Ex Felons For Hire

STEBBINS, Alaska — When Nimeron Mike applied to be a city police officer here last New Year’s Eve, he didn’t really expect to get the job.

Mike was a registered sex offender and had served six years behind bars in Alaska jails and prisons. He’d been convicted of assault, domestic violence, vehicle theft, groping a woman, hindering prosecution, reckless driving, drunken driving and choking a woman unconscious in an attempted sexual assault. Among other crimes.

“My record, I thought I had no chance of being a cop,” Mike, 43, said on a recent weekday evening, standing at his doorway in this Bering Strait village of 646 people.

He was wrong.

On the same day Mike filled out the application, the city of Stebbins hired him, handing him a policeman’s cellphone to answer calls for help.

“Am I a cop now?” he remembers thinking. “It’s like, that easy?”

The short answer is yes. With low pay and few people wanting the jobs, it is that easy in some small Alaska communities for a convicted felon, even someone who has admitted to a sex crime or who was recently released from prison, to be hired with public money to work as a city police officer.

It’s also a violation of state public safety regulations, yet it happens all the time.

In Stebbins alone, all seven of the police officers working as of July 1 have pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges within the past decade. Only one has received formal law enforcement training of any kind.

The current police chief pleaded guilty to throwing a teenage relative to the ground and threatening to kill her after drinking homebrew liquor in 2017. (Alcohol is illegal in the village.) He was hired a year later. He declined to answer questions in person and blocked a reporter on Facebook.

Two men who until recently were Stebbins police officers pleaded guilty to spitting in the faces of police officers; one was the subject of a 2017 sexual assault restraining order in which a mother said he exposed himself to her 12-year-old daughter. (The officer named in the restraining order said he was busy and hung up the phone when asked about his criminal history; the other officer admitted to the crime.)

The seven-man police force has served a combined six years in jails, prisons and halfway houses on dozens of criminal charges. That doesn’t include Mike, who was terminated on March 29, city records show. He says he wasn’t given a reason, but the city administrator said it was because he wasn’t responding to calls and didn’t get along with another officer.

ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News reported in May that one in three Alaska communities has no local cops of any kind. In June, U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr declared a “law enforcement emergency” in rural Alaska, announcing $10.5 million in Justice Department spending to support village police.

In the villages where there are cops, a different problem has emerged. A first-of-its-kind investigation by the Daily News and ProPublica has found that at least 14 cities in Alaska have employed police officers whose criminal records should have prevented them from being hired under Department of Public Safety regulations. The news organizations identified more than 34 officers who should have been ineligible for these jobs. In all but three cases, the police hires were never reported by the city governments to the state regulatory board, as required.

In eight additional communities, local tribal governments have hired tribal police officers convicted of domestic violence or sex crimes.

All 42 of these tribal and city police officers have rap sheets that would prevent them from being hired by the Anchorage Police Department and its urban peers, as Alaska state troopers or even as private security guards most anywhere else in the United States. Many remain on the job today.

“It’s outrageous that we have a situation where we have a, such a lack of public safety that communities are resorting to hiring people who have the propensity for violence,” said Melanie Bahnke, a board member for the Alaska Federation of Natives, which represents 191 tribes. “And placing them in a position where they have control over people and possibly could victimize the victims further.”

“That’s like a frontier mentality,” said Bahnke, who is also chief executive for Kawerak Inc., a Nome-based tribal consortium that oversees state-paid police in the region.

A key part of the problem: There aren’t enough state troopers or other state-funded cops to go around. When it comes to boots-on-the-ground law enforcement, village police officers (VPOs) and tribal police officers (TPOs) working in Alaska villages are at least as common. Yet no one keeps track of who these officers are, where they are working, if they’ve passed a background check or if they’ve received any training.

The state agency that regulates Alaska police has suspended efforts to solve this mess.

Alaska Police Standards Council Director Bob Griffiths said his agency barely has the time to fulfill its regular duties of juggling complaints and appeals involving certified police officers. It doesn’t have enough money to also visit rural Alaska so it can research ways to fix police hiring practices. That effort will come in the fall, at the earliest.

Yet the stakes are high. The same Alaska towns that have no police, or criminals working as cops, are in areas with some of the highest rates of domestic violence and sexual assault in the country.

When a case relies on an arrest by an untrained cop who has a criminal record, prosecutors sometimes do not want to put that person in front of a jury and instead might drop or reduce felony charges, Griffiths warned. “I could see felony domestic violence assault cases that end up being pleaded down to harassment or coercion.”

Nome District Attorney John Earthman agreed that sometimes happens, and that cases involving untrained officers sometimes lack key evidence such as recordings of initial interviews. He said public defenders have raised concerns about some police because they have defended those same officers on recent criminal charges.

“I’ve been out here almost 20 years and some of these are realities that you just don’t see in the city,” Earthman said. Still, the hiring of Mike as a village police officer came as a surprise.

“If he’s the only one who took a statement from a suspect or a defendant, that may be an issue.”

“You Are Absolutely Desperate”

The story of how Alaska communities came to quietly hire criminals as police officers, without consequence or oversight, is the story of how cash-poor local governments found themselves without law enforcement and few options.

There are several different forms of police in rural Alaska.

The best trained and best paid are state troopers. More than 300 work across Alaska, but just one-third are based off the road system.

Next is a class of cops unique to Alaska: village public safety officers (VPSOs), who are nearly as well-trained as troopers and are also paid by the state. But the number of VPSOs appears to be at an all-time low, with just 42 officers statewide this year, compared with more than 100 in 2013.

On the same day the federal government announced millions in emergency funds for Alaska rural police in June, Gov. Mike Dunleavy revealed he had vetoed millions from the VPSO program, saying the money was for vacant positions.

Dunleavy, a Republican, has declared a “war on criminals” and vowed to punish sexual predators. “If you hurt Alaskans, if you molest children, if you assault women, we’re really going to come after you,” Dunleavy said at a July 8 crime bill signing.

Asked moments later why the Alaska Police Standards Council has suspended efforts to revamp law enforcement hiring regulations, given that men convicted of sex crimes are working as police in some villages, Dunleavy offered no specifics but said he planned to hold meetings over the summer with “stakeholders.”

Bahnke, the head of the Nome-based nonprofit that employs VPSOs, said that only five of the 15 communities in her region have VPSOs and called on the state to spend unused salaries on equipment, housing and other amenities that would make it easier to recruit new officers.

Alaska Native leaders once sued to force the state to provide armed, trained police in villages, but their lawsuit failed in state court. That leaves VPOs and TPOs to pick up the slack. They tend to be younger, paid less and have less training than traditional police.

VPOs, such as those in Stebbins, are mainly expected to enforce city laws such as curfews and misdemeanors. In practice, however, they must sometimes handle life-and-death encounters such as standoffs and suicide threats. TPOs perform a similar role but are employed by federally recognized tribes and are not regulated by the state.

Of the emergency village law enforcement funding announced in June by the attorney general, $4.5 million will go to hire tribal officers who will not be required to undergo background checks.

But lack of funding for cops isn’t the only problem. Many villages have no housing for police, no secure jail cells or no public safety building. When Barr visited the state in May to see the problem for himself, he called the lack of services one of the most pressing public safety needs in the United States.

Our review also found that villages have routinely ignored — or said they were unaware of — laws that require training and bar people with certain criminal records from being hired.

Last year, the Daily News reported on isolated cases of people with criminal records working as police in remote Alaska villages. That story focused on a case at the edge of the Arctic Circle, in the tundra village of Selawik, where the city employed an officer who had been convicted of bootlegging and faced a pending charge of giving alcohol to a minor when he sexually assaulted an underage girl. The 16-year-old died the night of the attack, and the city settled a subsequent wrongful death lawsuit for $300,000. (The officer pleaded guilty to rape and furnishing alcohol to a minor in that case but was not charged in her death. He has not responded to numerous interview requests.)

What happened in Selawik is far from an isolated example, our comprehensive examination shows. Between January and May, ProPublica and the Daily News identified 50 city and tribal governments that employ officers. Some would not provide names, but of the 159 officers identified, more than 42 have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to assault or another crime, most often domestic violence, that is typically a bar to working in law enforcement.

