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Sunday, May 6, 2018

Disabled felon needs help finding jobs

Disabled felon needs help finding jobs


Jobs for disabled FelonsHello,

I am Shaun. I was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury about 6-7 
yrs ago. I am a barber now, however I have an injury now that has put me out of work. I desire a new career but have much concern as to what I should go into because of my past. Do you have any advice for me or maybe people that would like to help me.

sincerely,

Shaun

 

 



Disabled felon needs help finding jobs




Hello Shaun,

I suggest you contact your local One-Stop Career Center. There you will find a list of services that can help ex-offenders and felons find new careers including training and job search services. Most Career centers have counselors who have experience assisting ex-offenders and felons looking for jobs. There are also contacts with other agencies that offer vocational rehabilitation and employment opportunities for those with disabilities.

You can find the nearest One-stop Career Center here:


 www.servicelocator.org
 


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Jobs for Felons: The Facts about Companies that Hire Ex offenders and Felons (2018)


Jobs for Ex-offenders and Felons: Ten Steps to Getting a Job with a Criminal Record



Disabled felon needs help finding jobs

Disabled felon needs help finding jobs



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Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Meet Larry, an ex-offender who got a second chance thanks to a good law









Meet Larry, an ex-offender who got a second chance thanks to a good law
Last year, I wrote a highly critical opinion piece for the Sun-Times about Gov. Bruce Rauner after learning that he had denied clemency for a client of mine.

Given Rauner’s extreme reluctance to grant clemency to ex-offenders, even to those like my client who had gone on to live honest and productive lives for many years, I questioned why anybody would bother to file the petition.

Though I couldn’t  know it at the time, however, that same governor soon would lay the groundwork for my client to earn a second chance. In August 2017, Rauner signed House Bill 2373 into law. This legislation resulted in a significant expansion of the kinds of criminal records a judge can decide to seal from public view.

Last month, as a result of that law, a judge granted my client’s petition to seal his record, closing the book on my client’s addiction-fueled criminal conduct, which began when he was 17 and ended when he was 31.  Today, he is 51.

My client’s story, which he has given me permission to tell as long as I don’t use his real name, reminds us that people who make bad decisions as teens and young adults still can grow into law-abiding, productive members of society. If we don’t start believing in our human capacity to change — to learn from our mistakes — we will fail to see the potential in many of our fellow, returning citizens.

My client, Larry, grew up in Chicago with an alcoholic father. His mother managed apartment buildings. Neither of his parents graduated from high school. Larry himself struggled in school, and was diagnosed with dyslexia in the fifth grade. Once assigned to special ed classes, he was teased and bullied relentlessly.

The summer before Larry entered high school, he started drinking beer. By his freshman year, he was smoking weed and using cocaine. He dropped out of school after his sophomore year. A year later, he was arrested for the first time.

He was charged with felony burglary and sentenced to probation.

In no time at all, Larry had gone from high school dropout to convicted felon. His future did not bode well. It is estimated that more than 70 percent of the men and women in United States prisons did not graduate from high school.

Larry’s next arrest, for residential burglary, occurred while he was still on probation. He was sentenced to prison – the first of two prison stints he would serve before turning 20. Larry’s preferred choice of crime? Breaking into cars, though he wasn’t particularly good at it. He was usually drunk or high when arrested.

In 1990, Larry picked up his fourth — and final — felony conviction. He was spared prison, though, sentenced instead to an intensive, in-patient drug treatment.

Larry struggled with his sobriety for another 10 years. But a health scare in 2000 finally convinced him to stop drinking and drugging.

Today, Larry takes his sobriety seriously. He has been sober for nearly 18 years. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings three times a week.

A couple of years ago, he met his wife at an AA meeting. With her encouragement and support, he started meeting with a literacy tutor. At the time, his reading comprehension was that of a second grader. Today, he can read at a fifth-grade level.

So there you have it: Larry is sober. He can read a bit better. And he always manages to work for a living, despite his significant educational deficits. The jobs he has found, such as valet parking attendant, don’t pay well, but they are honorable and he has gotten by.

I met Larry and his wife in 2015 and filed his clemency petition in 2016. While the petition was pending, Larry was selected to be a participant in the CTA’s Second Chance Program, cleaning buses and rail cars. Recently, he completed his second full year in the program.

