Virgin Record CEO Advocates for Hiring Formerly Incarcerated Individuals

Billionaire Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group,  has sought to conquer the record industry, circumnavigate the globe by balloon, and introduce commercial space travel. Now Branson is urging the leaders of his 400 global companies to consider hiring formerly incarcerated applicants.

In a recent article in the Guardian,  Branson talks about his decision to actively pursue formerly incarcerated individuals as employees after spending a day in an Australian prison two years ago:

As soon as I got back to England, I contacted the MDs of Virgin companies and said to them that we must . . . try to take on as many ex-convicts as possible," he recalls.

How did they respond? "Generally positive," he says. "I think that people at Virgin appreciate the fact that we are an understanding company. I had one or two negative comments on Twitter, but nothing that concerned me. One of the prisoners I met in Melbourne told me he'd been released with no money. He had to find his own way to the city. He was thrown back out into this world with no help whatsoever. The end result was that he was back inside in a very short time. For people coming out of prison it's a vicious circle. If they can't get a job, the only thing they can do is reoffend. From society's point of view that can be very painful."

Virgin has worked with Working Chance to hire formerly incarcerated women (they also hire men) and so far the results have been encouraging:

[Jocelyn] Hillman, who founded Working Chance four years ago, was being interviewed by a newspaper about her work. "I said: 'We need someone like Richard Branson to get involved'," she explains. "He read the cuttings and got in touch with us. He said: 'How can I help?'"

Working Chance has successfully placed 173 female ex-prisoners with companies, including Pret a Manger, Sainsbury's and Virgin. Their reoffending rate is less than 5% compared with the general rate of about two-thirds of all adults released from prison, who are reconvicted within two years of being discharged. "We have a number of women working for Virgin Management," says Hillman. "One was taken on only last week. All are doing really, really well."

Branson has also made a push to encourage other companies to join him in hiring ex-offenders.

He explained why he has this mindset:

"One of the reasons perhaps that I'm more understanding than some people is that if I go back to my teenage years when I marched on the American embassy trying to stop the Vietnamese war, I was running from the police wielding batons."

For one of the wealthiest people in the UK it comes down to this:

"Everybody deserves a second chance.."

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NJ Expands Reentry Efforts

Today, as reported in North Jersey.com, NJ's Governor, Chris Christie, is expected to announce a major expansion of the state's reentry efforts. "The initiative adopts many of the recommendations made to the Christie administration by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative New York City-based think tank with a progressive reputation on prison issues, which was commissioned to analyze the state’s current prisoner re-entry system.

The institute found the state’s existing re-entry efforts amounted to 'a confusing system with no centralized definitions and mission, a lack of accountability for outcomes . . . and a lack of coordination, with potential duplication of services and no continuity between services provided in prison, during parole and in the community.'”

The Governor’s first major criminal justice initiative calls for:


"Expanding the state’s Drug Court program, which allows those convicted of certain non-violent drug offenses to bypass incarceration by agreeing to a strict regimen of court appearances and drug or alcohol treatment and other recovery services to break the addiction.

The creation of the Task Force for Recidivism Reduction, which will be co-chaired by attorney Lisa Puglisi, with the state Department of Corrections and the State Parole Board, and James Plousis, chairman of the State Parole Board. The task force will coordinate the many treatment and reentry programs across the state government to bolster reentry efforts, as well as make recommendations to the governor on how to improve those programs.

The task force will also assess the effectiveness of all reentry programs currently offered using a real-time recidivism database, which will allow officials to track individuals and the success of the programs they participate in. Using the data, the task force will identify programs that fail and suggest how resources could be better spent to improve recidivism rates."

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Fresh Start Program Keeps Rikers Inmate in the Kitchen

The New York Time profiles a young Rikers inmate in Fresh Start, a program of the Osborne Association that provides job skills and relapse prevention.  Click here to view the article.

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The Increasing Privitization of the Prison Industry: The ACLU's Latest Report

The United States imprisons more individuals than any other country in the world, both per capital and in absolute terms. The term "prison industrial complex" has been coined to refer to relationship between the rapid expansion of the U.S. inmate population and the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies.  Last week, the ACLU published the first comprehensive report on the privitization of the prison industry in its publication, "Banking on Bondage, Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration." The report points to some alarming statistics and trends that are facilitating the ever expanding industrialization of the prison industry:

"As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1600% between 1990 and 2009. Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6% of state prisoners, 16% of federal prisoners, and, according to one report, nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government. In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion dollars in revenue, and their top executives, according to one source, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million."

To read more, check out the ACLU publication by clicking here. 

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Supreme Court Will Decide Another Life-Sentence-Without-Parole Case Related to Juveniles

In May 2010, the Supreme Court decided that sentencing juveniles convicted of non-homicide related cases to life without the possibility of parole violated the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

On Monday, as report in the LA Times, the court determined that it would hear a related case-whether juveniles convicted of killing someone can be locked up without the possibility of parole.

The two cases that will decide this issue deal with two men who were sentenced to life without parole for killings committed when they were 14 years old.

In deciding the 2010 case, the court noted that a youth does not share the same amount of culpability for crimes as an adult due to their impulsive nature and a  less developed capacity for evaluating consequences.

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From Harlem to the UK: "Offender Resettlement" Forum in London features HCJC Project Director

Via The Young Foundation : 

Transatlantic perspectives on the challenges of offender resettlement

Wednesday, 2 November 2011 14:30 - 16:00

Cost, recidivism, and the collateral consequences of contact with the criminal justice system present significant challenges in relation to offender resettlement. Drawing on insights from Chris Watler and Evan Jones this seminar will explore these challenges and the process of resettlement from two comparable but contrasting contexts.

Chris Watler is the Project Director of the Harlem Community Justice Center, a community court in New York focusing on housing, youth crime, and offender re-entry. Evan Jones is Head of Community Services at St Giles Trust, a leading charity working with offenders in the UK.

This event is being co-hosted by the Centre for Justice Innovation (CJI) and the Young Foundation to coincide with the launch of a new publication, From the Ground Up: Promising Projects in Criminal Justice, which profiles a range of innovative criminal justice projects from the US and UK.

The event will be held upstairs in Bethnal Green Library, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 0HL.

RSVP to events@youngfoundation.org

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