Leaders in some communities, including Stebbins, say they have little alternative but to hire anyone they can.

“It’s easy to look at in that light, ‘How could these people hire criminals to do this job?’” said Jason Wilson, public safety manager for several Southeast Alaska villages.

“When you live in a community and you’re desperate, you are absolutely desperate for some law enforcement and to have somebody step up that might have a blemished record, you are willing to say, ‘OK, I think person is still going to do OK for us.’”

Asked if the criminal backgrounds of some TPOs and VPOs hamper investigations or undermine prosecutors’ cases, Alaska’s Public Safety Commissioner Amanda Price said the local officers are vital to fighting crime in far-flung communities.

“Our troopers regularly say that, while tomorrow they might have to arrest a VPO or a TPO, today they are critical,” Price said.

“He Was Our Only Applicant”

In village after village, troubling examples abound.

In Mountain Village, population 864, one recent VPO awaits trial on charges of stealing from a murder scene. Court records show five other recent VPOs in the same Yukon River community are awaiting hearings or have admitted to criminal charges including four counts of disorderly conduct, three counts of assault, two cases of neglect, two cases of drunken driving, two charges of harassment and three cases of domestic violence.

Along the Norton Sound coast, the city of Shaktoolik in May hired a VPO who has pleaded guilty to five assault charges within the past 10 years. “He was our only applicant so we had no other choice,” a city employee said.

Among those hired as TPOs in the fishing villages of Kasigluk and Tuntutuliak, located among the vast web of river-fed lakes in western Alaska, are registered sex offenders who admitted to abuse of a minor or attempted sexual abuse of a minor. The Kasigluk tribal administrator said he was directed by the tribal council not to talk to a reporter about the issue. In Tuntutuliak, Administrator Deanna White said the village council was willing to hire an offender on a part-time basis because of constant turnover and a lack of applicants in the high-stress job.

“Every time we hired, they wouldn’t last,” she said.

In the Kuskokwim Bay village of Kwigillingok, a 33-year-old man worked as a tribal police officer while subject to a long-term domestic violence restraining order. He was indicted in February on charges of sexually abusing an 11-year-old and is awaiting trial in a Bethel jail. He has pleaded not guilty.

And in the nearby Kuskokwim River village of Napakiak, recent police hires include William Gibson Smith as a TPO.

Smith was picked to patrol the village despite a complaint filed two years earlier by a young mother whose 3-year-old daughter told her that her bottom hurt. The girl later confided that Smith had touched her there, according to an application for a sexual assault restraining order filed in Bethel court. Based on a “preponderance of the evidence,” a magistrate ordered that Smith, who was not present at the hearing, stay away from the family. (Such an order is not automatically disqualifying, but the regulations say candidates must be of “good moral character.”)

Despite the judge’s orders, a matter of public record and discoverable on a public court database, Smith was hired to perform police work in Napakiak. He had the power to place his neighbors in custody and to hold them against their will if he declared them to be drunk or disorderly. In October, the Alaska State Troopers arrested Smith on charges of having sex with a different underage girl, and he has been in custody since. Today he is awaiting trial in that case and in another, in which he was charged with sexually assaulting a woman in police custody. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

In Stebbins, Louise Martin said she knows all too well the toll that officers with criminal records can take on a town. She recently filed a restraining order against a current city police officer, accusing the man of threatening her in person and through Facebook messages in which he said he would beat her up. Prior to his hire, the officer had been convicted of domestic violence and bootlegging.

“For him to be a cop, he shouldn’t be acting like this, especially if there’s kids + elders around,” Martin wrote in her application for the restraining order. An initial order was granted but a longer-term one was denied because Martin did not participate at a hearing.

Martin grew up in Stebbins and isn’t unsympathetic to the needs of the village. “They need a trooper in town.” But she said the city cops “hide behind their badge and harass people and drink on the job.”

One of the Worst Jobs in Town

Stebbins, an Inupiaq and Yup’ik village, survived a generation of monstrous sexual abuse by a Catholic priest and church volunteers. It is plagued by 12% unemployment, and its lone grocery store charges twice as much for food as it costs in Anchorage. As the lack of police data regarding missing and murdered indigenous women raises concerns nationwide, residents of Stebbins and neighboring Saint Michael say the suspicious death of a local woman, 19-year-old Chynelle “Pretty” Lockwood, in 2017 remains unsolved.

The city offers no benefits to part-time officers who walk into life-and-death emergencies. They are untrained and unarmed, their only equipment a cellphone and a pair of handcuffs. The police department, like most homes, has no flush toilets or running water.

Next to hauling waste, residents say being a cop is one of the worst jobs in town. In 2001, the mayor of Stebbins was shot in the face as part of a robbery scheme involving a 20-year-old man who had been working as a VPO despite jail sentences for assault and animal cruelty.

“I was not very fond of that [hire] in the first place,” then-Mayor Robert Ferris told the Daily News at the time, having survived the shooting. But, he reasoned, “In a place like this you take any help you can get.”

After serving time in prison for his role in the mayor’s shooting, the former VPO returned to Stebbins and was eventually hired back by the city as a police officer, current city officials said.

Little has changed in recent years.

“Other people don’t want to apply,” said the current Stebbins city administrator, Joan Nashoanak, when asked why her local government has hired so many VPOs with criminal backgrounds. “They are willing to work.”

In Alaska’s largest city, the Anchorage Police Department receives 18 applications for every cop it hires. Each recruit is subject to criminal background checks, drug tests and polygraphs.

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“It’s incredibly important for our department to uphold those standards because they are key to upholding the public’s trust in law enforcement,” said APD Chief Justin Doll, who serves on the Alaska Police Standards Council board. “If the public looks at a law enforcement officer and sees a lengthy criminal background, it undermines that trust.”

Anchorage police pay starts at $33.61 an hour plus benefits, retirement and a union.

In Stebbins, Nashoanak said it’s impossible to avoid candidates with a felony or a misdemeanor within the past five years, who should be prohibited from serving as cops by law, because of constant burnout and turnover. Officers are paid $14 an hour.

Factor in small-town politics and the pressure to look the other way when an influential person or family gets in trouble, and it’s easy to see why officers are constantly quitting.

“It’s a problem, but it’s never really been addressed,” Nashoanak said. “We can’t find anybody else without a criminal background.”

A former city administrator, Doreen Tom, says she has complained to the city about the officers’ conduct and rap sheets.

“These guys are criminals,” Tom said of the VPOs. “There’s qualifications to be a police. What you can’t be and what you can be. You can’t have a misdmeanor within five years and these policemen, there’s police who were charged with rape. People who were charged with assault.”

One recent Stebbins VPO is 24-year-old Harold Kitsick Jr., who has worked off and on over the past year despite a conviction for spitting in the face of a police officer in nearby Kotlik in 2013. The victim in that case said Kitsick had threatened to kill him, his 6-year-old child and his wife and vowed to burn down his house. The Kotlik officer said that he could smell gasoline around his home and that he waited out the night with a gun handy, afraid for his life.

Reached by phone, Kitsick denied that he threatened the police officer but admitted to attacking him. “I assaulted him, I hit him. I spit on him and kicked him. That was it.”

The Kotlik VPO quit being a police officer soon after the encounter with Kitsick. He asked not to be identified because his wife still works in the region. He, too, was a VPO with a criminal record, he said. The city of Kotlik recruited him despite an assault charge that should have prevented him from being hired under state law.

“There’s really no background checks to it,” he said.

Stebbins city records show Kitsick stopped working as a police officer on May 28 after two years on patrol. He sometimes tried looking for different work with better pay and more hours, he said, but jobs are scarce in the village.

“Then [the city] asked me to go back. I was, like, ‘Well, might as well,’” said Kitsick, who is currently awaiting trial on two new charges. Troopers accused him of punching a woman in the face and punching fellow Stebbins VPO John Aluska in two separate 2018 incidents. He has pleaded not guilty to both.

Aluska, who himself was convicted of domestic violence in 2010 and 2014, said he hasn’t been in trouble in years and is part of a roster of about seven officers who some Stebbins residents said work well together.

