On Rikers Island (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
Judith is a newly-minted head chef. She had previously been a line cook, and was nervous about interviewing for a job running her own kitchen, but decided to take the plunge after some convincing. When it came time to speak to the hiring manager, Judith, in her own self-assessment, “killed it.”
Before Judith was head chef, before she was a line cook, before she knew kitchen skills, she was incarcerated. But it was her time in “Rosie,” the Rose M. Singer women’s jail on Rikers Island, that placed her on her trajectory to becoming a chef.
In April 2017, four months before her release from Rikers, Judith began participating in the workforce development programming offered onsite by the Osborne Association, a New York-based nonprofit that provides social services for the currently and formerly incarcerated. Osborne offers a number of professional education workshops and certification programs on Rikers, and Judith began training intensely with the group.
“I took advantage of...everything I could get my hands on,” she told Gotham Gazette, and ended up leaving Rikers with certificates in food handling, culinary arts, building maintenance, and job safety.
Upon her release, Osborne’s housing staff helped her secure a home, and its employment team reviewed her resume, coached her on interview skills, organized her paperwork, and placed her in an apprenticeship in a kitchen. When the apprenticeship ended, Osborne helped Judith find permanent employment and supported her emotionally as she progressed professionally.
“They kept encouraging me that it’d be okay, that I need to keep pushing forward. It wouldn’t have happened without them,” she said.
The Osborne Association is one of several organizations in New York City providing services to those incarcerated in city jails, both during their confinement and after their release. Most have been operating for decades — Osborne was founded in 1933, and its peer group, the Fortune Society, has operated since 1967 — and receive city funding. But it’s only been within the past year that the city government has mobilized the Osborne Association, the Fortune Society, and six other incarceration-services organizations — Samaritan Daytop Village, Fedcap, Housing Works, Friends of Island Academy, the Women’s Prison Association, and the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College — to provide short-term transitional employment to every individual leaving a city jail after serving a sentence.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that lofty goal, which he promised to actualize through the new “Jails to Jobs Initiative,” in March 2017. Jails to Jobs is now a component of the mayor’s ten-year plan to shutter the city jails on Rikers Island by reducing the jail population, combating recidivism, and opening or expanding modern borough-based facilities. The mayor’s announcement was scant on details on the program, simply promising that “everyone leaving city jails after serving a sentence will be offered paid, short-term transitional employment to help with securing a long-term job.”
Employment after incarceration has been shown to reduce recidivism by 22%, and de Blasio says that the city needs to reduce its jail population to 5,000 — almost a 50% drop from figures at the time of his announcement — in order to make feasible the closure of Rikers. In 2017, the average total population of those incarcerated on Rikers or the city’s other jail facilities stood at 9,148. On Monday, July 2, the total city jail population was 8,208, including 6,138 on Rikers, down from 9,206 one year prior.
Roughly 8,500 people leave city jails each year after serving a sentence (many more are incarcerated after an arrest but do not necessarily serve a sentence in a city or any jail or prison). It is not clear what capacity the city needs to ensure through provider agencies to make sure that each of those individuals has access to a “paid, short-term” job. The program is in its infancy. There is no set duration for “short-term,” a mayor’s office spokesperson said, indicating that it depends on the needs of the client and the service-provider.
Employment is, by most empirical measures, both crucial to successful post-incarceration reentry and disproportionately difficult to attain for the formerly incarcerated. In 2017, 80% of those who served a sentence in a New York City jail had been unemployed at the time of their arraignment, and the National Institute of Justice estimates that between 60 and 75 percent of formerly-incarcerated individuals are jobless up to a year after their release.
This joblessness does not seem to be for lack of effort. A survey conducted by the Urban Institute reported that 79% of formerly-incarcerated individuals sought employment once out of jail, but data show that justice-involved individuals consistently face legal, perceptive, and racialized barriers to employment. More than 80% of employers in the United States perform criminal background checks on potential employees, and a government-published study conducted in New York City found that a criminal record reduces the likelihood of a job callback by almost 50%.
Still, white justice-involved applicants were twice as likely to hear back from a potential employer than black justice-involved applicants were. In a city that jails black and Latino people almost exclusively, this racial disparity has far-reaching effects.
