employer from being sure he is getting people who are ready for employment. But it should open them up to how people who have criminal records and even records for violent crimes may be completely viable, great employees, great colleagues and great friends.

Josh Hoe

I think this leads right into the next question. You spend quite a bit of time talking about employer concerns with liability suits. Do you want to address that?

Jeff Korzenik

This is something that I feel the criminal justice community has not sufficiently focused on. There is a real fear among employers that they will have negligent hiring liability, they can be sued, they have extra liability and can be sued if something happens involving an employee who has a criminal record that puts them at greater risk than if that employee had not had a criminal record. And the traditional pushback I’ve received from people in justice reform is this hardly ever happens. It’s very rare to have negligent hiring liability lawsuits, successful ones, on this basis. And my reply is always the same. I have fire insurance on my house; if I have an asset of great value I need to protect, even if it’s a rare event, if it’s a catastrophic event, I want to protect against it. And when you understand that many of the businesses that are willing to do this are family-owned businesses – sometimes multi-generational – if someone puts that at risk, you know, it’s not like a gigantic mega-corporation where you flip it over to the legal department and a PR department to handle; this is something that is going to involve the business owner; his family puts their livelihood at risk, their legacy at risk. So it’s very important that justice reforms take this into account and recognize that it’s not about the numbers, it’s about the risk. It’s about the risk. And just as it’s very rare for a house to catch on fire and burn down, if it happens to you, it’s generally catastrophic. You want to protect against it. That’s how employers view negligent hiring liability.

Josh Hoe

How can they better protect against that question?

Jeff Korzenik

Well, obviously having a thorough process for doing this and showing that you have vetted employees and that you have proof that you have done this, so you can accept and have someone who has a criminal record on your payroll. But you probably do have to be aware of special risks. You don’t want someone who has a long and recent history of DWI driving a school bus, right. I mean, those are common sense. And there’s also usually regulatory barriers for that. But in the more general sense, you have to show that you have a process for examining this, [and] that it’s a robust process. And that doesn’t mean saying no to everyone, it just means that you’ve examined the risks and made a good decision. And this is where I think policy can help quite a bit as well. There are policy solutions to this beyond things that the employer can do on their own.

Josh Hoe

I know it’s not a focus of the book, but you do dedicate a chapter to policy. And so what could legislatures do to be helpful?

Jeff Korzenik

I think broader use of expungement. If you’re expunging a record, then you cannot hold an employer responsible for something that was committed in the past because it’s invisible to them in the legal sense. So expungement is important. [And] expansion of proof of rehabilitation. So these various certificates of rehabilitation, many states have them, it’s not always an easy thing for someone who’s been justice-involved to get; often it’s costly, or sometimes barriers are too great to those ideas. Texas has done these things that essentially alleviate employers of negligent hiring liability in certain instances for hiring someone with a criminal record. You know, I think that’s really productive legislation, and helps employers say, Oh, this isn’t an issue. I can work through this.

Josh Hoe

And I know we said earlier that the plural of anecdote is not data. But I think it would be helpful – since you’ve done so much going around the country and talking and seeing companies that are doing good jobs – can you give us a couple of the stories that stand out to you, of companies who’ve made the shift to hiring folks with criminal records, who might immediately give business owners some kind of social proof and hope that making this move could not only be possible but really beneficial for them.