“The current ones we have are pretty good,” Stebbins health aide Tania Snowball said of the police force. While she spoke, Snowball cleaned a gleaming chum salmon, hauled moments earlier from the Bering Sea. “The ones in the past, they never answered their phones.”

As a health aide, Snowball said she partners with VPOs. If there were no police — or if the city couldn’t hire people with criminal records — Snowball said there would be no one to assist her in emergencies such as suicide attempts or shootings. She would quit the clinic.

“You have to have somebody help respond, because most of the people that call are intoxicated. There’s four-wheeler accidents or serious injuries,” she said. “VPOs gotta be available.”

“I’m a Pretty Good Cop”

A few hours after the health aide finished cutting fish along the foaming shoreline, Aluska began the midnight to 4 a.m. patrol. Rain beaded on his four-wheeler, a Honda shared by the entire police force.

Aluska circled the village in a wide loop. There are no stop lights and no paved roads in Stebbins. Most homes rest on stilts; red foxes and berry bushes hide in the knee-high grass. All groceries and vehicles arrive by plane or barge, and trailer-sized shipping containers in primary colors dot the yards. Aluska has lived here all his life.

“Go home!” he hollered to a crowd of middle-school-age kids outside the gymnasium. More than 40% of the village population is younger than 19, and parents said it’s hard to keep them indoors this time of year, when the sun dips low and red but never really sets.

“Don’t make me tell you again,” Aluska warned. A boy in a hoodie shuffled his feet, walking with exaggerated slowness.

The Honda engine clicked and popped as he turned off the ignition. The real trouble usually starts later. Everyone knows when the VPOs go off duty.

If someone is driving drunk, getting in fights or becomes a danger to themselves, they are held in one of three cells in the city jail. The building used to be a library, but it was converted when someone broke the fuel line at the old jail house, soaking the building in heating oil.

Aluska likes the new jailhouse. No one has broken out yet.

“In my time it was easier,” Aluska said.

The 42-year-old said he got into his share of trouble when he was younger. Making homebrew. Escaping custody. “It’s been years ago now since I last went to jail.”

Asked if he had ever been convicted of domestic violence, Aluska said he had, in 1998, but the charge was dropped. State court records show he also pleaded guilty to domestic violence-related assault charges in 2010 and 2014.

Aluska doesn’t think his record makes him any less able to keep the village safe. Same for his colleagues.

“Not really,” he said. “I get a call and, if you’re drunk and doing bad things, I’ll come get you.”

The next afternoon the rain disappeared, replaced by a damp heat that sent kids splashing between gillnets.

At city hall, the Stebbins City Council gathered for a monthly meeting. Chairs ringed a cafeteria table beneath property maps of village landmarks: The Old Church. The Elder Center. The New School. Skin drums and a bingo scoreboard (proceeds help pay police salaries) adorned the adjacent community hall.

One by one, the police officers gave monthly reports and brainstormed public safety ideas. Officer Delbert Acoman suggested police begin wearing small body cameras purchased from Amazon; the police chief admitted he can’t bring himself to shoot dogs when an animal needs to be put down. One officer who is the subject of a current restraining order wondered about turning a vacant building into a teen center.

At 45, Acoman said he’s worked as a Stebbins police officer off and on for two decades. During that time, court records show, he has been convicted of a dozen crimes, including three counts of domestic violence. His last no-contest plea to assault came five years ago and Acoman said he’s turned a corner — trying to provide for his wife and kids. A steady job makes that possible.

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Acoman headed home as his colleagues prepared for overnight patrols. Middle schoolers chased rebounds on an outdoor basketball court as two young men sat wrenching on a four-wheeler, fanning mosquitoes.

At the edge of town lives Nimeron Mike, the registered sex offender. While he was working as a police officer he could never shake the feeling that visiting state troopers might take him away to jail, instead of the people he arrested.

Mike said he is ready to go back on patrol any time the city needs him. He figures street smarts must count for something.

“I’ve done my time, now all I want to do is work and make money,” he said. “I’m a pretty good cop.”

For now, the state of Alaska hasn’t caught up with Mike’s change in job status. The official state sex offender registry database still lists his employer as “City of Stebbins.”

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Sen. Ron Johnson, Dem Cory Booker team up to ‘Ban the Box’ to aid ex-cons’ job search  Madison.com

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has teamed up with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., to “Ban the Box,” a nationwide initiative that aims to remove …

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Travis Heckenberg did not own any tools when he first came to work for T&D Repair in Burlington a few years ago.

The 47-year-old Burlington resident did, however, carry a conviction for manufacturing methamphetamine and other crimes, including assault and burglary.

Heckenberg attributed his criminal past to “falling in with the wrong people” and said he resolved to turn his life around while serving a 33-and-a-half-month prison sentence. That was after losing his house, his wife and “everything I built up my entire life.”

A loaner toolbox and a second chance from T&D Repair helped Heckenberg successfully re-enter his community as a law-abiding resident. Today he is self-employed and customizes motorcycles for a living.

Analysts interviewed for this report say Iowa’s employers could see similar results, and more easily fill vacant positions, if more of them followed T&D’s lead and open their doors to former prison inmates-turned-job seekers.

With the state’s unemployment rate lodged at just 2.4 percent as of May 2019, the number of resumes sent in to employers is shrinking, leaving businesses with fewer options for filling key positions.

Iowa employers had 69,994 job openings listed as of May with Iowa Jobs, a database Iowa Workforce Development oversees, for a variety of positions such as retail, repair workers, truck drivers and food servers.

State data shows about 40,700 Iowans were unemployed in April 2019.

But a mix of legal and personal concerns keep some employers from turning to candidates with criminal backgrounds as a solution to their workforce needs, the analysts say.

But representatives from other businesses, where officials have taken a more individualized approach with job seekers, say those concerns largely are unfounded, and the reward far outweighs the risk when it comes to hiring such candidates.

The red tape treatment

After leaving prison, Heckenberg recalled undergoing about 30 interviews over a two-year period before landing the job with T&D Repair.

“If they didn’t know my criminal history (during most job interviews), I had no problem talking with anybody or being friendly,” he said. “Once they find out you have a criminal history, they just shun you.”

Heckenberg’s experience is far from unique among former inmates.

Edward Ailey-Roberson, 61, of Ankeny, said he has become content as a stay-at-home husband after a lack of success in finding a long-term job, since his position at a window supplier was eliminated in April 2016.

The trilingual former Marine said he still has motivation to work, but his experience in interviews leads him to believe he has “the right skills in the wrong package.”

“If I said ‘voluntary manslaughter,’ that application was balled up and thrown in the trash, regardless of whether we talked (in an interview) or not,” Ailey-Roberson said.

Ailey-Roberson pleaded guilty to that charge in September 2009, following a house party fight where he punched a man and knocked him to the concrete, resulting in the man’s death.

During his approximately four and a half years of incarceration, Ailey-Roberson said he turned to God to fill what he described as a “void” that had opened in his life. Since leaving prison, he said he has not fought, gotten drunk or had any police interaction.

“We just need to take a different point of view of what a felon is,” Ailey-Roberson said. “Yeah, he’s made a mistake, but he’s also forgivable. God forgave us, and he talks about that.”

‘A transformation’

As director of the not-for-profit America’s Job Honors Program, based in Des Moines, Kyle Horn highlights people and companies that defy barriers to employment. In 2016, Horn wrote a series of questions for a survey on employer attitudes toward hiring candidates with criminal backgrounds, which Iowa Workforce Development distributed to thousands of companies as part of its annual Workforce Needs Assessment.

Though the state agency never published the results, Horn said he found the answers noteworthy in terms of measuring employers’ most pressing concerns about hiring former inmates.

Out of 5,973 Iowa employers, the largest plurality — at 1,504 companies, or 25.4 percent of respondents — answered that they were concerned about potential liability for negligent hiring, if an ex-offender were to harm a co-worker or a client.

The next most recurring concern, for 1,317 or 22.4 percent of responding companies, was potential non-compliance with industry standards or government regulations. That was followed by the concern for damage to the company’s reputation, for 1,194 or 20.2 percent of companies.