Earlier this year, shortly before a judge granted his petition to seal his criminal record — made possible by the law Rauner signed — Larry learned that his name has been added to the CTA’s hire list.

Over the years, Larry has learned not to give up on himself. And today, he says at age 51, he feels like a “different man.”

He’s a man of few words, but on the day after the judge granted his petition, he called me to say thanks.

How did he feel?

“Really, really good,” Larry said with a chuckle. “Like I never got in trouble before, though I know I did.”

Ina R. Silvergleid is a Chicago attorney and owner of A Bridge Forward LLC. She specializes in helping people with a criminal background eliminate barriers to employment, professional licensing and housing.


Companies that hire Felons


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Eric Mayo

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Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Jobs for Felons: How the Army Recruits Straight Out of Prisons

How the Army Recruits Straight Out of Prisons
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE DAILY BEAST


STARS & BARS

How the Army Recruits Straight Out of Prisons

There is one big difference between the second annual Second Chance Job Fair and a ‘regular’ employment expo. Here, everyone looking for work had been to jail.

As job fairs go, this one didn’t look much different from any other. Men and women of various ages wandered from booth to booth in business attire, filling out applications and handing out resumes. A photographer was set up on one side of the room, taking professional pictures the job seekers could use on their LinkedIn pages.
However, there was one big difference between this, the second annual Second Chance Job Fair, and a “regular” employment expo. Here, everyone looking for work had been to jail.
Twenty-three employers had been invited by the organizers, M.A.D.E. Transitional Services, a Rockland County-based reentry organization; only a handful showed up. Unibody Fitness, a Brooklyn personal training business run by ex-offenders, had a table set up, and a representative from People Ready, the temp agency, was on hand. Tarik Greene, M.A.D.E.’s co-founder and deputy executive director, said Shake Shack came last year, but didn’t make it this time.
A volunteer sat at a card table offering resume advice.
“There are too many people saying, ‘I’ll take anything,’” she said. “It tells me they haven’t had an opportunity to think expansively; how will they tell their own story?”
If that story happened to involve joining the military, they’d be in luck. Along the far wall, two U.S. Army recruiters sat quietly, handing out brochures to the smattering of job seekers who slowed down long enough to take one. Unlike most employers, who are normally solicited by M.A.D.E., Greene said the Army in fact reached out to them this year and asked to attend.




“You can have one non-violent felony as an adult,” one of the recruiters, Staff Sergeant Jeffrey Boswell, told The Daily Beast. “Some of the best and most capable candidates we get require a waiver.”

