By Dave Oberting
By Dave Oberting
Considering all the barriers a returning citizen faces when they make it home from incarceration, from not having an I.D. or a birth certificate to having no place to live or limited computer skills, it’s no real surprise the unemployment rate for the 50-60,000 returning citizens who live in DC is estimated to be about 50%.
What may come as a surprise is just how much income returning citizens are losing out on and how it hurts our economy. According to George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, because the unemployment rate for the District’s returning citizens is 50% and not a more normal rate like 10%, the District’s returning citizens lose out on over $915 million in wages annually. You can see the math here: http://egdcfoundation.org/the-wages-returning-citizens-lose-out-on-due-to-high-unemployment/
That’s almost a billion dollars that’s not flowing into the economy and generating economic activity or tax revenue. Before you even get into the moral imperative of finding a job for someone who’s paid their debt to society, losing out on $1 billion in income and $200 million in tax revenue is bad economics that hurts every DC resident.
Another thing that may surprise you is there are many jobs available for returning citizens in the District. Up until now, we’ve done a deplorable job of connecting those residents to these opportunities. According to the website snagajob.com, there are 22,328 hourly wage jobs available today in the District of Columbia.
A lot of these positions — everything from associate at Potbelly Sandwich Shop to furniture mover for a company called MakeSpace – require little or no training and experience, and are open to candidates returning from incarceration.
While a lot of these jobs are low skill/low wage, they all provide the two things a returning citizen needs most: work experience and some money in their pocket. It’s society’s job to make sure returning citizens get the education and training required to move to higher paying work, but the critical task for avoiding recidivism today is getting them into a job quickly.
How do we make those connections? My charitable foundation has launched a program that brings together a team of job placement professionals that do nothing but connect returning citizens to good jobs as fast as is humanly possible. They do this by using years of placement industry experience and expertise to build working relationship with District employers that are willing and able to offer District residents who’ve paid their debt a second chance.
It’s a program that makes sense for our foundation and the community because I spent twenty years in the job placement business prior to starting our foundation. I’m not qualified to do much, but I am supremely qualified to connect DC residents to employment. You can learn more about it here: http://egdcfoundation.org/ex-offender-job-placement-project/. Once we are fully-funded, we’ll place about 1,500 returning citizens into employment every year. We’ll always shoot for full-time positions with benefits that pay a living wage, but we won’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
A full-time job is the best tool for fighting recidivism there is. The District needs a system to better assist returning citizens in quickly connecting to real, viable employment. In partnership with District government initiatives like Project Empowerment and the Office of Returning Citizen’s Affairs, this program will connect large numbers of returning citizens to meaningful employment.
Dave Oberting is the executive director of the Economic Growth DC Foundation. He can be reached at dave.oberting@egdcfoundation.org.