Out of 9,761 state employers, 3,595 companies, or 36.9 percent, had either a formal or “unwritten” policy prohibiting or restricting them from hiring applicants with certain criminal convictions. An additional 1,599 companies, or 16.4 percent, were not sure, while the remaining 4,567 companies, or 46.8 percent, had no such policy.

Horn said he believes that, unless candidates can demonstrate that they have “undergone a transformation,” an employer could reasonably conclude their past behavior will continue and legitimately reject them.

But other employers, Horn said, might indiscriminately reject all candidates with criminal backgrounds to “over-comply” and avoid any legal risk, or because of decades-old company tradition.

“In many cases, there are policies against hiring returning citizens that came down from the ivory tower decades ago, and those policies arose in an entirely different environment, with employment rates at twice their current levels,” Horn said.

Frontier Co-op CEO Tony Bedard said his Norway-based company is open to hiring candidates with criminal backgrounds, with a few exceptions — for example, convicted sex offenders could not be hired because of the company’s on-site child care.

Bedard said Frontier Co-op has had great success in recruiting at events geared toward connecting employers and ex-offenders, including Second Chance job fairs, but some companies might just attend the events to “check a box.”

Ex-offenders previously have told recruiters that Frontier was one of the few companies that showed legitimate interest in hiring them from such events, Bedard said.

“I found that kind of striking but that being said, it is a big jump for companies,” Bedard said, of hiring candidates with criminal backgrounds. “A lot of people are conservative, and it’s going to take time for a lot of these kind of things to take hold.”

Cut-and-dried human resources policies and the stigma around ex-offenders often are the biggest barriers to more companies hiring those candidates, said Dane Sulentic, apprenticeship coordinator for the Iowa Department of Corrections.

While Sulentic said he can understand employers’ hesitance, depending on the offenses, the companies ought to “dig deeper” and judge candidates on a case-by-case basis — and as a resource for meeting Iowa’s workforce needs rather than as a last stop.

“Now, with the (unemployment) rate so low, you have to start looking outside the box,” Sulentic said. “I think what they (the companies) are starting to realize is, ‘Wow, there are really skilled individuals in here that, even if we’re not hiring, we need to stay in contact … . Maybe we don’t have something open right now, but in a couple of months, we could.’”

An alternate approach

More Americans have found themselves on the wrong side of the law than one might assume.

Approximately 70 million Americans, or close to one in three adults, have some type of arrest record, the National Employment Law Project estimates.

Approximately 2.3 million people are locked up nationwide, across federal and state prisons and local jails, the Prison Policy Initiative think tank found in 2018. Federal statistics show at least 95 percent of state prisoners will be released at some point.

Iowa’s nine prisons had 8,483 inmates as of June 21, with an additional 40,678 people involved in community-based corrections, including probation, parole or other special sentences.

T& D Repair owner David Dingman said he started his business 14 years ago after suffering a workplace injury and undergoing surgery. Told he would never again work as a mechanic, Dingman remained unemployed for about a year-and-a-half before deciding to open a small repair shop so he could teach others.

Dingman said he always has hired people who similarly might not have had “a fighting chance” at finding a job because they are “frowned upon or handicapped” in some way. This has included a number of ex-offenders over the years, including five members of his current 14-person repair crew, he said.

Dingman is willing to give any ex-offender a chance regardless of their charges, starting at $15 an hour for a few weeks, “as long as they’re willing to learn from their mistake and move forward.”

“Now, if they’re riding that fence, and they don’t know, I tell them don’t bother,” he added. “I always tell people, ‘The hand I offer you up is connected to the foot that’s going to put you back in jail if you ever so much as think about reviolating.’”

But aside from one or two employees who violated parole conditions, Dingman said he has not had any problems with his hires.

Employing ex-offenders, and training them while they’re in prison, also reduces their likelihood of returning to prison, said Tim Diesburg, who helped found Iowa’s prison apprenticeship program at the Anamosa prison in 2014.

“If we lock (the inmates) up and don’t do anything with them, they get out and victimize someone again,” Diesburg said.

“The best way to help a victim is to help that person (the inmate) never victimize anybody again. It’s a really good feeling to be able to accomplish.”

In fiscal 2018, state officials recorded a 37.8 percent recidivism rate for Iowa inmates returning to prison within three years of a previous release.

That year, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found, across 30 states including Iowa, 68 percent of released state inmates were rearrested within three years, with the rate rising to 79 percent and 83 percent over six and nine years, respectively.

Michael Willoughby, 34, did not go back to prison after serving a 14-year sentence for armed robbery. Rather, he landed a job at Frontier Co-op before his sentence ended, after graduating with the highest GPA in state apprenticeship program history.

Willoughby now is married and with a young child, and owns a house and cars in Marion, because of the second chance he was afforded.

“They ignored that aspect” of his background during interviews at Frontier Co-op, he said. “It was different because I’m used to the impersonal approach of being just ‘the convict’ or ‘the inmate with the record.’ I was treated in a rather human fashion, which was very uplifting.”

Sean Rambow, 18, of Burlington, was set to serve a week in jail in mid-May for unlawfully carrying a firearm, and then return to work at T&D Repair, where he started employment in the middle of his legal process.

“I’ve been here about a month, and I’ve learned quite a bit and changed my life around for the better,” Rambow said.

“I’m not doing anything stupid anymore. … This job means the world to me.”

The bill opens doors

Encouraging “second-chance hiring” of people with criminal records has stood out as a priority for state officials this year.

Gov. Kim Reynolds signed House File 650 in April, following unanimous votes from state senators and representatives, to set a safeguard for private employers that hire ex-offenders.

Employers now are protected from lawsuits based solely on an employee’s past conviction, with exceptions for violent offenses and crimes the employee committed while performing duties “substantially similar” to those of their new job.

“This bill opens doors for Iowans who deserve a second chance by protecting the job creators extending a helping hand,” Reynolds said at the time.

Both the state and federal government already offer tax incentives to businesses that hire former inmates.

Iowa employers can deduct 65 percent of an ex-offender’s first 12 months of wages from their state income taxes, with a maximum deduction of up to $20,000 per employee.

State businesses also can net $2,400 per ex-felon through a federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit, provided they’re hired within a year of being convicted or released from prison, and insure themselves up to $5,000 for the employee’s first six months on the job through the Federal Bonding Program.

• Comments: (319) 398-8366; thomas.friestad@thegazette.com

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Columbia City Council has given a first approval to a measure formalizing its practice of not asking a prospective employee’s criminal history on an initial job application. 

The city also gave an initial vote on an ordinance that would encourage vendors who do business with the city to adopt the same policy in regard to criminal inquiries on applications.

The practice of omitting a criminal history question on an application is commonly known as “banning the box.” Numerous counties and municipalities across the country have been choosing to eliminate the question of a person’s criminal history from initial job applications. Richland County Council voted to establish such a policy in early June. 

The theory is that, if an employer sees on an application that a person has a criminal background, they could develop an opinion about that person before ever taking a closer look into their qualifications and abilities. Banning the box could help in eliminating that initial barrier.

The City of Columbia has been practicing “ban the box” in its own internal hiring practices for about three years, according to Assistant City Manager Missy Gentry. The new proposal would formally make it city law, and takes the extra step of encouraging the entities that do business with the city to follow the same practices.

“If we’re going to live within certain values, then we are going to ask the people we do business with to do so, as well,” Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin tells Free Times. “It’s a hard move in the right direction. We are facing a reality right now that, across this country, even with record low unemployment, there are still so many of our citizens who are not able to access the job market because of previous mistakes. There are as many people in this country with criminal records as those who have college degrees.

“So, the opportunity to create pathways to full participation in the American economy, we are committed to it.”

District 4 Councilman Daniel Rickenmann voted in favor of the city’s recent ban the box move, but did so with caution, saying he wants more discussion before a final vote on the item at Council’s next meeting. 

“Second chances are great,” Rickenmann said. “Everybody deserves it. We’ve all had them. But the offenders that are out there today are multiple times. Our court systems are releasing people left and right on the majority of the crimes that we are seeing.

“I believe we ought to give the person the opportunity, the benefit of the doubt. My concern is, what’s the next step?”