Jeff Korzenik

I have to say I was very fortunate in that my very first contact was with The King’s Kitchen. My second contact was with Nehemiah Manufacturing in Cincinnati, Ohio. And Dan Meyer and his team – Dan’s the CEO and co-founder of the company – created this consumer goods/consumer products manufacturing company, with a social purpose to give back to the community and be based in an area of the city that needed employment, but they weren’t specifically looking at people with criminal records until the nonprofit – I believe it was a nonprofit, maybe it was a church that came to them – asked them to start considering people with felony convictions. And interestingly, it didn’t work. And they found they were not reliable employees. And you had that undistinguished model where you know, some were good, some didn’t work. And that’s not a viable talent pipeline. But they really started changing their process, partnering with nonprofits, laying out expectations for what the nonprofits should be sending them. They often also use staffing agencies to test people out, which gives them a little bit more flexibility in managing through this process. But the big thing that they do is their accommodations, and it starts with having …. Dan Meyer, when we first met, told me: I don’t have HR professionals, I have social workers. And I laughed, and I thought, okay, that’s what you’re calling your HR team. But no, he has actual social workers that help people with records, navigate through all the various issues. And it starts often with outstanding debts. And there are others that do this as well. So that you don’t have past financial burdens disrupting your ability to rebuild your life, and they’ll even go and get legal help for them and renegotiate settlements and all sorts of things. They’ll work on transportation issues; they sited their facility near intersections of bus routes, so that’s less of an issue. They have a subsidiary that helps build affordable housing, they have a gym, and also subsidized gym memberships. And it’s really an incredible story, both for the kind of accommodations, but also very much so for their bottom line. Dan’s a Wharton guy, so he’s a numbers guy. And he early on shared with me that the lower turnover rate and higher productivity from having engaged loyal employees, added about 5% a year to his cash flow, which is a huge number in a mature industry like that. And, you know, he tends to reinvest it back. But this concept of having specialized support that understands the needs of individuals who come from backgrounds, yes, justice-involved backgrounds, but just as meaningfully, backgrounds that involve some real challenges, and often the challenges of poverty. And, you know, there’s all sorts of variations on this, that I’ve seen, but having a life coach seems to be a big plus; what has been fun for me to see is that it really tends to change the whole company, you know, these companies that do this become purpose-driven companies, as well. But you know you’ll see folks . . . another company in Ohio makes everyone open a bank account, and actually has to sign that they will be notified if the bank accounts are overdrawn. And there can be actions, including termination, for multiple overdrafts of accounts, because one of the keys to rebuilding your life and having a sustainable career is being prudent with your money. And so, you know, these are things that are – I don’t think they’re patronizing – it’s just a recognition that people don’t have – in many cases – the backgrounds that have set them up for success. And so employers who understand success very well are well-positioned to provide those structures.

Josh Hoe

You talk a little bit toward the end of the book about what people on my end of the business call “in-reach”. I’ve said for many years that I think departments of corrections should at least prefer contracting only with companies who train incarcerated people and hire formerly incarcerated people in the sense that they have an investment in their profit. What’s your take on a company starting training before people leave incarceration?

Jeff Korzenik

There are some great examples of this. First, on the coaching side, there’s a nonprofit in Minnesota called the Redemption Project that gets employers involved, and they start doing coaching and participating in the programming, roughly six months before release. So it’s a chance for employers to build a relationship of trust with future employees, and to acclimate those future potential employees to company culture expectations. And I really think that building a relationship of trust is critical to allowing you to navigate some of the post-release issues that come up. But I also focus on a company –  I actually wrote a whole chapter – this is my case study – about a company called JVM Packaging. And they’re in Ohio. Ohio and Michigan are kind of hotbeds of activity. These kinds of companies are present elsewhere, but you’ve got some critical mass that’s developed and business owners who are Second Chance employers teaching other business owners, and so you get real pockets of excellence, but JVM packaging was inspired in part by the Nehemiah experience. The CEO was referred by his church to visit Nehemiah and they started ultimately sending not only their executive team over to observe Nehemiah, but they were sending over formerly-incarcerated employees to get coaching from well-established formerly-incarcerated employees at Nehemiah. So JVM Packaging [is] a second-generation family business that had real challenges with labor. And ultimately, and I go into great detail, of course, in the book about this, and it’s a real tribute to the leadership there, they stuck with it because it didn’t always work at first. But they started working with some local prisons to be their talent pipeline. And one of those prisons was doing the sort of questionable stuff you see in prisons, doing printing for the state at very low wages. But it also allowed them to see oh, here’s a facility that has ventilation, electricity, and is set up for modern manufacturing. And so they ended up donating a printing press to the facility, not to do prison labor, but to do training. And they worked with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, to have a former employee and incarcerated former employee of theirs transferred to this facility so he could be a trainer; and they actually pay a stipend to their students; anything manufactured as a part of the training process is simply recycled, it’s not sold; they’re really trying to be very careful and make sure that they are doing this to the highest ethical standards. And it’s created a pipeline of people who are trained on their machinery, and it has solved their labor problem. Now more than 20% of their workforce is second job, they call it Fair Chance, but Second Chance. And they’ve really helped people in a huge way while also helping their business. I think that’s a great model. I’m seeing more of this; I have some lines of communication to some commissioners of corrections around the country. And I think there’s a much broader understanding of how programs like this, or work release, can be incredibly beneficial and lower recidivism and more importantly, or in tandem, help people rebuild their lives.

