Why Buying a Hamburger Might Be the Organizing Tool of the Future

Friendly Toast

By Kate Krontiris (who also recently wrote a thoughtful piece on her own blog
about Open Courts, a live streaming of court proceedings out of the Mass. Supreme Court).

There is a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts called “The Friendly Toast.” It serves standard diner food with a bit of colorful flare (think: two eggs over easy with hash browns, amongst inflated Barbie dolls, bright green walls, and 1957 kitchen furniture).

What makes the restaurant truly unique, however, is that its next hire will be somebody with a criminal record.

Why? Because its customers want it that way.

The Friendly Toast agreed to hire a formerly incarcerated person if its customers purchased $1,000 in gift certificates. With some organizing help from the Boston Workers Alliance and Haily House, the customers
did just that. This means that the next opening goes to somebody who can do the job and who has a criminal record. The implications for that person and his family are profound: a steady income, membership in a positive community, a structured environment for recalibration to freedom, and the dignity that comes from a day’s work. For The Friendly Toast, the benefits are also clear: a dedicated employee with training from a local non-profit and supervision from the state probation system, the ensuing loyalty of hungry customers who care about the practices of the businesses they patronize, and the positive brand value that comes from doing a good deed.

This is just one example of what Mike Norman thinks will be a sea-change in organizing on community-level initiatives, be it youth employment, environmental sustainability, or child nutrition. Last year, Norman founded SoChange, an online platform that allows individuals to use their spending power to affect change on issues they care about. Any individual or organization can create a project, invite community members to patronize businesses that have agreed to support that project, and track the combined impact. Even businesses can launch initiatives to see what their customers care most about.

Here is Norman talking about how the Friendly Toast reentry project got started:

For Norman, who has one graduate degree in business and is working toward a second in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the SoChange framework offers four key benefits:

• First, it makes immediately apparent to individuals the power of their own purse – and the impact that that power could have in their own communities.

• Second, it creates a mechanism by which neighborhood individuals and businesses can communicate about what issues matter to them. Individuals can send signals to businesses about what they desire as consumers – and businesses can connect with customers who would be willing to patronize their services in return for commitment to a particular cause.

• Third, it fills a need for mid-spectrum civic engagement. For those individuals who desire to do more than make online donations, but who may not have the time to volunteer in a soup kitchen or tutor young people, the SoChange platform provides a leg up the “ladder of engagement.” It fits civic engagement opportunities right into daily buying transactions in a completely local context.

• And finally, it offers scaling potential of a new variety, expanding the reach of local-level initiatives to the national and international levels, and multiplying the power of partnership. A national membership network could, for example, get its members to pre-pay for gift certificates to whichever one of five national brands commits to do the most for a particular cause. Companies would compete not primarily for the sum of money raised, but rather to win those customers who will now feel a kind of ownership over and loyalty to the company whenever they patronize its services in the future. Customer loyalty supports sustainable growth.
What is exciting about this idea for anybody who has tried to crack the stigma of a criminal record in employment is that it demonstrates some good old common sense mixed with a dash of regular practicality.
Any good business wants to know what its customers care about. It may not have the time or savvy to parse through the complexities of all the social issues at play – but it can understand the simple signal of spending. Businesses that know why their customers are spending money in a particular way can then tailor products and services to meet those preferences, particularly if there is guaranteed demand.

Likewise, the residents of a neighborhood actually do care how area businesses behave with respect to a variety of social issues – but neither do they have the time or savvy to research the standards and compliance of every outfit they patronize. A simple mechanism for spending money at those institutions that meet identified social goals makes it easy for individuals to meaningfully demonstrate their preferences. What SoChange offers is an elegant fix for this market failure of information asymmetry and a tangible way for people to organize around issues of concern.

As applied to reentry-related employment issues, one could envision a community campaign to engage, say, ten local businesses in a hiring initiative, partnering with job-training agencies so that when positions open up, there are trained and supported individuals ready to interview. In convincing businesses to participate, reentry strategists would need to demonstrate that there is indeed a sustainable demand for the services of a firm willing to hire individuals with criminal records. This might mean launching a pilot project to test that theory (as in the Friendly Toast experiment) and it most certainly means a strong mechanism for communicating the results of the experiment to potential partner firms. What was so powerful to the owners of The Friendly Toast was that clients were willing to put down their money before anybody had been hired. For those businesses that are not convinced by the promise of future tax credits or bonding insurance for hiring an individual with a record, this up-front show of commitment sends a powerful signal of customer demand. At the $1,000 threshold, there is a kind of implicit guarantee that a business will not back out of its end of the bargain – since it would risk significant reputational damage if it did not fulfill its obligations.

To have an impact at a much larger scale, perhaps reentry initiatives in New York could pair up with similar programs in Detroit or Albuquerque and invite businesses sited in those three cities and selling to similar markets to engage in a hiring challenge that could win them new customers responding to their social commitments. City and state government could play a role in highlighting this innovative partnership, perhaps by offering tax benefits or other incentives to businesses that engage meaningfully.

We do not need big, flashy, new ideas to solve these social problems that take root from market failures. We just need some common sense and a willingness to think more closely about how to realign incentives, so that everybody wins. In that respect, SoChange seems to have a bright future ahead.

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HIV and Mass Incarceration: A Recipe for a Super-virus

While Camping makes predictions about an impending judgement day, Dr. Robert Fullilove, the Associate Dean for Community and Minority Affairs and a Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University at the Mailman School of Health is making a much more likely, and therefore much more disturbing, premonition about the future of HIV in this country. By the year 2015, he says, the HIV virus will have mutuated to the point that a supervirus that is incurable and looks startingly similar to HIV in the 1980s will have been born. What does this have to do with prisons and reentry? While at first glance, it might not be obvious, but after a half an hour talk by Dr. Fullilove, similar to the one he gave yesterday at the Community Service Society's Reentry Roundtable, you will be schooled, and you will be frightened.