Benjamin stresses that people who work for the city will have a background check before they are hired. 

“We have sensitive positions, parks and rec employees, anyone who interfaces with seniors, first responders and the like,” the mayor says. “You couldn’t allow someone to go work in the accounting department who has embezzlement issues. So, yes, they will [have a background check]. But after they have had the chance to show that they are qualified and the type of candidate you want for a job.”

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“While BTB is the most visible approach to signal support for reintegration, it is perhaps not the most effective way to bring about substantial criminal justice reform and truly help ex-felons build a new life.”

^In January, some Duke University classmates and I were asked by the North Carolina Governor’s Office to write a memo about how to incentivize employers to hire more formerly incarcerated people. For a month, we researched several common policy options, including tax credits, staffing agencies’ guarantees, Ban the Box (BTB), post-conviction certificate, and support of state contractors that employ ex-felons. BTB is, of course, the recent grassroots effort that aims to stop employers from asking candidates about their criminal history on a job application form until later in the hiring process. In the end, we decided to drop BTB, which was and still is the most popular approach, and instead recommend supplementing federal tax incentives, along with expanding access to rehabilitation certificates and prioritizing contractors who hire ex-offenders.

About a week after we submitted the memo, we had a call with the correspondent from the Governor’s Office who told us that they are actually deep into the process of considering banning the box. She did not mention that they wanted to look at any of the other policies we had proposed to help with ex-felon employment. We walked out of that call feeling a little down and confused.

The hope of BTB is that employers can give ex-offenders an opportunity to tell their stories and prove themselves beyond what their history presumes. The movement has caught on. As of 2018, 33 states have officially banned the box, and over 150 cities have taken the initiative to adopt this policy at the municipal level. Although North Carolina has not adopted statewide BTB laws yet, many cities and counties, including Asheville, Buncombe, Carrboro, Charlotte, Cumberland County, Durham, Durham County, Forsyth, Mecklenburg, Spring Lake, Wake County, Wilmington and Winston-Salem, have banned the box on public-sector job applications.

Moreover, though BTB fulfills the public’s desire to expand civil rights and liberties, it still preserves the social and political ordering that pins ex-offenders as second-class citizens. In this sense, BTB is like a window dressing and shifts our attention away from demanding more comprehensive reintegration reforms.

However, at the time of our research, findings about BTB were mostly dominated by criticisms of its unintended negative consequences. In 2016, one study done by Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr from Princeton University created fictitious job applications for private-sector positions in New York City and New Jersey and found that BTB significantly increased the racial gap in callbacks from 7% to 43%. White applicants are much more favored than racial minorities after BTB because employers start using racial stereotyping as a substitute of criminal history.

Published around the same time, another study, conducted by Jennifer L. Doleac from University of Virginia and Benjamin Hansen from University of Oregon, covered both private and public sectors and found that “banning the box” lowered employment for young, low-skilled black men by 5%. These researchers believe that removing employers’ access to job applicants’ criminal record does not remove employers’ desire to still want to know, thus inviting racial profiling. 

Although these findings are not universally supported, they have indeed shed some light on the impact of BTB laws. While BTB is the most visible approach to signal support for reintegration, it is perhaps not the most effective way to bring about substantial criminal justice reform and truly help ex-felons build a new life. 

The problem with BTB is that it doesn’t directly address employers’ concerns when it comes to hiring formerly incarcerated people. Even though some ex-offenders might be able to build rapport with employers during interviews, many companies are still held back by concerns for workplace productivity and risks of lawsuits. BTB by itself also doesn’t help ex-felons acquire more skills or pursue further education to make up for the schooling and vocational training they might have missed. Under BTB, even the lucky ones who are able to find a job are often locked into low-skilled labor work and continued cycles of poverty. Thus, BTB remains largely symbolic. The reason why it can get easily passed is that it demands very little from both the companies and the government. Employers are still free to discriminate against ex-offenders—just not right away—while governments don’t have to invest money and human resources in more comprehensive reintegration efforts. Moreover, though BTB fulfills the public’s desire to expand civil rights and liberties, it still preserves the social and political ordering that pins ex-offenders as second-class citizens. In this sense, BTB is like a window dressing and shifts our attention away from demanding more comprehensive reintegration reforms.

But that is not the original purpose of BTB. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. According to Dorsey Nunn, a co-leader of the movement, “We decided to push Ban the Box to organize people with criminal records, not the other way around, meaning we did not organize people with records to only pass Ban the Box policies. That was not our primary objective. For us the larger objective was to get people with criminal records to become organized and active in the fight against mass incarceration and the second-class status that comes with a criminal record.”

Thus, when we ask employers to keep an open mind in the hiring process, we should also advocate for other visible and straightforward policies to further encourage employers. When we urge the public to give ex-felons a second chance, we should also demand that the topic of criminal justice be given the focus it deserves in the upcoming election. When we applaud the discussions about rehabilitation and reform that BTB has opened up for us, we must not forget the bigger picture of pushing politicians and lawmakers to end mass incarceration and injustices.

Eva Hong is a student at Duke University and an intern at Merion West. 

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From a DUI charge to petty theft, successful job searching with a criminal record is definitely an uphill battle. Many convicted felons strive to obtain a job as it provides financial security and the greater possibility of restoring your record. Luckily, more and more industries are opening up and hiring citizens with records.

Criminal Background Checks

Criminal background checks are pretty universal among businesses, which means employers will most likely review your background. According to a study from the Society for Human Resource Management, managers are willing to hire employees with records if they have solid references, outstanding job performance, and a certificate of rehabilitation. Businesses don’t merely run background checks to fulfill some idle curiosity about your past—if an employer didn’t go over an individual’s background and that person commits a violent or illegal act on their premises, the company may be held liable.

Accessing Documentation

The Public Access to Court Electronic Records system makes federal court documents available online, enabling employers to see whether you’ve been involved in criminal court cases. However, most states put limits on what an employer can check. They can enact restrictions that only allow businesses to see felonies and not misdemeanors as well as only making records from the last five available. For those put under arrest but not convicted, employers can still access arrests via the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

Though the outlook for job employment with a criminal record is looking more promising, there are a few industries which will not hire those with a record. Former criminals will likely not receive jobs working in education and working among children, especially those with offenses that involve minors. Individuals with a criminal record will also find it difficult to get work within the government, hold public office, or join the police force. If your arrest or conviction relates to the job you are seeking, it will probably negatively affect your chances of getting the job. For example, a car theft conviction will probably not look good if you’re applying to be a car mechanic.

Although people with a criminal record have some constraints when it comes to finding employment, many individuals are working to make a positive change. The Fair Chance Business Pledge initiative, which Facebook, Starbucks, American Airlines, and a few American universities signed, is fighting to provide job opportunities for convicted felons when they re-enter society—learn more about the pledge and how you can join.

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NEW ORLEANS – The sun glowed gold, and a second line parade was tuning its horns just a few streets away. But Danielle Metz had missed half her life already, and she couldn’t spare the afternoon, even one as unseasonably warm as this mid-February Sunday.

She climbed the stairs to the shotgun house her mom had bought in uptown New Orleans more than half a century ago. Metz slipped through the screen door, then shut it tight enough to keep out the sun. Inside, she dug through a box next to her bed and pulled out the clothbound journal that a woman had given her in 1996, when they were both incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin, California. Metz hadn’t kept much from the 23 years she spent in prison, but the journal had been too special to leave behind. She opened it and read the dedication as a reminder of what she hoped to accomplish now that she was out.

“To Danielle — There’s so many things we can’t get in here, but knowledge and education can’t be kept out by walls.”

Metz set the journal down on her glass coffee table and opened the Dell laptop she’d received as a perk from the community health job she worked during the week. Just two years earlier, Metz had barely known how to use a computer, but now, her pink-polished fingernails moved easy across the keys. She searched for Southern University’s New Orleans campus, and the school’s baby-blue website loaded. Metz looked for a moment at the home-page photograph, a row of black professionals smiling back at her. The man in the middle had been the one who suggested she apply.

