North Lawndale report counts a $1 billion cost of reoffending and points to jobs

What happened

WTTW News reported on a report released Tuesday about the cycle of incarceration in North Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side. According to WTTW, it is a collaboration between the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago and the North Lawndale Employment Network. It uses 20 years of data to study economic barriers in the neighborhood and what reentry and work programs can do to lower recidivism.

WTTW listed the report’s findings. Over two decades, correctional costs for people from North Lawndale who reoffended topped $1 billion for Illinois taxpayers. For every 10 people enrolled as network clients, $405,000 a year in incarceration costs is diverted. The report argues recidivism can be lowered cost effectively by pairing “fair chance hiring” with community programs that meet people’s full needs. WTTW’s story did not include outside researchers assessing these estimates.

“Oftentimes, people are returning to the same economic and social environments that they left,” network President and CEO Brenda Palms told WTTW. The outlet also profiled Leslie Williams, a program graduate who entered prison at 19 and was incarcerated for 23 years on a murder conviction. She now works as a maintenance technician at the network and runs her own cleaning business. Williams told WTTW that employment and housing were her biggest barriers after release. “My past doesn’t predict my future,” she said.

Great Cities Institute Director Teresa Córdova pointed WTTW to social-impact businesses such as the network’s Sweet Beginnings, which provides job training and experience through making and selling honey and honey-based skincare products. “The combination of the training, the actual employment and the wraparound services provides an important mechanism,” Córdova said, according to WTTW.

Our reflection

Leslie Williams went into prison at 19 and came out 23 years later. Then she learned the sentence had a second half. She had a job and pay stubs to prove it, and she still heard that her background closed the door on housing.

A murder conviction means a life was taken, and somebody still carries that loss. Grace never pretends otherwise. She also served the time the court gave her. What comes after is on the rest of us. Too often it is a second sentence no judge handed down. Without a lease or a paycheck, a person rides back to the same block Brenda Palms described.

Most of us who say we believe in second chances have never had to rent to one or hire one. When the application has that box, plenty of church people check their fear and call it prudence. Sometimes it is. Often it is the instinct of the priest and the Levite in Luke 10, who crossed the road to keep their own hands clean. Jesus names that in us before he names it in any system.

In Nazareth he read Isaiah 61: liberty to the captives (Luke 4:18). Keep reading that chapter. A few verses later, the people God frees and comforts are the ones rebuilding the ruined cities. In Isaiah, freedom ends with tools in the hands of the freed.

Then watch the risen Christ on the beach in John 21. Peter had denied him beside a charcoal fire. Jesus cooks him breakfast over another one and gives him work: feed my sheep. No waiting period. The past was real. It did not get the last word, because the tomb was empty.

The report puts plain things on paper. Jobs paired with support. Employers who read a record and then read the person. It was produced with the organization it studies, so its savings figures deserve outside testing. Still, the pattern matches what reentry workers have watched for years: a paycheck with a person standing beside it changes what happens next.

We The Revolt has a hub in Chicago, and our re-entry work rests on that conviction. We stay beside young people for twelve months after release, when the risk is highest and support usually ends. We also teach workforce and money skills so a job can become a life.

If you hire or rent, pull up your application this week and ask what the background question is protecting. If you have time, give it to one person coming home.

They shall build up the ancient ruins; they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.

Isaiah 61:4

Source: WTTW News, “North Lawndale Organization Aims to Break Cycle of Incarceration Through Work Development Programs”