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view They sit face to face, a table width apart, the suburban business executive and 10 convicted criminals hoping to find work.
 Project Return |
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Photo/David Joles Roy LaFever, chief financial officer at Artos Engineering, talks to Derrick Miller, a convicted felon recently released from prison who is trying to find work and turn his life around. LaFever volunteers at Project Return, a special jobs program for people freed from prison. |
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Photo/David Joles Derrick Miller looks over a job list while participating in Project Return in spring at Milwaukee Enterprise Center-North. |
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Photo/David Joles When Roy LaFever first made the decision to volunteer at Project Return, he said, he initially felt somewhat intimidated being in the central city, but now he is comfortable and concentrates on the similarities rather than differences with the men and women with whom he works. |
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Photo/David Joles LaFever drives through the Marquette Interchange his way to volunteer at Project Return on the north side. |
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Photo/David Joles James Fears (left) and Derrick Miller listen to Roy LaFever talk in spring at Project Return, where LaFever volunteers. Miller intends to stay out of prison this time and says he wants to get two jobs and take care of his young daughter. |
| By the Numbers |
 Job seekers with criminal records generally need
three to seven times the number of interviews that other applicants go
through to get hired.At the time of their first offense, 40% of convicted
criminals were not working or were underemployed; 83% for second
offenses.Every time a former inmate doesn't become a repeat
offender, taxpayers save $26,000 a year, not to mention the taxes that
person would pay through employment.Sources: Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development; Wisconsin Department of Corrections |
Between them looms a daunting divide: a coming need for workers and the high rate of African-American incarceration.
Even as some Wisconsin employers - largely in suburbs - begin to worry about finding the employees required to fill anticipated openings from retirements and business growth, plenty of ex-prisoners struggle to land decent work.
At 70,469, Wisconsin's parole-probation population is a smidgen of the state's 2.8 million-person labor force. But grouped together, it would be the fifth-largest city, just ahead of Appleton.
According to the latest federal data, Wisconsin has not only the nation's highest incarceration rate for African-Americans but also the nation's highest unemployment rate for African-American males.
Roy LaFever, chief financial officer at Artos Engineering Co. in the Town of Pewaukee, sees the wasted potential up close. He volunteers at Project Return, a Milwaukee non-profit group trying to help former inmates make a positive, lasting return to the community.
"Unfortunately in our society, people think that everybody who has a felony is a bad person," LaFever tells an employment preparation class at Project Return. "I've learned that's not true."
LaFever, who's 51, learned about Project Return through a seminary training program. He liked the idea of helping former prisoners set their lives straight through employment.
"I always thought there was a lot of racism in this city, and that's why we have the problems we have in the inner city, but I think a lot of it is just we lost all those low-skill, high-paying jobs," LaFever says. "Unfortunately, we haven't done enough to train people to get new skills."
Bruce Western, a Princeton University sociologist who studies the social impact of the U.S. penal system, has found that in the past two decades nearly all the growth in the risk of imprisonment has been concentrated among men who didn't go to college - the same demographic hardest hit by the decline in factory work.
Western figures that had wage and employment levels of the 1980s persisted through the late '90s, imprisonment rates for those men would have been 15% to 25% lower.
It's not just the economy, says Pam Oliver, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The disintegration of good work for young men with little schooling coincided with greater use of prison as a punishment for lesser crimes, including drug offenses, according to Oliver.
Her research shows imprisonment rates rising at the same time that crime overall has declined in the last three decades. Prison sentences for drug crimes have grown as drug use has shrunk.
Worst off: African-American men, nearly 40% of whom are in prison or jail or on parole or probation nationwide, according to Oliver. In Wisconsin, African-American men are less than 3% of the population but 44% of the prison inmates. There are five times as many African-American men in Wisconsin's prisons than in the University of Wisconsin system.
Project Return is housed at the Milwaukee Enterprise Center-North, on N. 4th and W. Hadley streets. The building is a sprawling, six-story complex developed 20 years ago as a small-business incubator to stimulate job growth in the neighborhood. It used to be the mother plant of Nunn-Bush Shoe Co., which employed more than 600 factory workers at the site 40 years ago.
On any given week, between drug addiction counseling, job placement, employment preparation and walk-ins, Project Return handles more than 750 former inmates.
The class LaFever is speaking to started four weeks earlier with 43 students enrolled, most at the behest of their parole officers. Twenty never showed up. All who remain are eight men and two women.
Across the table from LaFever is Derrick Miller, recently released from prison for the second time.