Growing up, Metz had believed that college was for white kids and for “Huxtables” — black people she named after the upper-middle-class family in “The Cosby Show.” She knew, as she looked at the laptop screen, how improbable people might think earning a degree would be for her now. She’d dropped out of high school her junior year. At 26, a judge had sentenced Metz to three life sentences plus another 20 years for her role in her husband’s cocaine distribution. She’d thought she’d never see New Orleans again, let alone visit a university.

Even after President Barack Obama granted her clemency in 2016, Metz believed she couldn’t go to college. Nationwide, less than 4 percent of formerly incarcerated people have a bachelor’s degree, according to a report released last year. The chances seemed especially low in Metz’s home state. Louisiana had long held twin records, the world’s highest incarceration rate, and the country’s lowest rate of black college graduates. Put together, this meant tens of thousands of residents lacked a viable pathway to middle-class security.

But lawmakers had come to believe that a change was imperative for the state’s future. In 2017, Louisiana became the first state in the nation to “ban the box” on public college and university applications, prohibiting school officials from asking whether an applicant has a criminal record. Metz knew that people across the country were working to help people like her go to college after prison. Though Illinois and New York failed to pass “ban the box” measures for university applications, several other states are trying to follow Louisiana’s lead. And federal lawmakers from both parties are pushing to allow incarcerated people to access Pell Grants, financial aid that they’ve been barred from using since Metz first went to prison.

Metz was grateful for the legal shifts, but political momentum alone would not carry her through school. As the parade began its march through Uptown, she scrolled through the university’s website and hovered over the tab marked “current students.” She had no idea how long it would take or how much it might cost, but Metz didn’t care. She was going to college.

Related: Will thousands of prison inmates lose access to college?

Metz grew up the youngest of nine children in a city barreling toward chaos. As a kid, she considered herself lucky. Both of her parents worked — her father as a cement finisher, her mother in a bakery — and together they earned enough to buy a home three miles away from the St. Thomas Projects, a public housing development where many other black families lived. St. Thomas was so poor and violent when Metz was young that Sister Helen Prejean described the neighborhood in the opening of her book “Dead Man Walking” as “not death row exactly, but close.”

Even as a little girl, Metz knew people who’d gone to jail, but her neighborhood was quiet, and her parents were dreamers. For years, her father urged her to become a nurse. Metz knew the job required a college degree, but she didn’t know anyone who’d earned one. In 1980, the year Metz enrolled at Walter L. Cohen High School, more than half the city’s black adults didn’t have even a high school diploma, let alone a university credential.

Instead, Metz longed to become a hairstylist. She’d practiced since she was a little girl on her mom, whose locks grew in so straight that people speculated she must have white ancestors. But even that goal felt unreachable after Metz became pregnant in 1985, her junior year of high school. She dropped out and assumed she wouldn’t have a career. She’d be a mother instead.

Six months after Metz gave birth to her son, Carl, his father was murdered.

Metz became a single mother just as the state’s economy was collapsing. Louisiana had long been dependent on oil — profits from the natural resource accounted for nearly half of the state’s budget then. But the price per barrel began falling in 1981, and by the mid-1980s, one in eight Louisiana workers was unemployed, the highest rate in the nation. New Orleans lost nearly 10,000 jobs, leaving few openings for a teenage mother with no credentials or documentable skills.

Metz didn’t take time to grieve. Most black people in New Orleans knew someone who’d been killed, she said. Instead, she started looking for someone to help raise her child.

Glenn Metz had money. He’d grown up poor in the Calliope housing projects, one of the most violent neighborhoods in New Orleans, but he owned two tow-truck companies by the time Metz met him. At age 30, he possessed the kind of quiet maturity that Metz, then 18, thought would make him a good substitute father for Carl. Glenn Metz wore such nice clothes and jewelry the night Metz met him that she suspected he at least dabbled in drug-dealing, but she told herself his business had nothing to do with her.

According to federal prosecutors, Glenn Metz formed a drug ring just before he met the girl who would become his wife. Between 1985 and 1992, Glenn Metz and his crew came to dominate St. Thomas and Calliope, prosecutors said, distributing more than 1,000 kilos of cocaine and killing 23 rivals. Glenn Metz sat atop an organization manned by more than half a dozen enforcers, two of whom, prosecutors said, drove through town in an armor-plated pickup with the word “homicide” spelled out on the hood in gold letters.

Metz spent most of those years at home. “The Cosby Show” debuted the year she should have graduated high school, and she watched it and its college-based spin-off “A Different World” every week, dreaming of the life she wished she had. She took a few beauty school classes and occasionally cut hair in someone’s home, but Glenn Metz didn’t like when she left the house, she said. They married in 1989, and Metz soon gave birth to their daughter, Gleneisha. Metz didn’t have a social security number or any way to make money on her own. When Glenn Metz told her to ride with her aunt to deliver a few packages to Houston, Metz said, she did it.

Crack cocaine was spreading through black neighborhoods across the country then, and lawmakers blamed the drug for an increase in inner-city violence. New Orleans was especially hard hit. In 1990, the city topped 300 murders for the first time. Nearly every edition of The Times-Picayune that year carried news of cocaine busts. Police arrested scores of black men, including Metz’s older brother, Perry Bernard, for possession. As the city’s murder rate rose to the nation’s highest, investigators worked to take down Glenn Metz. His was the biggest and most violent drug ring in the city, prosecutors said. They indicted him and eight others, including Metz, in the summer of 1992.

Metz, who’d been temporarily living in Las Vegas with her husband before the indictment, fled to Jackson, Mississippi. She rented an apartment near Jackson State University and planned to enroll after the investigation concluded. When police arrested her there in January 1993, Metz figured she’d just get probation. Most people she knew went to jail “seasonally.” Her older brother had drifted in and out before a 1989 arrest netted him 13 years in a state prison.

After crack cocaine became popular, Congress adopted the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, establishing for the first time mandatory minimum sentences triggered by specific quantities of cocaine. The penalties were worse for defendants charged with possession or distribution of crack cocaine, favored by African-Americans, than for those accused of possessing or distributing the powder cocaine primarily used by white people.

But Metz, 25 then, had never had so much as a traffic ticket. She believed her involvement in her husband’s narcotics sales was minimal enough that prosecutors would let her go with a warning. Police did not find any drugs with her, and she was never implicated in any violence.

Instead, federal authorities charged Metz and her co-defendants under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Lawmakers created RICO in the 1970s under President Richard Nixon as a tool to combat the Mafia, but prosecutors increasingly used it in the 1980s to fight drug rings. The charges under RICO carried automatic sentences of life in prison without parole.

The U.S. attorneys who prosecuted her case presented witnesses who were major narcotics suppliers or small-time drug dealers. They testified that Metz had driven packages to Houston for her husband and, on occasion, accepted cash payments and wired money to suppliers. The jury decided she was guilty.

Four months later, in mid-December, U.S. District Judge A.J. McNamara sentenced Metz to three life sentences plus another 20 years in federal prison.

“I hope that by the sentence you receive, others who might be tempted to follow your path of crime will have second thoughts,” McNamara told her.

Louisiana didn’t have a federal prison for women, so authorities sentenced Metz to FCI Dublin, a converted military barrack 35 miles east of San Francisco. As authorities led Metz away in shackles, she realized she would never become a nurse or a hair stylist. She wouldn’t become anything.

“It was as if I died right then and there,” she said.

Related: What does college look like in prison?

If Metz had gone to prison a decade earlier, she might have earned a college degree inside. Since at least 1965, when Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act explicitly granted incarcerated people the right to apply for financial aid, prisons have used what became known as Pell Grants to pay for post-secondary educational programs. By 1994, nine out of every 10 prison systems offered classes for incarcerated people. At FCI Dublin, women were studying English literature, psychology and sociology when Metz first arrived.

Just a few months after a judge sentenced her, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, written by then-Sen. Joseph Biden, which banned incarcerated people from using Pell Grants to pay for college. Prisons across the country discontinued their education programs, and within a year, the number of incarcerated people enrolled in classes declined by 44 percent. By 1998, fewer than 4 percent of incarcerated people were taking post-secondary courses.