The current pool of qualified applicants from which the Army can recruit is the shallowest in over a decade, with just a quarter of all 17 to 24 year-olds eligible to join and only one in eight willing to. Stretched thinner than it’s been in years, with a mandate to grow by 8.500 soldiers under the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, the Army is granting so-called “moral waivers” to people it would likely turn away under normal conditions, including convicted felons.
Recruitment standards in the U.S. military are “elastic, to put it mildly, depending on need,” according to retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, who graduated from, and later taught at, West Point.
“When recruits are hard to come by, standards previously considered sacrosanct get waived,” Bacevich told The Daily Beast. “Offering waivers to convicted felons suggests that the services—probably the army in particular—are struggling to meet their quotas of warm and willing bodies. As to whether military service offers a way to turn your life around, there's no easy answer. For some, sure. For others, it's probably a dumb idea for the individual and for the service.”
The vagaries of the job market have a notable impact on the use of moral waivers, said Kate Germano, who commanded the Marine Corps’ 4th Recruit Battalion at Parris Island before retiring as a Lt. Colonel in 2016.
“It’s becoming harder for all of the services to make their recruiting goals; this is what happens anytime conditions favor the kids just graduating high school or college,” Germano told The Daily Beast. “But if we just open the floodgates without looking at the whole person because we’re worried about the economy being strong and not making mission, that’s when things become problematic.”
“The United States Army does not actively seek individuals who require conduct waivers,” Army spokesperson Lt. Nina Hill told The Daily Beast in a statement. “We seek individuals who have the ability to meet all of our cognitive, physical and moral qualifications and can successfully complete a term of service. A small percent of new recruits meet the requirements to join the Army with a conduct waiver. We only consider conduct waivers for individuals who are otherwise fully qualified and have met prescribed waiting periods that prove rehabilitation has occurred. If an individual requests a conduct waiver for a past offense, factors such as the nature of offense, how long ago the offense occurred, and the overall number of infractions, are critical in determining suitability for service. All new recruits must meet Department of Defense accessions standards.”
Moral waivers are given out on a case-by-case basis, and as Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark Milley said last year, “considering a waiver is not the same as granting a waiver.”
Still, between 2003 and 2006, the military allowed 4,230 convicted felons to enlist by granting them moral waivers. In 2006 and 2007, waivers were given to three applicants with manslaughter convictions; 11 who had been convicted of arson; 142 who had been convicted on burglary charges; seven with convictions for sex crimes; three with convictions for making terrorist threats, including bomb threats; and one with a conviction for kidnapping. In 2008, the Army issued 372 waivers for felony convictions, down from 511 the year before. In 2009, the Army granted 220 waivers for “Major Misconduct (Conviction),” seven in 2010, and none between 2011-2014.  
One in three American adults—70 million people—have a criminal conviction. 650,000 people are released from prison in the United States each year, and three in four of them are unable to find a job during the first year they’re out.
“I don’t know how many ex-prisoners would want to do it, but the military can be a good place to get your life together,” said Brian DiMarco, a NYC wine and liquor importer who spent three years “finding himself” in the Navy after high school. “It can be a little bit like trading one form of prison for another, but at least the military gives you free healthcare for life.”
Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to General David Petraeus in Iraq and now teaches military history at Ohio State, isn’t particularly keen on moral waivers but is pragmatic about their existence.
“In general it’s better if the military does not grant moral waivers because we know that on average, people who have had offenses in their past don’t do as well with discipline in the military,” Mansoor told The Daily Beast. “That being said, for those that do join having received a moral waiver, some of them do turn their lives around and it’s a great thing for those people. I’m just not sure that we want to devise military policy on that basis, though.”
When she was on recruiting duty, Kate Germano’s team analyzed situation data and found a high correlation between people with felony waivers and those who didn’t complete basic training. Yet, there are still some good candidates in there. It’s just a matter of identifying them, she explained.
“I’m still in touch today with people I took a chance on, so it does work,” said Germano. “But if we’re not looking at both the whole person and the systems we have in place to make sure they’re committed, that’s how you end up with those horror stories.”
Plenty of recruits given moral waivers turn out to be model soldiers. But there are a fair number of horror stories, and they’re not hard to find. In 2005, the Army accepted recruit Steven Dale Green under a moral waiver for three past convictions (underage alcohol possession, drug possession, and fighting). The following year, while deployed to Iraq, Green and four other soldiers gang-raped 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, murdered her and her family, then burned the bodies. A year after that, Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis joined the service despite being arrested on a gun charge in 2004.
The successes, on the other hand, get far less attention.
Nasser Hempel spent 11 years behind bars for his role in a 1991 armed robbery outside a Houston nightclub. Shortly after he was released in 2002, Hempel took a trip to South Padre Island with some friends for Spring Break. The Army had an obstacle course set up, and Hempel decided to give it a try.
“I was working for Viacom at the time, hanging their billboards, so I did a lot of climbing on a daily basis,” Hempel told The Daily Beast. “Me being a little cocky, I asked one of the recruiters who had the fastest time. He pointed to this guy from the 10th Mountain Division, a hotshot. I said, ‘I’m gonna beat your time.’ And I beat his time.”
