“I tried to assimilate, And I couldn’t. I applied for jobs everywhere. I’d go in for an interview, and they’d be reviewing my resume, and then they’d get to the application and see the box [asking about a criminal record] … and just in their body language you could see they weren’t interested anymore.”
“Having a degree — no matter how many I had, it wasn’t going to make a difference. We come home to nothing — you can’t find a job, you can’t find a place to live. People ask, ‘Why do people go back to prison?’ This is why.”
Imprisoned by "the Box"
At 41, John Jones has spent one third of his life behind bars. His first bid came at the age of 16, when he was sentenced to eight years in a prison for young offenders for being in a car during a drive by murder. He was released in December 1998 and within two weeks he found a job working as a warehouse shipping clerk.
For Jones, a big part of landing that job was being able to meet the hiring manager in person. "When you have the opportunity to sit down face-to-face for an interview, you have more of an opportunity to get a job," Jones said.
But in July 2012, after Jones served five years in prison on an assault charge -- his second stint behind bars -- he faced another hurdle: the box on the online job applications that told employers he had a felony conviction in his past. While he had seen the box sporadically on applications in the past, it was now everywhere he applied.
Jones applied for jobs as a shipping clerk, forklift driver, retail associate and even contacted multiple temp agencies desperately looking for "any type of job."
No one called him back.
Jones felt his job applications were going into a "black hole."
Jones was unemployed for 18 months doing "whatever it took," to get by, even occasionally "going back to hustling," he said.
He finally landed two part-time jobs, one working security at a fast food restaurant and another as a server at an Indonesian restaurant. In February, he had just started working at a non-profit organization with victims of violent crime when he was arrested again for a parole violation -- one that Jones says he was not aware of.
In August 2015, soon after he was released, Jones started working at The Ella Baker Center as criminal justice advocate.
Many employers have a mental block against hiring people with criminal records, said Philip Genty, the director of the Prisoners and Families Clinic at Columbia Law School. "You can almost look at incarceration as a contagious disease," Genty said. "Once somebody has that taint, they are just looked at differently. It's not even at the rational level."
Story Source: https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/30/news/economy/former-inmates-unemployed/