Dublin discontinued most of the college courses it had offered before. Debi Campbell, a woman who served time alongside Metz at the federal prison that year, said she and others were devastated by the news. Campbell had been working toward her bachelor’s degree before the prison stopped offering classes.

“There were a lot of us who really wanted to better ourselves,” she said. “But just like that, it was over. We complained, but it was in a bill. Congress passed it, so all we could do was cry.”

After the Pell Grants went away, Dublin offered only a few computer classes and sessions to help women earn their general education diplomas. Officials there told Metz that space in the classes was so limited they had to reserve spots for people who’d eventually get out and could use the education.

Though the federal prison system requires women without a high school degree to earn their GED, Metz said no one pushed her to take the exam her first two years. She might have gone longer without the credential if she hadn’t performed in a slam poetry reading one night in the prison. Marilyn Buck, a radical leftist who went to prison for crimes she committed with the Black Liberation Army, approached Metz after the reading and asked if Metz had her GED. Metz told Buck she was scared of the test. Metz read and wrote well, but she feared numbers.

Buck had earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology at Dublin the year before the ban. She told Metz to meet her early the next morning in the meditation room, and for months after, Buck spent two hours each day guiding Metz through the Algebra she should have learned in high school.

Metz earned her GED in December 1996, nearly three years after she went to prison. The other incarcerated women hosted a makeshift graduation, and one gave Metz the clothbound journal, which she’d ordered special from a bookstore in town. That night, just before bed, Metz recorded her thoughts in a loopy cursive.

“No one knows the joy that I feel in my heart,” she wrote. “This is only the beginning of a new start for me.”

Earning a GED, Metz told other women, was the best feeling a person could have inside a prison. She’d accomplished something even after she and other people believed her life was over. Metz wanted to do more, but she found herself still limited by the lack of classes offered at FCI Dublin. She tried for years to get into a computer graphics course, she said, but an official overseeing the sign-up sheet scoffed.

“What do you want it for?” Metz remembers him saying. “You’re never leaving here anyway. You’re going to leave out of here in a body bag.”

Eventually, Metz secured a spot in the class. She learned to make charts and use Microsoft Word. When she wasn’t in class, she tried to create her own curriculum. She watched the news and wrote poems about the headlines. She studied sports broadcasters and practiced as if she’d one day be reporting from the field.

In her journal, Metz acknowledged that she might never get out to use the knowledge she’d tried hard to gain. But so much of her life had turned out differently than she’d expected, she wrote.

“I never thought I’d be in prison serving a life sentence, but I am, and I never thought I would get my GED, but I did,” she wrote. “Now I’m in prison fighting, trying to win my freedom back. I don’t know how I will do it. All I know is it will be done.”

Metz appealed her sentence and wrote letters to politicians who might help commute it. One decade passed, then another, and Metz stopped writing in her journal. Much of her life was marked by absence; she had few successes to record. Her older sister had agreed to raise Metz’s children in California so they could visit her more frequently, but Metz missed her son’s basketball games and her daughter’s dance recitals. She couldn’t attend either of their high school graduations or Gleneisha’s wedding.

When Obama took office, Metz believed her time had come. This president looked like her, she thought. He would understand what white leaders hadn’t. A few years into his first term, Obama began granting clemency to people who, like Metz, had been sentenced for nonviolent drug offenses. By the end of Obama’s second term, he’d granted more people clemency than any of the last 10 presidents. But every time Obama released a list of clemency recipients, and Metz’s name wasn’t on it, she retreated to her room, sure she couldn’t go on.

“He’s going to be leaving,” she thought. “If my name don’t show up, I’m going to be stuck here.”

Parents, friends and activists tried to help. They held vigils and made videos detailing her plight. Federal Bureau of Prison staff members submitted recommendation letters on her behalf, and in 2015, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana wrote to the Department of Justice to say his office no longer believed Metz should remain in prison.

Finally, in the summer of 2016, Dublin’s warden called Metz to his office. The president had agreed to release Metz. That August, just a few months before leaving office, Obama granted Metz and 324 other people clemency — the most any president had ever signed in a single month.

Metz gave away most of the possessions she’d acquired in prison. She let other women have the white jeans and colorful sweat suits she’d brought before the prison changed its rules, outlawing civilian clothing. She left behind her eyeglasses and all of her hair accessories, but she kept the journal. Its opening pages were proof, she thought, of what she’d accomplished inside. The back half remained empty, space left to document the life Metz had thought she’d never get to live.

Related: ‘What haunts me is how easily everyone could picture us behind bars’

Metz lived in a halfway house when she first returned to New Orleans. Catholic Charities hired her for an AmeriCorps job packing food boxes for low-income senior citizens, and she was grateful for the work. She’d earned only 29 cents an hour cooking meals in the prison cafeteria. The AmeriCorps job gave her a stipend and a $2,200 scholarship to put toward her education. But Metz spent months unsure if she’d be able to use the scholarship.

She knew a few people who’d gone to college after prison. Her older brother had even earned his master’s degree in criminal justice after he finished his 13-year sentence, but he’d always been the smartest of the nine kids. Metz worried she didn’t have the same special aptitude.

One of the activists who’d helped Metz fight for clemency, Syrita Steib-Martin, had also attended the University of New Orleans after serving nearly a decade in prison, but she had initially been denied entry to the college because of her criminal record. Steib-Martin got in the second time she applied because she left blank the spot on the application that asked about convictions. Steib-Martin went on to her earn her bachelor’s in clinical laboratory science, became a supervisor at a local hospital and ran a nonprofit helping formerly incarcerated women. But Metz didn’t want to lie on an application.

Then, in March 2017, a man named Hakim Kashif visited the halfway house. He told Metz and the other women living there that he’d been released from prison half a decade earlier and was now close to earning his bachelor’s from Southern University in New Orleans. Metz didn’t know Kashif well, but she knew police had indicted him on drug charges in 1993, the same year she’d gone to trial.

Kashif showed Metz his school ID and a schedule of his classes. He carried his report card everywhere he went. He’d finished six semesters with nearly all A’s and B’s.

“You think you can get me into SUNO?” Metz asked him.

“Yeah, girl,” Kashif said. “Come on. I’m going to bring you down there.”

Kashif was self-motivated — he’d never doubted that he could and should earn his degree after he got out — but he knew most people needed more than encouragement once they left prison. He drove Metz the 10 minutes to SUNO that day and walked her to the admissions office. Kashif held the door open, and Metz stepped inside, staring at the building’s beige brick walls in wonder. She’d never been inside a university before.

“You really think I can go to college?” she asked him. Inside, Kashif introduced her to Brent Hodges, an admissions counselor who’d worked at the school since the late-1980s. Metz recounted her story timidly at first. She worried Hodges might turn her away, but she knew she needed to explain why she lacked most of the traits of a typical college freshman. She’d never taken the ACT, and she hadn’t studied math since Marilyn Buck tutored her inside the prison more than two decades earlier.

“That’s not a problem,” Hodges said. Louisiana hadn’t yet banned the box on college applications, but SUNO had enrolled plenty of students with criminal records, Hodges said. His was a historically black university in a city where, in 2017, African-Americans were 50 percent more likely to be arrested than white people. He’d be limiting his pool of applicants if he never considered giving students a second shot.

Hodges also believed that education was one of the surest ways to reduce recidivism. In Louisiana, researchers have found that 48 percent of ex-offenders end up re-incarcerated within five years. But a 2013 RAND Corporation nationwide study found that incarcerated people who got some form of education were 43 percent less likely to reoffend. Hodges also understood how difficult Metz’s life might be without an education. Nearly half of black women with criminal records are unemployed. Metz’s AmeriCorps job was temporary, and Hodges knew she’d have an easier time finding work if she had a degree.

“Just put that all behind you,” Hodges told Metz. “If you’re serious about school, fill this out.”

He handed her an application packet. The form was simple, just two pages. Metz filled in the boxes that asked for her address and date of birth, then paused for a moment before writing down her intended major. She imagined herself working with young girls just beginning to veer down the paths she wished she’d avoided.

“I think I want to do social work,” she said.