Impressed, the recruiters asked Hempel if he had ever considered joining the Army. He replied that he had just gotten out of prison—it had been less than a year—and was afraid he wouldn’t qualify. You might with a moral waiver, the recruiters told him.
Like most people who have done significant amounts of time, finding his footing again on the outside was difficult for Hempel. When life began to hit him “like a sledgehammer,” Hempel decided to go to his local recruiting office and see what his options were. He was 33 years old.
The recruiter he spoke with seemed to lose interest when Hempel revealed his criminal history. But another one sitting nearby overheard their conversation and took an interest in Hempel, offering to help guide him through the moral waiver process. They began the paperwork, and eight months later, the day after Hempel got off parole he signed his Army contract, becoming one of 1,002 incoming recruits that year with felony records.
After basic training, Hempel would ship out for back-to-back tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with the 808th Engineering Company. He left the Army and returned to Houston five years ago, where he now runs a bootcamp-style gym.
“There’s been some collateral damage,” said Hempel, choking up. “I got blown up three times. I ended up getting divorced. There was a time when I got back that I was borderline homeless. It was a rough time but to this day I still look back and say, ‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’”
There are studies that show a correlation between pre-service criminal history and in-service misconduct. Others have found service members with moral waivers are more likely to complete their terms of service than those accepted without them. A more accurate picture only comes into focus upon a more granular analysis of the available data. One study found the correlation between unsuitability discharges and whether or not a recruit graduated from high school to be significantly stronger than having been issued a moral waiver.
“Thus, unless we are prepared to say that, across the board, non-graduates make bad troops, we should not say that ex-offenders cannot make good ones,” wrote legal scholar Michael Boucai in his 2007 study, “‘Balancing Your Strengths Against Your Felonies’: Considerations for Military Recruitment of Ex-Offenders.”
Of course, the absence of a criminal record doesn’t always mean an absence of criminal behavior. While the rate of criminal offenses is pretty evenly distributed across the general population, those who wind up getting charged with those crimes is not, explained Boucai, now a professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law.
“If the question is how many people in the Armed Forces have smoked marijuana at some point, you’ll get a pretty good cross-section across all races,” Boucai told The Daily Beast. “But if the question is how many people have smoked marijuana and have some sort of criminal record for it, that’s going to be overwhelmingly black and brown. The idea that we’re letting in people who are morally bad is based on the criminal record, which is a record of encounters with the criminal justice system. In reality, it’s very often not telling us who has actually committed an offense.”
According to Boucai, bringing ex-offenders into the military is not only good for the offenders themselves but also a smart investment for the population at large, by allowing offenders to restart their lives when the bulk of the private sector has all but discarded them.
Right now, there exists a “de facto ex-offender recruitment policy” in the US military, maintains Boucai. Recruiters need to hit their targets when the service needs bodies, often meaning, Boucai maintains, that violations are ignored, applicants are told to omit negative information, and background checks are left incomplete.
Each of the services has different standards and approval rates when it comes to waivers. To those who receive them, moral waivers are for the most part presented as an exception, not the rule. But, contends Boucai, many problems related to ex-offenders in the service might be traced back to this system of “winks and nods,” rather than simply acknowledging the fact that the military ranks include a certain number of people with checkered pasts, says Boucai. (“People should understand that the majority of ex-offenders, when offered a job, make good employees,” former NYC Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn told The Daily Beast, “and it undermines civil society when we ostracize them.”)
According to a 2013 Army War College Strategy Research Project by Lt. Colonel John Haefner, informed leadership could pay closer attention to recruits who enlisted under moral waivers—not just to steer them away from trouble, but to be better prepared for other issues that could arise, such as the fact that males with a criminal conviction are 200 percent more likely to attempt suicide than those without.
However, privacy laws prohibit commanders from knowing which soldiers under their supervision have records or what’s in their criminal histories.
Nevertheless, if a recruiter has adequately tested an applicant’s commitment to joining the military before they ship out to boot camp, the higher-ups don’t need to know about their pasts, said Kate Germano. What’s important, she maintains, is doing proper due diligence on people from the very beginning to “make sure they’re a good fit for the service and the service is a good fit for them.”
As the Second Chance Job Fair wound down, Staff Sgt. Boswell, the recruiter, said he was feeling cautiously optimistic.
“I think prison is kind of good preparation for the Army, in a way,” he said. “You have to be mentally tough in the Army, you also have to be mentally tough in prison.”
Boswell’s partner, Staff Sergeant Minji Hwang, explained that people with criminal histories tend to be “really motivated when they’re with us,” because they have a lot to prove, as well as a lot to lose. Plus, she added, Army benefits are really, really good.
The two may not have broken any recruiting records that day, though they emphasized that that wasn’t really the point.
“We didn’t come here expecting to recruit dozens of people,” Boswell said, “but we definitely got two or three that we can help.”