How do you create the perfect conditions for the spread of disease? Dr. Fullilove tells us to look to the war on drugs and the subsequent mass incarceration of individuals in confined spaces,without condoms, without access to good medical care, and disruptions in access to HIV medications that require strict adherence.

  Here is a very brief, synopsis of the very scary story that he tells:

 In 1970, Nixon declared drugs as the public enemy of the state. In 1973, the DEA decided to wage the against drugs by incarcerating those who use them.  It is no coincidence that in 1972, 200,000 were locked up, and today, the U.S. is the leader of incarceration in the world, with 2.3 million people in jails or prisons. 1/2 of all arrests today are drug related crime.  

Although HIV hit the media in the 80's with the "gay men's health crisis," because the virus has an incubation period of 10-15 years, the disease began being spread  at the very same time that the country began criminalizing the use of needles.  Fearful of getting caught with a "spike," injection drug users stopped carrying their own needles and began to share them in places they could be left and refused, engaging in the most efficient way of spreading HIV, Hep C, and a host of other diseases. 

Now, instead of treating addiction as a public health issue, incarcerate these individuals, predominantly ethnic minorities,  for drug use and sales.  In New York, take 75% of them from the 7 neighborhoods that have among the highest rates of HIV infection in the country, as high as in areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, and put them together in prisons. Mix different strands of HIV and they will become be more resistant to medication. 40% of incarcerated individuals willl have sex in prison and a large amount will inject drugs, or share needles tatooing. Don't offer condoms and, depending on the state, offer limited HIV/AIDS treatment. No wonder, Fullilove says, that prisons have 3-5 times the rate of HIV infection as the general population. Although extremely effective when given, HIV treatment requires a strict regimen, so when those incarcerated individuals who have access to HIV treatment leave the prison they must take the drug regularly. If not, the virus will mutate and become less responsive to HIV meds.  With no immediate access to Medicaid upon release and disruptions in HIV treatment due to release machinations, a "drug holiday," can eventually become deadly. When the individual with HIV returns to his/her community, or jail, and transmits the virus, that virus will be more resistant to treatment. At some point, it will become untreatable. 

And so, warns Dr. Fullilove, by the year 2015, the HIV virus will have mutuated to the point where we will create a supervirus that is incurable and looks startingly similar to HIV in the 1980s. 

Equally startling, is that Mr. Fullilove asserts that there are many very simple public policies that could prevent the spread of the disease. To read Dr. Fullilove's work, click here.

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"Want to study here? Let me look at your record": PRI features Dr. Weissman on the Use of Records in the Application Process

Last Friday, at the Prisoner Reentry Institute's Occassional Series on Reentry, Dr. Marsha Weissman of the Center for Community Alternatives presented on the increasing use of criminal records in the college application process.  Interestingly, this issue became of increasing concern to the Center for Community Alternatives in 2004 when colleges began accepting the common application. Their clients, excited to return to school, began asking, "How do I answer the criminal conviction question?"  Prior to the common application, few schools' own applications asked the much dreaded question.

Dr. Marsha argued that the racial disparities in the criminal justice system coupled with the justice system's expansion undermines the civil rights movement's goal of access to higher education.  Without any empiral evidence that students who have had contact with the justice system are riskier to campus public safetly, the use of records to weed out potential candidates is a policy that not only unfairly discriminates, but may serve as a threat to public safety by inhibiting access to the most effective crime reducing tool-education.

Based on a study conducted by CCA partnered and the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), of the 292 of surveyed schools of undergraduate level or higher, 74% of schools require criminal record self-disclosure and 20% of colleges conduct background checks.  69% of surveyed schools have special requirements for applicants with criminal justice histories that range from offering a letter of explanation,  to providing the production of an official rap sheet which has information otherwise unobtainable to the public. 61% of colleges have some type of CJI related automatic bars to admission for certain types of convictions.

According to Dr. Wesissman, 53% of colleges that collect and use criminal histories in their decision making policies and 60% have no training on interpreting criminal records. For those of us who have seen a RAP sheet, this is especially troubling.  RAP sheets frequently contain errors, include the initial charge in addition to the charge for which the individual is convicted, contain information that is supposed to be sealed, and are generally extremely confusing documents.

Among CCA's practice recommendations are:

• Remove CJI disclosure from initial application
• Limit disclosure to specific convictions
• Allow people still on community supervision to enroll if otherwise qualified
• Establish fair and evidence-based admissions criteria
• Use unbiased and well informed assessments

To read the full report pubished by CCA, click here.

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ATI Reentry Coalition Reduces Recidivism and Saves Taxpayer Dollars

The Alternative To Incarceration (ATI) Reentry Coalition recently released its 2010 report documenting its contribution to public safety and taxpayer savings.  According to the report, while the annual yearly cost per person of jailing an adult is $76,000 and incarcerating an adult in prison is $55,000, most ATI programs cost $11,000 and have a combined recidivism rate of less than 20% after two years.

Here are a few highlights of the ATI Reentry Coalition members outcomes:

• Of the 43 individuals who were housed in the Fortune Academy's phased permanent housing program, 36 of them remained in pernanemtn housing for at least one year, 36 remained unincarcerated and 97% or residents remained free of parole violations.
• In CASES Nathaniel ACT Program, an ATI program for individuals with mental illess who have committed felonies, 67% released from the program were not convicted of a crime in the following two years.
• Of the 48 youth classified as delinquent participating in Center for Community Alternative's Alternative to Placement Programs, only 9% were rearrrested and prosecuted in the following years.

To read the entire report, click here.

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