Hodges told Metz that major sounded perfect. He waived the application fee, then gave her a study booklet to prep for the math and English placement exams Metz would take instead of the ACT. Kashif sat with Metz as she filled out the 108 questions on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Five months later, in August, Metz returned to the university by herself. She wore a hoodie and Nike huarache sneakers — fashion she hoped made her look younger — and climbed the steps to Intro to Social Work. She was 50 years old, a college freshman, and happier than she’d ever been.

Related: New policies close off opportunities to college applicants in need of extra help

Metz scored high enough on the placement exams in math and English to test out of the remedial courses that Southern offers for students with gaps in their education, but she felt insecure during her first weeks on campus. Though nearly half of the university’s students are 25 or older, Metz worried her classmates would think she was ancient and out-of-touch. She barely knew how to use a computer — it had been more than a decade since her prison class — and her fingers faltered on the touchpad of her iPhone.

Occasionally, during icebreaker games and class introductions, she told other students that she’d spent time in prison. She wanted them to understand why the technology that came easily to them still flustered her. Some of the teenagers told her she was an inspiration, but Metz winced when one young man’s eyes widened after she explained that she’d served 23 years. “You done more time than I’ve been alive!” he said.

Metz sat in the back of classrooms and rarely raised her hand, but professors soon noticed that she often knew the right answers. Several pushed Metz to speak up in class.

“She was apprehensive about everything,” said Karen Martin, a professor of social work who taught Metz in a public speaking class. “I told her, ‘You have the wherewithal to achieve anything you aspire to. Shake off them little fears and them little doubts, and let’s roll.”

Metz was “a sponge,” Martin said, eager to learn and open to criticism. After Martin showed Metz how to outline and infuse voice into her writing, Metz delivered a speech about her life before and after prison that Martin recalls as one of the semester’s most powerful.

Though Martin and a few other professors helped, Metz largely relied on her 32-year-old niece, Santana Harper, to guide her through her first year of college. Harper knew how daunting higher education could be. She’d gone to Grambling State University on a track scholarship right after high school, but she’d dropped out after a year, then wandered in and out of college before enrolling in SUNO in 2012. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology a few months after Metz came home.

When Metz signed up for an English literature class, Harper taught her aunt how to cite sources using APA Style and how to change the spacing in a Microsoft Word document so Metz’s essays looked the way professors wanted them to.

Harper had been only 7 when Metz went to prison, so they were strangers when Metz came home, but they grew closer in the university computer lab, commiserating over Microsoft Excel. One misplaced comma could mess up an entire spreadsheet. Some nights they spent hours backtracking to figure out where Metz had gone wrong on her Intro to Computer Information Systems homework.

Metz struggled so much with the computer class her second semester that she didn’t want to check her report card after finals. Harper offered to look with her, so they huddled over a computer together to search for her grades online. The page loaded, and Harper squealed.

“Auntie,” she said. “You made the dean’s list.”

“What’s that?” Metz asked.

Harper explained that it meant Metz had earned all A’s and B’s that semester, good enough for a 3.75 grade point average. Metz worked the phones in celebration. She called her brother and both of her children, along with every friend she imagined might care. The only way the day could have been better, Metz thought, was if she’d somehow been able to tell Obama the news.

“You don’t know what you did for me,” she imagined herself telling him. “I’m finally coming into my own. I made the honor roll.”

Metz spent the $2,200 AmeriCorps scholarship her first semester, so she took out loans to help pay for her second year. She found a new job working as a “violence interrupter,” an on-call position that required her to run to the hospital anytime a young person got shot, but she needed more money to pay for school and the taxes on her mother’s house. In January, she started a second job working in a community health clinic at Tulane University. The new gig would eventually allow her to take free classes at the prestigious private school, but working double shifts meant Metz could no longer fit in regular courses at Southern. Computers still scared her, but she decided to take her spring semester online.

In February, Metz pulled two textbooks out of her gold book bag and began to read. She’d signed up for general psychology and a social sciences elective called Introduction to Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Harper arrived mid-afternoon and asked if Metz needed any help. Metz waved her niece off. Four semesters in, Metz felt like she could navigate nearly all of her homework on her own.

The more she read, the more Metz understood what had gone wrong in her life. She’d never talked to a counselor before, but as she read a chapter in the psychology book, Metz wondered if her life might have turned out differently if she had talked to someone after she got pregnant or after her boyfriend was murdered.

Metz switched to the textbook called “Drugs, Society and Human Behavior.” The homework that week required Metz to chat with the other students online about the reading, and she considered telling them about her own experiences.

“All I was thinking was, ‘I need money for my kid. I’m with somebody and this is what they do,’” she said. She never used drugs herself, so hadn’t thought about how drugs affected the families around her. “That’s the way I thought, but now I feel like that was wrong. Them drugs had to be distributed to somebody. Somebody’s family had to use those drugs.”

Her fingers hovered over the keys. She knew it might be useful for her classmates to know what she’d learned, but some days, she didn’t want to be Danielle Metz, the woman who spent two decades in prison. She began typing.

“Reading this has broadened my knowledge of drug use and how often drugs are abused,” she wrote. “I never knew it was so extensive.”

Related: The real reasons many low-income students don’t go to college

Obama made another important decision for incarcerated people the year he granted Metz clemency. He authorized a pilot program that allowed a small number of incarcerated students to use Pell Grants to pay for classes. Sixty-seven colleges signed up and have offered more than 1,000 courses in state and federal prisons since. Nearly 600 incarcerated people have earned a degree because of the pilot.

In April, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill that would make the program permanent. Clinton’s ban is still in place, but Congress this year will vote on a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, a vote that will allow them to strike the ban Clinton signed the year Metz went to prison.

Annie Freitas, who – along with Steib-Martin – is the co-executive director of the nonprofit Operation Restoration (and who is also a Tulane University doctoral student studying the intersections of the education and incarceration systems), said repealing the ban would be “the most significant thing to happen in prison education in the last 30 years.” But she and other activists believe the Pell Grant ban is just one of dozens of barriers incarcerated people face as they seek an education.

Freitas is working to help other states pass ban-the-box measures. Since Louisiana lawmakers unanimously approved their bill in 2017, only Maryland and Washington have followed, leaving formerly incarcerated students in dozens of states still vulnerable to rejection for their past mistakes.

In New Orleans, at least, Metz believes that for some people, the biggest barrier isn’t money or a prying admissions counselor: Most people she knows don’t believe they can attend college, so she uses her weekends and occasional lunch breaks to do what Kashif did for her.

In February, she took an hour off work to speak at a graduation ceremony for people finishing a reentry program offered by the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office. Metz, wearing a blue plaid suit and silver wingtips she’d found on deep discount at the mall, stood as a program official played “Pomp and Circumstance” from an iPhone. As the graduates shuffled across the room, Metz thought back to the ceremony the women had thrown for her in prison.

“I know how y’all feel with them cap and gowns on, because when I got my GED, that was the best achievement for me,” Metz told the graduates. “I used to tell myself when I was in prison, if I ever get the chance to go home, I’m going to go back to school.”

She’d practiced the speech all weekend, employing the techniques Martin had taught her in the public speaking class. The group laughed as Metz recounted the way she’d claimed a chair in front of the prison TV, intent on learning everything she could from the news. One woman teared up as Metz described the day Obama granted her clemency.

“Now here I am outside in society living my best life,” Metz said. “I love the fact that I can just ride down the streets of New Orleans and get me a hot sausage sandwich or yaki mein. But what I value most is my education.”

The crowd clapped, and Metz smiled as the sheriff handed each graduate a diploma-like certificate. They’d learned anger management and office skills in the program, and as they passed Metz, she hugged each one, urging them to dream of their next graduation. A young man in blue Air Jordans accepted his diploma and announced he’d enrolled at Delgado Community College. The sheriff asked the man what his best subject was, and the graduate pulled the sheriff into a hug before replying, “Math.”

Most of the other graduates had yet to start college, and when the ceremony ended, they formed a line to ask Metz for advice. Metz told them it was easy. She knew they might also struggle with Excel and APA citations. Or maybe they’d hide in the back of classrooms, feeling old and decades behind. But as the graduates celebrated their first small victories, Metz imagined that they, like her, had survived far worse.

This story about “ban the box” was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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