Profiles of Engagement:
Tackling Employment Discrimination Against Former Prisoners

UCLA law students and the community organization A New Way of Life join forces on the Prisoner Re-entry Initiative supporting former prisoners in restoring their lives and, in turn, stimulating economic development in South Los Angeles.

By Rachel Benioff

April 2008 It’s a familiar scene – you are filling out a job application. The question appears: “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” You easily check “no” without giving it another thought and move on. But imagine you have just been released from prison, with $200 in “gate money” to your name, in need of a job so you can pay for housing and perhaps regain custody of your child, determined to make a new start. If you knew that 80 percent of Los Angeles employers would not hire someone with a conviction record, according to a recent survey, would you check “yes” or “no”?

For the thousands of people released on parole each year in Los Angeles County — 125 per day, many of whom return to South Los Angeles — checking this box is fraught with implications. The Little Hoover Commission, a state oversight agency, estimates that 70 to 90 percent of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed. This rate can be attributed in part to discrimination in hiring practices, which in turn is reflected in the state’s recidivism rate — the highest in the nation. More than 70 percent of California parolees are returned to prison each year.

The Prisoner Re-entry Initiative aims to reduce the discrimination and barriers to employment that former prisoners face and to promote their civil and human rights — and in so doing, to assist them in reclaiming their lives. To that end, students from UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program and A New Way of Life Re-entry Project have partnered to assist communities and former prisoners in their emerging civic engagement efforts to transform the laws and policies that effect them.

A Model Collaboration

Saul Sarabia, director of UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program, and Susan Burton, executive director of A New Way of Life Re-entry Project, are dedicated to tackling the largely unaddressed issues facing communities in Los Angeles with high numbers of parolees. Given the statistics — nearly one-quarter of California parolees are returned to Los Angeles — and the toll for communities with high numbers of parolees, like South Los Angeles, these barriers are a critical issue for the city and county.

Sarabia and Burton met in 1999, when he was serving as a staff member of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles. A graduate of UCLA School of Law, Sarabia returned to UCLA in 2003 and in 2005 became program director of the CRS Specialization, the only program of its kind in the U.S. Its students examine the relationship between racial oppression and the law, and the historical role of the legal system in simultaneously alleviating and imposing that oppression.

Burton approached Sarabia about applying for an award through UCLA’s Center for Community Partnerships. A New Way of Life was interested in moving into policy advocacy work on the employment discrimination issue, and specifically making a case for removal of the prior conviction question from county and city job applications. Says Sarabia, “One of our major priorities was to develop opportunities for our students to apply the theoretical framework that they were being exposed to in the curriculum to actual social settings and existing legal problems, so I thought, ‘Wow, what a great fit!’”

A model collaboration was born, combining the legal expertise of CRS students and faculty who are equipped to address employment discrimination and share a strong interest in racial and social justice work, and the expertise and commitment of A New Way of Life, dedicated to effecting reforms that will support former prisoners in restoring their lives and, in turn, stimulate economic development in South Los Angeles.

Says Sarabia, the students are learning first-hand how “ostensibly race neutral policies can create racially disparate impacts. In the case of former prisoners getting jobs, social science research, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and research commissioned by cities themselves indicate that asking about criminal convictions on job applications has a racially disparate impact, particularly against Black and Latino men. This means we need to ask not only how a person coming out of prison can get a job, but also what are the ways in which racism organizes society in the United States?”

Melissa Burch, director of programs and policy for A New Way of Life, elaborates that for a number of systemic reasons, “we end up with so many people of color being the ones who have the conviction histories in the first place … And then there is the underlying discrimination in the job market against people of color in general ... So when you … add to that the discrimination around conviction histories, it’s this totally compounded effect, where if you are a person of color with a conviction history … good luck getting a job.”

A Personal Experience

Burton knows first-hand the challenges of re-entry. In 1981, her 5-year-old son was killed in a car accident and, in her grief, she turned to drugs. By 1985, she was serving her first prison sentence for drug related offenses, and spent years in and out of jail, even living on the street. Says Burton, “There was never ever any support exiting the criminal justice system … and there was never ever any treatment offered while I was incarcerated.” When she finally did get treatment for substance abuse, her life began to come together, “and I ended up really angry about what had taken place.” She set her sights on nursing, but her conviction history placed obstacles in her new path. “And I got angrier, and I committed myself to helping so many other women who were just like me.… One thing nobody could stop me from doing was helping people coming out of prison.… So I bought a little house and then I set about my journey.”

Burton founded A New Way of Life in 1998. What began as a single sober-living home in Watts for women, has grown into a non-profit organization that operates four homes for women and their children and one for single women, offering services to help them break the cycle of entrapment in the criminal justice system and lead healthy and satisfying lives. And at the community and policy level, A New Way of Life organizes former prisoners and their loved ones to remove barriers to re-entry and increase re-entry services.

