A search for second chances
In Milwaukee neighborhoods, felony records are a barrier to employment
When morning Corey of CampbellOct. 2, 1989, woke he up saw on the the barrel of a gun inches from his face. He realized the police had come for him. Handcuffed and led to a squad car in his robe and silk pajamas, Corey knew he was headed for prison.
He didn’t feel fear or anger or despair. Rather, he thought of his family and the congregation that had supported him all his life. He was overwhelmed with shame.
In that moment, Corey — one of my third-grade classmates at Samuel Clemens Elementary School in 1978 — was on his way to becoming one of the more than 1,600 African-American men from Milwaukee sent to prison every year, forever labeled a felon.
Of the 28 people in Ms. Marilyn Spicuzza’s class, at least 13 have spent time in prison or had a close family member — a parent, brother, sister or child — locked up.
Wisconsin has the highest incarceration rate in the nation for black males and in Milwaukee County, more than
half of African-American men in their 30s have served time in state prison, according to a 2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study.
The “War on Drugs” was expanded under President Ronald Reagan, when I was in sixth grade. It was supposed to clean up the streets, but it had unintended consequences that echo today.
Families were broken up; children were raised without fathers or mothers, sometimes both; and poverty increased. Once a cycle of incarceration is started, experts say, staying out of prison gets harder, as does finding a job upon release. And when ex-inmates do find jobs, pay tends to be low.
Meanwhile, corrections costs are taxing state budgets. Since 1980, spending on prisons and jails in Wisconsin has increased at triple the rate of funding for public education, according to a 2016 U.S. Department of Education report.
If incarceration rates remain unchanged, about one in three black males who turn 16 this year will go to prison at some time during their lifetime, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. That compares to one in six Hispanic males and one in 17 white males.
“Most of the people we have in jails and prisons are there for property crimes, for crimes that don’t directly threaten public safety,” said Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.”
“And there is no hard or soft there. There’s just smart or not smart.”
** * Growing up black in Milwaukee, Brandon Johnson avoided the incarceration trap because his no-nonsense mother had the means to move her family to a middle-class neighborhood, where she connected Brandon with mentors.
“If you’re a black man who grew up in Milwaukee, there’s a good chance that you know someone who’s been incarcerated,” said Brandon, another of my third-grade classmates. “It’s that bad for black men.”
One of Brandon’s mentors, Richard Nelson, lived across the street from him in the Northridge Lakes condos and apartments, where Brandon moved after third grade.
A lot of people care about children’s well-being, Nelson said, but they don’t know how to help, or are too scared to act. He wasn’t. “When the kids are wilding out and the parents are losing control, that’s when people have to step in,” Nelson said. “We can’t keep standing on the side saying, ‘That’s not my problem,’ because sooner or later it will become a problem too big for anyone to handle.”
As Brandon and Nelson bonded over Green Bay Packers touchdowns and slam dunks by the Bucks’ Marques Johnson, Nelson advised Brandon on everything from how to approach girls to how to act when stopped by police.
Growing up amid treelined cul-de-sacs and outdoor swimming pools didn’t shelter some of Brandon’s friends from prison. A pair of brothers who lived nearby were locked up for the armed robbery and shooting of a gas station clerk. Another friend was incarcerated for selling drugs.
Brandon narrowly avoided a felony conviction himself.
When he was in his early 20s, Brandon was leaving Summerfest with a group of friends — some black, some white — when he was approached by two white men who had locked their keys in their car.
They asked Brandon if he would help them break into it.
Why’d you ask me? Brandon wanted to know.
Because you’re black, they replied. We figured you’d know how to break into cars.
“I mean, I was pissed,” Brandon recalled. “I had too much to drink at the time, too.”
He went to his friend’s car, where there was a toy gun, pulled it out and told the men to give him all their money. They produced close to $800, but Johnson didn’t want it. He said he just wanted to teach them a lesson. So he took $10 and walked away.
The next morning, deputies showed up on his
doorstep.
Had he taken more than $500, he could have been charged with felony robbery and faced up to five years in prison. But when the case went to court, the two guys told the truth about the $10.
This is your lucky day, the judge told Brandon.
He was convicted of a misdemeanor and paid a fine.
“I was lucky,” he said. “I never drank alcohol again after that.”
Today, he is a loan officer at Waterstone Mortgage Corp. He is married with no children, but uses the story of his near miss as a teaching tool for the young black boys he now mentors.
Corey Campbell, our classmate, had a different outcome.
He grew up in a twoparent home on the 4100 block of W. Congress St., not far from Clemens. His father worked at A.O. Smith for 37 years. When the factory was sold in 1997, he was one of the last to go.
