Subscribe to Our Monthly Newsletter
Every year, 600,000 people walk out of state and federal prisons in the United States, but most of them walk into nothing. No job lined up, no credential in hand and a sky-high unemployment rate waiting on the other side of the gate.
Last week, I visited the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. You may know it as the facility that's held Sean "Diddy" Combs, Luigi Mangione, Ghislaine Maxwell, and most recently, Nicolás Maduro. I was there the same day as the Knicks championship parade. Rather than celebrating with my adopted team, who had just won their first title in 53 years, I was inside a federal detention center talking with people who are currently incarcerated.
I went to talk about what Emerge Career does. What I found instead was a room full of people who already knew, and were eager to sign up.
The room was packed with each new wave of interested participants, and our table saw the highest level of engagement of any participating organization.
Program directors. Reentry coordinators. Community-based organizations. Correctional officers. Probation staff. Everyone who touches the system from a different angle was in that room, and every one of them was excited to hear about our work.
That kind of near-universal enthusiasm is what happens when the people closest to the system recognize that a real solution is sitting right in front of them for most of the problems faced by the people shuffling around in jumpsuits.
To me it showed that even those who work closest to the system don't really want to hold it up as our best effort to rehabilitate people and deliver public safety. They know the cycle. They see it repeat, and they're looking for a better answer.
The consensus in that room was clear: a great job is a better approach than endless cycles of incarceration.
I left MDC Brooklyn with about 30 requested sign-ups and a request to provide in-custody training for residents.
Many of the individuals I met don't have a release date for over a year but that didn’t deter them from excitedly planning for the day when they can enroll and get on the path to a six-figure salary in the skilled trades. When they heard what our graduates are earning, which is regularly confirmed by friends inside the facilities, they wanted to be next in line.
But this wasn't a room full of people waiting to be saved. Every person I met had plans. They were doing research from inside a federal facility, building toward something specific, like a new small business, starting a family, and embarking on a new career journey.
Our NYC program with the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice has trained and placed hundreds of participants into skilled trades careers where starting salaries range from $65,000 to $124,000 and the average is close to $75,000. Our participants succeed at rates 50% higher than national averages and earn nearly twice as much as the typical workforce program graduate.
For a population that faces 60% unemployment post-incarceration, those numbers aren't just good. They're game changing. They’re “reorient my every routine and lifestyle” numbers.
The conventional wisdom is that reentry workforce programs are feel-good investments with marginal returns. The data says otherwise.
RAND Corporation research shows that 5-year recidivism, which nationally hovers around 70%, drops to 50% when someone completes some high school while incarcerated. An associate degree brings it to 13.7%. A bachelor's brings it to 5.6%. A master's degree: 0%.
Vocational credentials tell a similar story. Research shows the hazard of recidivism is substantially lower when former inmates are employed, compared with their unemployed peers. Across Emerge Career graduates, our reported rearrests are near 0% 2 years after completing the program.
Emerge's 90+% credential attainment rate and 95+% job placement rate show we're setting a new standard in workforce development. What's more, our average salary of nearly $75,000 nearly doubles the outcomes of even the best state workforce boards.
The difference is embedded in our programmatic design. We offer success coaching with daily check-ins for at-risk students and wrap-around service referrals that address the real barriers (fines, fees, transportation, housing instability, etc.). Most importantly, our direct employer partnerships turn training into job offers, not job searches and endless months waiting for an offer.
We are building Emerge Career to close the gap between incarceration and employment. Rather than hope someone else would solve this systemic problem we are building the infrastructure. Our technology-driven training, world-class coaching, employer partnerships, and demonstrable outcomes show our ability to back up our vision.
MDC Brooklyn showed that the demand for this model has outpaced our ability to supply it and we need to continue pushing for additional expansions with our ecosystem partners. People in facilities across the country are publicizing our value before we even make the pitch, the staff in every facility we speak with want to offer something better, and people sign up on the spot to prove it.
600,000 people will be released from a corrections facility this year. The question isn't whether they want to work. It's whether we're ready for them.
Jason Barefoot is Head of Government Accounts at Emerge Career, a Y Combinator-backed reentry workforce platform operating in New York, California, Massachusetts, and Colorado. To learn more or partner with us, visit emergecareer.com.