Says Burton, “When I started, the thought was, if people had a safe environment to go to, that that would be enough. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were barriers and policies, there were practices that were really harmful … all of these forces saying, ‘No, you can’t have a job. No, you can’t live here because you’ve been to prison. No, you can’t get your child back because you have to work and make a wage.” And that brought about the broader questions, why is this happening and how can we stop it?”

Ban the Box

As part of a national organizing initiative called “All of Us or None,” which is comprised of former prisoners and their loved ones seeking to combat barriers to re-entry, A New Way of Life has been convening summits since 2005 to identify policy changes that will support prisoners in re-integrating into their communities and prevent recidivism. One of the persistent barriers identified is the inability to secure jobs due to a conviction history, and so All of Us or None has been working for the removal of this question from applications for employment with the City and County of Los Angeles.

Joshua Kim, a third year law student participating in the Prisoner Re-entry Initiative, describes the agony he has seen former prisoners go through over this question: “I know that they are … diligent, hard-working, and rehabilitated by any definition of the word. And I see them not getting a job for months, and then finally relapsing … I can’t help but look at the system and think, ‘This is messed up, you’re not helping them.’”

In February 2006, a resolution to remove the question about prior convictions from city and county job applications was brought to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles City Council by All of Us or None.

Since A New Way of Life serves as the lead convener of the organization’s L.A. chapter, the CRS students worked closely with All of Us or None, strengthening and expanding the Ban the Box campaign through their research and knowledge of relevant employment rights law. They created fact sheets and other materials to educate All of Us or None members about the broader legal context and presented their research at a community meeting. They also conducted focus groups with former prisoners and prepared testimony for a public hearing. Though the Fair Employment Resolution was not passed by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors in January 2007, the resolution is now being considered by the City’s Personnel Committee. If it passes out of the Personnel Committee, it will be forwarded to the full L.A. City Council for consideration.

Says Burch, if the Ban the Box Campaign is successful at the city level, it “will have benefits not just for South Los Angeles ... or just the women who are here … but for people who are impacted by these issues all over the county … That’s 45,000 people a year who are released on parole in L.A County. So if we’re able to successfully open … any of those doors to employment for people who have convictions, that impact is going to be huge.”

Lessons Learned

The Ban the Box experience was rich with lessons for the students. Says Sarabia, “It raised some really important questions which most law students never have to deal with … How do you, as a poor person or a person with a criminal record, get to engage in a democracy? How do you actually make policy change happen? For law students to accompany these residents in the civic engagement process, to witness their successful effort at mobilizing a congresswoman, a state senator, a multi-racial, county-wide coalition of organizations, and still not make sufficient enough impact on county decision makers to adopt the Fair Employment Resolution, makes these questions real for these future leaders.”

For the former prisoners who participated in bringing the resolution — sharing their experiences in focus groups, providing compelling testimony, gathering letters of support — the experience was valuable as well. Says Burton, “They have a more concrete understanding of the political process … It builds confidence and esteem to know that we can step into a council meeting or talk to a councilmember about what our needs are, because traditionally we’ve just been quiet and thought there was no way for us to actually be in there to address the discrimination we face … And it lessens the burden of ‘I did everything wrong,’ seeing there’s something else going on that is bigger than them that has impacted their lives.”

Burch adds that while the experience was empowering, “people also saw … the total unwillingness of policymakers to make even this very minor change to help make it possible for them to get their lives back on track … So, I think it helped them understand how big the battle is that we have before us.”

Beyond the Box

In addition to advocating for the removal of the question about prior convictions, the students have been working with a New Way of Life on a number of other fronts.

The students have conducted research on expungement policies, certificates of rehabilitation, voting rights, negligent hiring (which employers cite as the primary legal reason for not hiring someone with a conviction record) and the benefits for private employers of hiring persons with prior convictions. Kim is researching the limitations of existing antidiscrimination laws in addressing employment discrimination against former prisoners.

The students also organized a panel presentation at UCLA in spring 2007 that featured faculty from the UCLA School of Law and School of Public Affairs as well as community organizations, including A New Way of Life. UCLA School of Law graduate and former PRI Coordinator Priscilla Ocen, who helped organize the panel, says it provided an opportunity “to educate ourselves about what’s happening regarding antidiscrimination in our community, and also to facilitate a conversation among scholars and activists working on this issue, and then to motivate students to get involved.” A final panel is slated for spring 2008.

The students have also been developing a website — http://www.socialtext.net/prisoner-reentry-initiative — and continue outreach in South Los Angeles to employers and human resources and personnel departments. This fall, the Re-entry Initiative piloted two prisoner re-entry legal clinics in Watts. The students, under the supervision of volunteer attorneys from Homeboy Industries, Neighborhood Legal Services and the Public Defender’s Office, assisted former prisoners with petitioning the court for expungement; dealing with the suspension, revocation or denial of an occupational license because of a conviction history; and documenting their experiences with denials of employment. The legal clinics also provided petitioners with information about their rights, and the students with information about systemic problems individuals have been experiencing.