After graduating from high school in 1987, Corey wanted to work in manufacturing like his father did. By then, most of those jobs — and the family-supporting pay that went with them — had disappeared.
From 1979 to 1983, Milwaukee County lost more than 52,000 manufacturing jobs, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2000, Milwaukee had lost 47% of its manufacturing jobs.
When you look at a longer period, 1963 to 2002, the city lost manufacturing jobs at a pace of nearly six a day, according to an analysis based on a 2007 UWM report, “The Crisis of Black Male Joblessness in Milwaukee.”
“I would have loved to get in Harley or A.O. Smith or Harnischfeger,” Corey said. “I loved working with my hands.”
Instead, he worked low-paying retail jobs for a couple of years after high school before being hired as a car salesman at Bob Brown Chrysler-Plymouth in Thiensville in 1989.
Raised in a devout, spiritual family, Corey was confident and outgoing, which served him well during school and carried over to the job. Three of his close friends also got jobs at the dealership, and the four shared an apartment on Milwaukee’s far northwest side.
But the dealership soon shut down, after a finance officer was caught embezzling money.
Out of work and out of money, Corey and his friends didn’t want to give up their independence.
“We all grew up in the same congregation together and none of us wanted to move back home, so we came up with this ‘ingenious’ idea,” Corey said.
The group would go to grocery stores and other businesses, wait until the cash drawer was opened, then jump over the counter and grab the money. They robbed eight businesses in three counties, including a Sentry, two Sav-U Foods and a Hampton Inn, before they were caught.
Corey didn’t participate in the ninth robbery. That’s the one where the police followed his friends home and dragged him out of their apartment in his silk pajamas.
Nearly 100 people came to support Corey during his sentencing hearing on federal armed robbery charges. Many from his congregation referred to Corey as the “choir boy.”
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison in 1990, but was released on electronic monitoring after serving 2
“Nobody messed with me and everyone felt that I didn’t belong in prison,” he said. “I helped teach some of the men how to read, and I led some of the programs there.”
In Milwaukee County, a felony conviction is the most serious barrier to employment, according to a 2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study.
Lois Quinn, who co-authored the report with John Pawasarat, said things have been slow to change since it was published. The reasons are twofold: Sending people to prison takes them out of
the workforce, and most employers are reluctant to hire felons.
“The thing we need to keep in mind is that a majority of the people who are incarcerated will one day get out,” Quinn said. “And what do we do to the people when they get out? Do we keep treating them like criminals and never give them a chance? Or do we give them an opportunity to work and get on with their lives?”
Calvin Lee, a Sherman Park resident, thinks the violent unrest that erupted last August after a police officer shot and killed a 23-year-old black man was sparked by more than the incident itself. It also was related to declining opportunities for people of color, he said.
“My fear is that we failed our youth,” said Lee, who serves as chief of staff for the 11th Assembly District office of state Rep. Jason Fields. “I’m starting to question myself on had we done more, would we be where we are right now?”
While most states, including Wisconsin, have laws prohibiting job discrimination based on having been incarcerated, they are difficult to enforce.
For a 2004 study, Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Harvard University, identified openings listed by 350 Milwaukee employers for jobs that required no experience or education beyond high school.
Two teams, each with one black man and one white man, applied for the jobs, alternating as to whether they listed 18 months behind bars on their applications. The educational and experience levels they listed were comparable.
When they didn’t list a prison record, 34% of whites and 14% of African-Americans received callbacks. When they did list a record, 17% of whites received callbacks, but less than 5% of African-Americans did.
While the study was conducted more than a decade ago, many prison reform advocates believe a similar study today would net the same results.
“It’s not surprising,” Quinn said. “We have been saying this for a long time.”
In Milwaukee, a group of advocates is working to “ban the box.” By that, they want to forbid employers from asking applicants if they have been convicted of a felony.
They would also make changes to online court records, such as not listing minor offenses, dropping older ones or charging a fee to look up records — changes that have also raised objections about limiting access to public records and the public’s right to know.
Acclaimed civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander once believed black men who got out of prison and couldn’t find work were lazy.
After doing research for her 2010 book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” she realized the felony box on job applications was at the root of the problem.
“If you are labeled a felon, you are considered a felon for the rest of your life, even if you committed a crime 40 years ago,” she said.
Brandon Johnson knows he caught a break. The fact that he was convicted of only a misdemeanor means he doesn’t have to answer “yes” to that question.
Another former Clemens student isn’t so lucky.
Unable to find a good job after high school, he and some friends resorted to stealing cars and selling the parts.
The man, who asked that his name not be used, was convicted of a felony and spent time in prison. He answered the felony question honestly on several job applications, but was never hired.