Guaranteed employment for the formerly-incarcerated, then, would radically alter the conditions of thousands of New Yorkers leaving a city jail, and Jails to Jobs seems to be the first initiative of its kind in the United States. It may prove to be a massively complex undertaking.
The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) is spearheading the initiative in collaboration with eight criminal justice nonprofits. “The bulk of the initiative,” said Patrick Gallahue, MOCJ’s senior press director, “includes paid transitional employment and supportive services in the community.”
The city works with groups that provide an array of services. For instance, the Friends of Island Academy holistically focuses on the needs of formerly-incarcerated youths while the Women’s Prison Association offers gender-specific services, and Housing Works helps the formerly-incarcerated secure stable housing, a well-documented struggle for justice-involved individuals.
Several leaders of the city’s partner organizations spoke to Gotham Gazette of Jails to Jobs’ collaborative nature, whereby affiliated groups freely refer individuals to other organizations that may be better suited to their needs. For instance, if a Brooklyn resident sought assistance from the Fortune Society, based in Long Island City, Queens, staff there said they might refer them to the Osborne Association, which runs a center in Brooklyn Heights.
The Jails to Jobs initiative officially commenced on January 1 of this year, but most organizations began providing services under the program’s auspices in the spring, meaning the program has only recently launched in earnest.
The network of groups finding employment for formerly-incarcerated people is labyrinthine, and Jails to Jobs runs slightly differently between organizations. When MOCJ solicited programming proposals for Jails to Jobs, it wrote that the city would “strongly favor proposals that demonstrate partnerships through subcontracting or formal cost-sharing arrangements.” As a result, most Jails to Jobs participants are placed into internships through subsidiary organizations.
As of mid-June, the Osborne Association had employed 30 formerly-incarcerated individuals via three different, smaller groups — the Center for Employment Opportunity, Exponent, and the Hope Program — though it hopes to reach 150 people by the end of this year and 200 by the next.
The Center for Employment Opportunity primarily provides day labor cleanup crews and employs Jails to Jobs participants for four to five hours a day at $13 an hour. Exponent, a substance-use program, provides services and certifies in counseling. Programs have not yet begun at the Hope Program.
The Fortune Society, for its part, hopes to place 300 individuals in employment by the end of the year, and had enrolled 128 as of mid-June, 2018. That enrollment figure, as with all similar statistics from service providers, includes more than just the individuals who are currently employed in a paid, temporary internship — Jails to Jobs also funds hard skills training, including culinary, construction, and CDL driving certification.
“It’s going to look different for each person,” said Katharine Samberg, the Fortune Society’s Manager of Trainings and Transitional Programs. “Some don’t have job experience, and the transitional work program is for people who need to get a footing and realize they can be a beneficial employee.”
Experiences vary along lines of gender, as well. In 2015, women comprised roughly 6% of the city jail population, and their experiences before, during, and after incarceration differ from those of men, said Nyasha Rivera, who oversees the Jails to Jobs program at the Women’s Prison Association.
“We are not using tools that were created for men or are gender-neutral,” Rivera told Gotham Gazette. Since they are often the primary caregivers of children, meaning they must live in bigger homes, be nearer to sources of support, and are often more undesirable to landlords, women typically face less housing stability post-release than men do, which depresses their ability to find employment. And gender-specific “trauma that women experience prior to incarceration, during incarceration, and in the reentry process...serves as a barrier,” Rivera said.
The Women’s Prison Association offers, through various partnerships, employment tracks in culinary arts, building maintenance, and front-of-house restaurant work. As part of Jails to Jobs, the Association offers eight paid weeks of job training followed by a two-week paid internship, a different program than those run by other service providers.
Still, explained Jim Hollywood of Daytop Samaritan Village, “all Jails to Jobs contracts across the city have a similar construction to the programs.” Job training services begun during incarceration place individuals in contact with service providers, who continue employment support after release, which comes, in part, in the form of a city-subsidized temporary internship.
MOCJ allocated almost $9 million -- $8,885,492 -- to the Jails to Jobs program in its first year, which it’s spent mainly in the form of grants to service providers. That money pays for the minimum wage salaries of program participants for up to 21 hours a week, assuaging, the hope is, any sense among employers that to employ a formerly-incarcerated person is to undertake a risk.