The re-entry Legal Clinic will eventually be offered on an ongoing basis under the auspices of El Centro Legal, a student organization at the UCLA School of Law, providing a direct service to the South L.A. community that Burch believes “wouldn’t have happened without the partnership.” Adds Sarabia, the legal clinic is “an illustration of the possibilities that emerge when you partner the social capital of the community with the human capital of the university.”

The students and A New Way of Life are now planning the culminating event of the Re-entry Initiative, an Employment Rights/Job Fair in spring 2008. Says Burton, “Just to be able to get the employers in a room with people who want to be employed and have them understand and know who the people are, is a step forward to breaking down some of the mental barriers and having people be more open.”

Gains All Around

Reflecting on the Re-entry Initiative, Burch observes, “The law students have brought so much energy to the work. They’ve really helped keep us motivated about not just continuing forward but thinking about new directions that we could take the project in … While they’ve been supportive on the Ban the Box campaign, their larger legal research and really probing into questions like ‘Can employers do this? Is this legal for employers to just not hire people? What does the law say? What can they do? What can’t they do?’ … has really helped us think about these other directions and how do we get the private sector, how do we begin to actually shift employer practices more broadly, and how can we hold them accountable, which is part of what we’re trying to do through the clinics. How do we actually make it not possible for them to just not hire people based on their convictions?”

For the students, the experience has had a profound impact, putting a human face on the issues. Says Kim, who has been working as an intern at A New Way of Life and is co-chair of the Legal Clinic, “My life experience is so different from the residents at A New Way of Life ... Women here, they defy stereotypes. I developed what I like to believe are lasting friendships … They provide a valuable insight into what it is that I’m doing here and what I want to be doing. They provide both reason and motivation.”

Adds Ocen, “The thing I learned the most was … your legal education only will get you so far in dealing with the issues related to social justice … As a law student, you think ‘the law can change the world.’ But really … it’s about how do we communicate with people so that they’re empowered themselves, and it’s not lawyers … coming with a top-down approach, but really it’s about sharing, and listening more than speaking. And I gained so much by just watching what Susan and Melissa and the folks at a New Way of Life were doing … just seeing the way in which they addressed the issues and … and acted in solidarity and in concert with other people … It also opened my eyes to the way in which the law doesn’t work, and the way in which we have to be creative about problem solving.”

The Re-entry Initiative is giving formerly incarcerated people a chance to be actively involved in policies that affect their lives. And for the South Los Angeles community, where so many parolees are struggling to find living-wage jobs, the initiative’s efforts to decrease the unemployment rate will ultimately result in a healthier and safer community. It is also generating a wealth of information about specific barriers to employment that South Los Angeles residents face, attitudes and hiring practices of South Los Angeles employers and successful strategies for working toward more open hiring procedures.

For the Critical Race Studies Program, the partnership has been invaluable. Says Sarabia, “The relationship between racism in our past, structural racism today and public policy reform for our future, which is raised by this project, makes it more than just an extra-curricular opportunity for the students. Our program is recognized as the leading race and law center in the U.S., and in terms of what we bring to bear in the intellectual realm around race theory, having a real direct connection to a social problem that’s impacting communities like Watts today in this way is crucial, because practice is informing the theory.”

Looking Ahead

Sarabia and Burton share a commitment to ensuring that disenfranchised communities have a voice in the law-making process, and the Prisoner Re-entry Initiative, says Sarabia, has been “an opportunity for leadership development of our constituent groups — for Susan, the people she works with, and for me, the students I work with.”

Harking back to the model for civic engagement that he and Burton learned when they worked together at the Community Coalition where, says Sarabia, “the more voices that were involved, the better,” he tells his CRS students, “you are particularly well-positioned to do more than the average person because you will become the decision-makers, you will become elected officials, you will become people who run government agencies and non-profit organizations. It’s great that you have this interest as students, let’s leverage that, and let’s problem solve together with community members so that can inform your future work.”

Despite the fact that, according to Sarabia, “at the governmental and policy level, very few decision makers, elected or otherwise, are willing to talk about re-entry as a major social problem,” three CRS students who have participated in the Re-entry Initiative —Joshua Kim, Claudia Peña and Priscilla Ocen — are applying for, or considering applying for, fellowships to do work related to re-entry after they graduate.

Speaking of her commitment to re-entry issues, third year law student and PRI coordinator Claudia Peña says, “I think, in general, society feels very comfortable with formerly incarcerated persons not having opportunities, not getting a second chance. That’s one of the reasons I feel so strongly about it, because … I don’t think it matters to enough people.”

Adds Kim, “I’m grateful to (the Prisoner Re-entry Initiative) for giving me guidance in terms of what I’m going to do after law school … My back-up plan was to be a public defender, and that still is my backup plan, but I want to work in this field first and see what I can do with my passion and my growing expertise, my interest in this field.”

All of which is good news for former prisoners and their loved ones, the South Los Angeles community and A New Way of Life, because as Burch attests, after a rueful laugh when asked how she keeps up her morale, “We have a long way to go on these issues.”