When he applied for his current job, he lied and answered “no.” He has worked there for many years now and been promoted a number of times. Still, he’s afraid if his employer found out about his criminal conviction — even now — he would be fired.
“I’ve seen it happen to other people before,” he said.
In 2015, more than half the people sent to prison in Wisconsin weren’t there for committing new crimes, but for violating the terms of probation or parole.
The state Department of Corrections says about 70% of them were suspected of criminal activity, though officials did not have to prove a new violation in court.
The others were sent back for “technical violations,” which can include things such as accepting a job without permission, missing a meeting with a probation and parole officer, or leaving their home county.
One way to reduce the prison population is to help ex-offenders succeed on the outside rather than locking them up again when they fail to follow the rules, said David Liners, executive director of WISDOM, a statewide group of faith leaders and activists dedicated to prison reform.
“They are constantly having to restart,” he said of people arrested for probation or parole violations. “Besides, it’s nearly impossible not to break some of the rules.”
For example, Liners said one former inmate was sent back to prison for four years for creating an email account without prior agent approval.
In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University has taken a lead in addressing the issue.
Faced with a growing shortage of hospital personnel, Johns Hopkins has hired more than 450 employees with criminal records over the past decade.
In 2014, the city introduced a second-chance program called Aim to B’More, which expunges the felony records of people convicted of nonviolent crimes if they complete an internship with LifeBridge Health or Johns Hopkins Hospital and do community service.
In the wake of riots and protests following the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died in police custody, officials from Johns Hopkins and 24 other large businesses met with faith leaders.
They agreed to hire more minority firms and employees as part of a program called BLocal. The companies will hire from neighborhoods with the highest poverty rates, hoping to get people with the greatest needs back to work.
In Wisconsin, the prisons are overcrowded.
The system is designed to hold 16,300 inmates, but according to the most recent count, 23,000 are behind bars.
State and local governments in Wisconsin spend $1.5 billion a year on corrections — from 59% to 70% more per resident than the neighboring states of Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa, according a 2015 analysis by the Wisconsin Budget Project, a program of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families.
The state spends $27 more per resident than the national average of $232. Only 11 states spend more per resident on corrections than Wisconsin, the report said.
By comparison, Iowa spends $100 less per resident than Wisconsin. If Wisconsin spent at the same level as Iowa, according to the report, the state would spend $613 million less on corrections each year — a reduction of more than 40%.
WISDOM, the faithbased prison reform group, has urged Wisconsin officials to look to states such as California for solutions.
In 2012, California passed the Public Safety Realignment Act in response to federal court order to reduce overcrowding by 40,000 inmates.
The new law sent people who violated parole and those who committed nonviolent crimes to county jails rather than prisons. Those who violate parole can be held a maximum of 180 days in California; in Wisconsin, they can be re-incarcerated for years, depending on the violation and the judge.
Since the law took effect, California has saved $450 million in annual prison costs, without an increase in crime rates, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Wisconsin, by comparison, has only taken small steps.
Consider a provision in Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s budget to provide additional money to help prisoners with drug and alcohol addictions.
The $1.8 million over two years would allow an additional 250 inmates to complete treatment and potentially be released from prison early. Last year, about 1,450 of the state’s 23,000 prisoners completed the program.
Not every inmate is eligible, only those with nonviolent offenses who were pre-approved for the program by judges, typically at sentencing.
And completing the program does not guarantee early release. That decision goes back to the judge.
The state estimates the change could save $3.7 million in prison costs over the next two years.
That’s a fraction of the overall budget for state prisons, which is projected at about $2.55 billion over the same period.
In comparison, Walker’s proposed two-year budget calls for $2.19 billion in tax money to go to the University of Wisconsin system.
*** For Corey Campbell, finding steady employment upon release from prison wasn’t easy.
He worked in construction, but the jobs weren’t consistent. The last project he worked on was the Marquette Law School in 2010.
Five years ago, he moved to Champaign, Ill., with his family to help take care of his wife’s ailing father. In the small college town, Corey, who has three children, felt like he could start over.
“I had to swallow my pride a lot, because most of the jobs didn’t pay well,” he said.
Unemployed for a while, he went through a bout of depression.
“It was hard on me, for a while, because I’m a proud man who wanted to take care of my family and my responsibilities,” Corey said. “That’s the way I was raised.”
His depression eased once he was hired as a county bus driver in Champaign.
It was his second chance.
He loves his job. It’s steady, family-supporting work that has helped him become a respected member of society again — the type of career he found hard to obtain back home in Milwaukee.
“I have a smile on my face every day because of what I went through,” Corey said. “I persevered and it feels good.”