Jobs for Felons: The Facts about Companies that Hire Ex offenders and Felons (2018)






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Eric Mayo

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Saturday, April 21, 2018

Jobs for Felons: Navigating a Digital World After 40 Years in Prison

Aaron Mondry - Splinter News - Detroit

 Navigating a Digital World After 40 Years in Prison



Edward Minor had a paper due for his English class on income inequality at Wayne County Community College in Detroit. He’d completed all the research and knew what he wanted to write. The main issue was time—he only had a few hours.

But countless, frustrating obstacles delayed his progress, from the laborious pace at which 62-year-old Minor types to figuring out how to save his document. The final step, however, was really tripping him up. Since he was using a computer at the library, he needed to email the file to himself so he could edit it later on a different computer.

“Do I just put my email address up here?” Minor asked, pointing to the bar at the top of the web browser. Eventually he got some help from a computer technician, but he wasn’t confident he’d be able to find the document later.

“They’re doing it so fast and I’m trying to follow,” he says. “They don’t see that there’s a baby right here in front of them. I’m a baby out here!”

Jobs for Felons: Navigating a Digital World After 40 Years in Prison




Ed Minor types at the Detroit Public Library, wearing a pin with a photo of Angela Davis.
Photo: Nick Hagen

Indeed, Minor’s relationship to the world isn’t so different from that of an infant. That’s because, in October 2017, Minor was released from prison after being incarcerated for more than 40 years. A modern-day Rip Van Winkle (who left society for a mere two decades), Minor is adrift in a society that left him behind.

The hunt-and-peck typing method he employs, which itself is slower than usual, is just the beginning of his technological difficulties. The computers, wireless internet, and touch screens that many take for granted are alien to him. Even looking at a computer screen—with all its strange icons, commands, and windows—is like deciphering the Rosetta Stone.
While Minor may be an extreme case, he squarely fits the description of Americans who suffer most from the digital divide, a phenomenon that describes how technology can contribute to inequality: He’s elderly, he’s poor, and he’s a person of color.

Resolving the divide’s underlying issues will be anything but simple, but the negative effects are pretty straightforward. If you don’t have access to the internet or the skills to use it, you also won’t have access to countless jobs and resources. As Tom Wheeler, former chair of the FCC, said in 2015, “The bottom line is this: If you are not connected to the internet…you cannot participate fully in our economy and our democracy.”

As of 2015, Detroit was the least connected city in America. Forty percent of Detroit’s households have no broadband connection and 70 percent of its school-age kids have no internet access at home (excluding smartphones).

For its size, Detroit is woefully under-connected. But rural areas and small metropolises often have it worse. According to a Brookings Institute report, almost one in four people in the United States lived in low subscription neighborhoods in 2015. Fewer than 40 percent of households subscribed to broadband internet.

Price is often an inhibiting factor. Detroit’s two main broadband providers, Comcast and AT&T, respectively, offer plans for their slowest connections at $25 for 12 months (and $50 afterwards) and $40 per month with a $99 installation fee.


Jobs for Felons: Navigating a Digital World After 40 Years in Prison




Ed Minor
Photo: Nick Hagen

Federal programs can lower the cost of these plans, but a study by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) showed that in Cleveland and Detroit, AT&T didn’t built out the infrastructure sufficiently to provide residents with high enough connection speeds to meet program guidelines. In other words, there’s a major correlation between plan availability and poverty.

The NDIA has described this as “digital redlining,” a reference to the practice that denied people of color access to housing, and which ran rampant in Detroit in the mid-1900s.

That’s in line with what Diana Nucera, director of the Detroit Community Technology Project, has witnessed. “Whether it’s artificial intelligence or internet access or healthcare,” she says, “the problems of the digital divide all stem from the same place: racism.”

I described Minor’s situation to Nucera and asked what she thought. “If he’s a victim of the digital divide, he’s also a victim of several other things before that,” she says. “It’s much more complicated than giving this gentleman a computer.”

Before Minor ever went to prison, understanding modern-day technology was the least of his concerns.

He came from a challenging home life. “My family were alcoholics,” he says. “I never met my mother’s side of the family. My father’s side was just drunks, dope fiends, dealing in corn liquor. My father was always jumping on my mother; my uncles were always jumping on their girlfriends.”
That contributed to his feeling aimless as a youth growing up on Detroit’s west side. “I didn’t know what to do with my life,” he says. “Didn’t want to do anything with my life.”
As for technology, his family didn’t even own a color TV.

“The problems of the digital divide all stem from the same place: racism.”





Minor was imprisoned once for seven months for breaking and entering. When he was released, he wanted to pay back a favor for a friend that helped him out while in prison. But the only way he knew how to get the money was to steal it. Planning to mug someone outside a nightclub, he says he brought an unloaded BB gun whereas his co-defendant, without telling him, brought a real gun.

According to Minor, his accomplice shot the person they were mugging, and after they were arrested, made a statement saying Minor committed the murder. Minor says he was pressured by his lawyer and the judge to plead guilty to second degree murder.
The sentence: life with parole.

Navigating a Digital World After 40 Years in Prison




Ed Minor checks the bus schedule on his phone.
Photo: Nick Hagen
Since getting out of prison, Minor has lived with his cousin in Southfield, an adjacent suburb of Detroit about 15 miles from downtown. On a normal day, Minor wakes up at around 11am, eats breakfast, and takes an hour and a half-long, two-bus transfer journey—with an undersized bicycle in tow—to either the WCCC campus or Detroit Public Library’s main branch. There he’ll do school work and develop his computer skills for several hours before heading to his job as a dishwasher at a nearby restaurant.

He often closes out, which means leaving work at around midnight and catching one of the last rapid buses heading north. At that time of night, the bus no longer runs for the last four-mile leg home, so he either bikes or walks depending on the weather. Once, the bus never came and his co-worker paid for a rideshare. He rarely gets into bed before 3am.

While at the downtown library, the person assisting him is often Keronce Sims, a computer technician. He teaches classes on computing basics, but his main job is helping patrons and employees troubleshoot computer issues. That means he’s often running from one request to the next all day long.

“What aren’t I responsible for?” Sims says with a laugh. “I’m one of three in the building…I’m putting out some matches, some candles, some fires.”

Local libraries are common destinations for people without computers or internet access. Detroit’s main branch has about 80 computers and there’s no time limit on how long someone can use one or, aside from games and X-rated content, what they can use them for.


In his 30 years at the library, Sims has seen all types of people use the computers for every conceivable reason: to apply for assistance, look for work, write a thesis, sue someone, or just to watch videos and go on Facebook.

Sometimes, according to Sims, people have panic attacks when trying to take care of a stressful matter using a machine they don’t understand. “I see it all the time,” he says. “I see a lot of impairments. Some are dyslexic, some are recovering from a physical injury or a stroke. Some are visually impaired. I’ve seen people with missing digits.”

Sims has been working with Minor since the summer and is encouraged by his effort. “Some people inquire about our services but don’t show up,” he says. “But [Minor] showed up. He knew nothing at first—the whole digital world was foreign to him.”


Navigating a Digital World After 40 Years in Prison




Keronce Sims helps Ed Minor navigate a computer at the Detroit Public Library.
Photo: Nick Hagen

In addition to having a felony on his record, little free time in his daily life, bad eyesight, hyperthyroidism, and no car, Minor also has very little money, and few people he can rely on besides his cousin. He’s also battling the type of culture shock that has nothing to do with the digital world. Simply going to the supermarket is a stressful experience that results in decision paralysis. “I stick to chocolate or vanilla ice cream and white socks,” he says.

As director of DCTP, Nucera oversees programs that foster use of technology based on community need. One of those programs is the Equitable Internet Initiative, which will provide 150 Detroit households with high-speed internet access. The program also involved training 25 local “digital stewards,” two of whom were in their late seventies, in hardware installation and WiFi setup. Age matters, but it’s not the primary barrier.

Minor has a passion for housing. After he’s done taking his prerequisites at WCCC, he’s planning to take classes on real estate. Despite everything he’s been through, he’s remarkably optimistic.
“Oh, it’s gonna get done,” he says. “Keep doing what I’m doing, don’t cry about it, move with it. I feel I’m on a mission.”

Sims and Nucera both think he has the capacity to overcome his technological difficulties.
“Clearly he’s extremely resilient,” Nucera says. “You don’t come out of prison after 40 years as an optimistic man without having a sense of self and being very intelligent. It’s not about his ability to learn. It’s about whether or not society can accept someone who’s been in prison for that long.”



Updated List of Companies that Hire Ex-offenders and Felons


Navigating a Digital World After 40 Years in Prison




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Eric Mayo

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