Josh Hoe

You also briefly talk about the role that government can play in hiring. I know I was excited to hear Speaker Schumer talk the other day about something I’ve actually suggested for a long time, which is that maybe there should be some kind of government cadre that does infrastructure and environmental remediation projects and hires formerly incarcerated people. Do you have any ideas about what role government could play in hiring folks?

Jeff Korzenik

I think the government has a big role to play in this that has not been fully exploited. In Cook County, for instance, which is the county that includes Chicago, there’s a procurement ordinance that gives a pricing advantage to companies that have a certain percentage of their workforce comprised of people with criminal records, or addicts or veterans. You know, that’s one way to incent the private sector. But we should also remember that the public sector is a significant employer and should be taking part in this. Again, in Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority has a Second Chance program; they put about 1000 people through it, it’s a one-year internship, and several hundred – I think it’s about three or four hundred – have actually been hired out of this program. I think every city and state of size in the country should be considering programs like this and leading the way.

Josh Hoe

Probably one of the biggest challenges we face and we talked about a little bit before is confronting what has been called the Willie Horton politics of this whole thing. Do you have any ideas for what we can do to change the larger narrative or [is it] just the hiring itself that’s going to be what ultimately breaks things down?

Jeff Korzenik

I think that ultimately, it is going to take the hiring of, and more interaction with – successful, pleasant, positive interaction – with people with records. And we see this in employers that introduced Second Chance hiring; there was often a lot of resistance. But then as they get to know the people as people, suddenly it changes the view. There is a real danger, in that I think that we have to be very careful in policies to understand that public safety can’t be compromised here, or you’re going to have that Willie Horton moment. And it’s difficult, and it’s often kind of cold-hearted. You know, if you see that bail reform often does – there’s some evidence that eliminating cash bail can increase some crime in the short term, but in the long term, it actually decreases it – because you haven’t interrupted people’s employment; you’ve broken the cycle. So really leading a lot in terms of public-facing reform, stressing that this is also public safety. You know, I’ve seen – I think it was Brian Hooks –  that Stand Together had a video where he said, criminal justice reform has often been oversimplified to hear “tough on crime” or “soft on crime”. And that’s the wrong way of looking at it; what you really want to be is in favor of public safety and in favor of people being able to achieve their potential. And those are not things that you have to compromise; they really go hand-in-hand.

Josh Hoe

This year, I’m asking people if there are any criminal justice-related books they might recommend to others; obviously, we’re talking about your book, so that’s one of them. But do you have any other favorites?

Jeff Korzenik

You know, on my reading list – I’ve been, as you can imagine, pretty focused – I did add Halfway Home; I think it is interesting and talks about collateral consequences quite a bit

Josh Hoe

That’s Reuben Jonathan Miller’s book?

Jeff Korzenik

Yes, it just came out this month I believe.

Josh Hoe

I believe he might – I can’t promise this 100%  – well actually I can. He’s gonna be on pretty soon to talk about it.