Employers can choose to supplement the schedules and salaries of their formerly-incarcerated employees beyond what the city guarantees. Such is the case of Alexandra, who spent 18 months on Rikers Island and a little over a year in state prisons. She connected with the Fortune Society while on Rikers through taking its anger management, family safety, and job training workshops. Upon release, Alexandra entered into an internship at a home health services facility that employs her for over 40 hours a week, paying the half of her full-time salary that the city, through the Fortune Society, does not cover.
Like Judith, Alexandra (Gotham Gazette agreed to withhold last names) credits her connection with an incarceration-services group for her stable re-entry process. Immediately following her release from the Taconic State Prison, where she was sent after time on Rikers, staff at the Fortune Society helped Alexandra open a Medicaid account, apply for food stamps, and begin learning skills necessary for re-integration. She called it a “one-stop shop” in an interview with Gotham Gazette, and is now poised to be hired full-time as a coordinator at the home health services facility once her internship ends this month.
It is difficult to ascertain whether the successes of Judith and Alexandra are representative of most participants’ experiences with Jails to Jobs; most organizations only began running the program two or three months ago. But each service provider, as per the terms of MOCJ’s solicitation for proposals, already has extensive experience in reentry programming in New York City.
Data points for the program are tricky to come by. For example, Gallahue, the MOCJ press director, told Gotham Gazette that the city does “not have a precise number” regarding the expected demand for jobs among recently-released individuals. Though at this time it is known that approximately 8,500 people leave city jails after serving a sentence each year, MOCJ could not say how many individuals who had served a sentence could be expected to be looking for a job at any given time.
No organization told Gotham Gazette of having to turn away an individual for lack of space in an employment program; if anything, most are eager to grow. But, in the words of City Council Member Rory Lancman, who chairs the Committee on the Justice System, without a figure from the city, it is nearly impossible to assure that “every person serving a city sentence would have access to this job training, job placement program...it’s incumbent on the city to explain how it’s going to meet its commitment of serving every person serving a city sentence.”
Anecdotally, a minority of those released from city jails, even those who’d been involved with a service provider while incarcerated, seek post-release services. Judith said that she is the only one of her roughly 20 peers who’d been enrolled in Osborne’s classes on Rikers to seek out the organization’s help once off the island.
Her two closest friends from Rosie “have every excuse [to not go to Osborne]...For one, it’s easier for her to sell drugs on the street, and, for the other one, it’s her boyfriend.”
Improved outreach would help, she said — for some, organizations should “take them by the hand.”
The employment services Jails to Jobs has added resources to have changed Judith’s life, she said.
“I’m so grateful to that program. They did a wonder job on me. A wonder job.”
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by Daniel Yadin for Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
Ocasio-Cortez and DSA (image: NYC DSA)
Donald Trump was a boon to the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. The organization, founded in the early 1970s, had comfortably maintained between 5,000 and 10,000 members for most of its existence. But on the first day following Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, over 1,000 individuals joined DSA. Between November 2016 and July 2017, DSA gained over 13,000 new members. As of now, there are over 30,000 Democratic Socialists of America, and, after a shocking upset in last Tuesday’s New York congressional primaries, one appears headed to the United States House of Representatives.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Rep. Joe Crowley — the “King of Queens,” ten-term incumbent, chair of the House Democratic Caucus and shortlisted successor of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — stunned the political world, and it all but guarantees that the 28-year-old member of DSA’s New York City chapter, NYC-DSA, will head to Washington, D.C., in January.
Ocasio-Cortez’s win is another big boost to DSA, especially its New York City branch, and DSA helped her pull off the event that sent shockwaves throughout local and national politics. NYC-DSA co-chair Abdullah Younus told Gotham Gazette that the local chapter canvassed for Ocasio-Cortez and provided her with political guidance.
“This is nothing short of a political earthquake,” said Younus. “Every corporate-funded politician should be terrified.”
In an interview with Gotham Gazette, Younus described the Democratic Socialists of America as a “grassroots, member-driven organization.” It is not a political party, but an activist organization with an array of chapters in 47 states and Washington, D.C., united under the rule of the 16-person National Political Committee, which guides and helps implement DSA’s political goals.