Miller, who's 37, shows eagerness in his posture, training his eyes on LaFever, laughing when appropriate, often holding his chin thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger.
In March 2000, Miller left prison after serving 10 years for armed robbery. He worked after he got out, sometimes more than one job, mostly through temp agencies, all in relatively low-skill positions in maintenance and manufacturing.
Then he got convicted of being party to a drug sale. "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Miller says of the incident, which earned him two more years in prison.
What's different now for Miller, five years after he last looked for work?
"I have a daughter," he says.
Her name is De-Airah. She turns 4 in September. And she is Miller's raison d'être. Not only does he want to avoid another trip to prison, he wants to provide for De-Airah. He wants to be with her. Sometimes he watches her while her mother is working third shift at Potawatomi Bingo Casino. He owes about $2,000 in child support.
LaFever tells the class that his company is seeking another assembly worker. He knows, though, that probably none of them has the desire, let alone the transportation, to work out in Waukesha County.
For instance, Miller's driver's license is suspended because of fines he estimates at about $600. Before arriving at Project Return, he had spent much of the day on the bus - from the tiny west side house he shares with his mother and stepfather to temp services on the far northwest side and another on the near south side and then to an appointment at the Milwaukee Urban League on the north side.
"I'm limited to the places I can accept employment," Miller says of his transportation situation.
His drug conviction also limits where Miller can work, including places where he might have access to pharmaceuticals or chemicals or delivery vehicles.
Barriers aside, Miller says he's shooting for not one but two jobs.
"Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think if I have two jobs, everything will fall in place," Miller says. "I wouldn't have so much extra time to be out and about, and I could accomplish a lot of things that I'd like to have."
Even absent their criminal records, most adults released from prison make poor job candidates because they tend to lack the education, job skills and work experience valued by employers.
Imprisonment also robs convicts of what usually is the best way to land employment - an extensive network of associates who can alert them to openings and vouch for them in the application process.
On top of all that, there is a stigma against felons.
Studies show that employers are largely unwilling to hire job applicants with criminal backgrounds, especially if they're African-American.
And even when they do find work, felons often are relegated to the sorts of situations that can lead them back to pursuing less "legitimate economic activities," as Princeton's Western puts it.
"Steady work and wage growth, that's what really allows people to begin to move forward with their lives, if they're young men in their 20s and 30s," Western says. "And those jobs are really just closed to people with prison records."
Eventually, criminals want to retire from criminal life, says Chris Uggen, a criminologist at the University of Minnesota.
"If people who are branded as criminals, as deviants and cast out for a while," Uggen says, "if we keep them cast out, we won't be able to benefit from their contributions."
Some policy-makers are showing more concern about the re-entry of ex-inmates, in part because of the escalating cost of recycling them.
"There has been an upswing of interest in this area," says the Rev. C.H. McClelland, pastor of Milwaukee's Holy Cathedral Church of God in Christ. The church's Word of Hope Ministries is one of 16 federally funded demonstration sites working with former inmates.
Word of Hope is in the second year of a three-year $875,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to help adults gain employment after their release from prison and has placed 77 in jobs since September.
Work at Word of Hope also is garnering more attention from state officials, including a visit in May from Gov. Jim Doyle and state Corrections Secretary Matthew Frank.
Frank notes that each inmate costs the state more than $26,000 a year and that about 45% of the prison population are repeat offenders.
"The gain we get from having more of them become law-abiding citizens is that they actually become more productive," Frank says. "They become contributing members of the community. They start to pay taxes, as opposed to having the taxpayer pay for them through incarceration or other programs."
Last year, the state released nearly 14,000 former inmates under correctional supervision. More than 7,800 returned to Milwaukee County.
To think that all of them are ready to be model citizens would be unrealistic, Uggen says.
"At the same time, you can't paint with such a broad brush that you say once you have this stigma you can never rejoin society, because that's simply not the case empirically," Uggen says. "People do manage to make it. It's an uphill battle. But over the years, they will piece their lives together."
Local churches collaborated to start Project Return nearly 25 years ago to address what they saw as a gap in community needs: services for the growing legions of former inmates hoping to establish themselves in Milwaukee.
This spring, LaFever participated in a prison ministry summit organized by the Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The chief conclusion of the session was that there continues to be inadequate attention to the return of former prisoners.
Driving back to work from Project Return, LaFever says he is agitated.
"In some ways, I take away some frustration when I see what they're trying to do, and I know what they're going to get," LaFever says. "These guys just don't realize that if they just did these things and got some skills, how employable they'd be. And if people would just hire some of these people, they'd learn what good workers they are."