Jeff Korzenik

Oh, I think that’s great. I’m gonna confess, Josh, that the Decarceration Nation podcast has been a resource for me, helping me find some people I should know about. And it’s been, it’s a central resource for anyone who cares about this issue. So I’ve got a book [called] Punishment Without Crime [by Alexandra Natapoff] about the misdemeanor system, the horror show that’s our misdemeanor system. John Pfaff’s book [Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform; James Forman Jr.’s book, [Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America]; those are all books that I think are important reading, in terms of how did we get to this system? I will steal something, you know, I don’t want to give away the whole book. But in terms of understanding the criminal justice system, you really have to break people away from thinking, gee – a lot of people were taught if you have a criminal record, you know, bad people go to jail, bad people go to prison, a criminal is a bad person. And you have to break that. And I’m a great believer in this aphorism called Hanlon’s Razor, which says, “never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”. We don’t have an intentionally evil criminal justice system. We just have a really stupid one. In “Punishment Without Crime” I think that becomes very, very apparent. And it’s time to have a smart system that yes, protects public safety, but also gives us the ability to have people live beyond their worst moments to recover from their mistakes and be contributing members of society.

Josh Hoe

I always ask the same last question: What did I mess up? What questions should I have asked but did not?

Jeff Korzenik

Josh, I don’t think you missed anything. I’ve been living and breathing this book, and I think you got the key points. Honestly, I’m hoping that this will interest your listeners. And my real hope, though, is that this will be a book that helps make real change, helps employers solve their labor problems and find talent, and helps people live lives of contribution and meaning and you know, if you do that, we’re going to have a more just society, safer communities, stronger families; there’s so much to win and so little to lose by giving this a whirl.

Josh Hoe

So when can people get Untapped Talent and where can people find it and find you?

Jeff Korzenik

The easiest starting point is jeffkorzenik.com; I’m the only Jeff Korzenik on the planet. People on LinkedIn are free to send me an invitation or follow me on LinkedIn, as well as on Twitter. Information on the book is on jeffkorzenik.com; it is available for sale today but will be released on April 13th. I will also say that if people believe in this mission and intend to buy the book, I would ask that they consider buying it and purchasing it pre-release. There are links on the website; or just go to Amazon; or order through indie books, if you’d want to support independent bookstores; Barnes and Noble; any of the usual suspects. When you buy a book before it’s released it’s a signal to publishers and to reviewers that this is a book that’s going to interest people and that helps spread the word and that’s what this is really about. This is a man on a mission; the book is the vehicle and I appreciate anyone having an interest in it.

Josh Hoe

Well, I for one have been watching you work so hard on this over the years, not just the book, but going around and trying to lift up the idea of hiring folks who have come into contact with the criminal justice system. And as a formerly incarcerated person, I just want to thank you for all that hard work. And just thank you again, for being on the podcast. It’s been a real pleasure.

Jeff Korzenik

It’s been a pleasure. I have to tell you, meeting you and other people who have been incarcerated, and all the people I’ve come into contact with has enriched my life and enriched my friendships in ways I would never have dreamed possible. So I’m the grateful one out there for sure.

Josh Hoe

Well, we’ll have to agree to both be grateful. And thank you. Thanks again, and hope to talk again soon.

Jeff Korzenik

Thanks so much, Josh.

Josh Hoe

And now, my take.

Jeffrey said the path to a more equitable society must be paved by the business community. And this makes some sense to me. In my work in Michigan, for instance, I’ve seen the business community move the needle farther than most anyone else could with the legislature, and many of us make up our minds about how we see the world, either at home with our families, or through work. But this is not just on businesses. What we also need is lots of normal everyday people who understand that mass incarceration, buttressed by fear tactics and sensationalized coverage, does not serve our communities. We need these people telling newspapers that they oppose tabloid stories. We need them telling prosecutors that convictions are not the best standard for community well-being. We need them to tell politicians that our criminal punishment system, as currently constructed, does not serve anyone’s interests. Like with every single area, power starts with organizing, and every single one of us has to be invested every day, in every way, in changing the narrative and bringing people together.

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Thanks so much for listening; see you next time!

Decarceration Nation is a podcast about radically re-imagining America’s criminal justice system. If you enjoy the podcast we hope you will subscribe and leave a rating or review on iTunes. We will try to answer all honest questions or comments that are left on this site. We hope fans will help support Decarceration Nation by supporting us from Patreon.