The New York City chapter is the nation’s largest, with over 3,000 members as of last November. It describes Governor Andrew Cuomo as “a major roadblock for any progressive agenda,” the New York State Legislature as “corrupt to its core,” and Mayor Bill de Blasio as “a major disappointment.”
It endorsed Ocasio-Cortez in late April. She had been running for the Democratic nomination to represent District 14, covering parts of Queens and the Bronx, in the U.S. House of Representatives since the previous May, and approached NYC-DSA for its endorsement.
Ocasio-Cortez’s platform largely aligns with DSA’s leftist values. She centered her campaign on racial, social, and economic justice, with a heavy focus on housing affordability, and has called for universal health care coverage, a federal jobs guarantee, and the abolition and investigation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She regularly provides variations of her belief that “in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live," as she said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and has said, “to me, what socialism means is to guarantee everyone a basic level of dignity,” according to NYC-DSA.
NYC-DSA runs a citywide Electoral Working Group that recruits and supports socialists running for local election, operating what Younus termed a “candidate recruiting pipeline.” The Electoral Working Group contacts individuals interested in running for public office and discusses with them the prospects of a political run, focusing efforts on women, people of color, and working-class New Yorkers.
Once she’d received the approval of the Electoral Working Group, different organizational branches, and, ultimately, the citywide group, Ocasio-Cortez gained access to NYC-DSA’s veritable army of canvassers. NYC-DSA members knocked on “thousands of doors” throughout District 14 in support of Ocasio-Cortez, collected voter data, and assisted with funding, according to Younus. Ocasio-Cortez was buoyed by small-dollar donations and used the comparison to Crowley’s heavily-corporate-funded campaign to make her case as someone in tune with the community who would not be influenced by large donors.
NYC-DSA has offered its endorsement sparingly. The only other candidate in New York City currently endorsed by the organization is Julia Salazar, an organizer running for New York State Senate in Northern Brooklyn’s District 18, where she is attempting to unseat state Senator Martin Dilan in the Democratic primary set for September 13.
“We keep it generally limited so that we don’t just do paper endorsements,” Younus told Gotham Gazette. “We do real endorsements...our strength is our ability to knock on doors. If a person approaches us that we’re willing to endorse, we’re going to donate our labor.”
Nationwide, DSA is emerging as a significant political force. Dozens of DSA members are running for elected office, according to The New York Times, and “socialism” is hardly the dirty word it once was, especially among young Americans. DSA appears to be part of the energy moving the Democratic Party, and many of its elected officials, leftward, while also working to replace some of them. On the other hand, the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, who was endorsed by DSA, and, now, the victory by Ocasio-Cortez have heightened public criticism by many on the right of “socialism,” where it is typically conflated with communist, authoritarian regimes, like Cuba’s, as opposed to modern European models, like in Sweden, that are guided by socialist principles. Those critics have also raised questions about Ocasio-Cortez's and other Democratic Socialists' views on raising taxes and allowing more immigrants into the country, among other issues.
The New York City chapter of DSA is “absolutely” expecting to see an uptick in interest from prospective candidates seeking its endorsement and resources, said Younus, and the infrastructure to handle an influx in electoral work is said to be in place.
“The more we rattle the establishment,” he continued, “the more we empower people who otherwise would not have considered seeking office because of the entrenched power involved.”
These remarks echo Ocasio-Cortez’s, delivered as she watched the results from the primary election roll in: “We meet a machine with a movement.”
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by Daniel Yadin for Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
What's The [Data] Point? Episode 45 -- 75%, with Marisa Lago, Director of the Department of City Planning [You can download What's The [Data] Point? wherever you get your podcasts, including on iTunes]
New York City alone accounted for 75% of the jobs created in the New York metropolitan region since the recession, according to a forthcoming report from the Department of City Planning. Marisa Lago, Director of the Department and Chair of the City Planning Commission, joined CBC to discuss some of the report's findings as well as neighborhood revitalization, housing affordability, and resiliency and sustainability.
Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think: Ben Max of GG (@TweetBenMax), Maria Doulis of CBC (@MariaDoulis). Listen below or download wherever you get your podcasts!
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette