A new round of grants from the Community Foundation of Southeastern Michigan’s Michigan Justice Fund, announced in January, will provide a much-needed boost for services that help formerly incarcerated people overcome the multiple hurdles standing between them and sustainable jobs. More than that, many of the projects getting this funding — just over $2.8 million in grants — demonstrate just how many opportunities are still out there to make big, positive changes in the lives of returning citizens.
Funders whose goals include everything from alleviating child poverty to tackling homelessness may want to take notice. In Michigan, as in every state, supporting people as they reenter society can be a powerful lever for philanthropy to tackle a wide range of social ills.
Even a superficial glance at the numbers easily demonstrates both the scope of the need and the potential benefits that could be achieved by helping formerly incarcerated people find and maintain sustainable employment at living wages. More than 600,000 people are released from state and federal prisons every year. The majority of them, 57% of men and 75% of women, were impoverished before their arrest. Most incarcerated people are forced to work while behind bars, but are paid as little as $.13 an hour, if at all, which hardly allows them to save money for their reentry. The cycle of impoverishment continues after they are released. An estimated two-thirds of formerly incarcerated individuals are jobless at any given time, and even four years after their release, returning citizens were only being paid an estimated average of $464 a week in 2014 dollars.
In addition to keeping adults behind, these factors affect a depressingly large number of children; at least 4 out of 10 children in the U.S. who were born between 1999 and 2005 were raised in a home where a parent or other adult faced at least one criminal charge.
In this environment, the latest Michigan Justice Fund grants have the potential not only to support returning citizens, but also the families and communities that rely on them.
The grants also demonstrate just how much unmet need is out there. Seven of the 18 grants will be spent to plan or develop new programs or services, like $100,000 earmarked for Neighborhood Defender Services to develop a reentry program combining workforce training and comprehensive social services. Six grants will be used to implement services including training and support for other workforce-related needs like transportation, health, housing and professional mentorships. The remaining five grants will go to other efforts, including training first responders for an unarmed crisis response team in Washtenaw County, Michigan.
According to Michigan Justice Fund Director Ashley Carter, “It’s time to do a re-imagining of what’s possible for resourcing for reentry and workforce development. And I think that one of the things that’s being acknowledged by advocacy groups, direct service providers and publicly funded entities is that there are opportunities to serve this population that are not being engaged as fully as they could be.”
This includes a lack of organizations to provide those services. There are programs out there, and they’re working hard, but “I don’t think that there are enough of them,” she said.
Imagining a holistic approach to help returning citizens
As we reported in 2021, the Michigan Justice Fund is a collaborative between state and national funders whose goals include boosting the economic mobility of citizens living with a past criminal conviction. Housed within and administered by the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, the effort is supported by smaller funders and heavy-hitters like the Ford Foundation, J.P. Morgan Chase, and the W.K. Kellogg and Kresge Foundations. The initiative committed $650,000 of its first wave of over $2.2 million in grants to help returning citizens, including $50,000 for an effort to provide wraparound support to people who were incarcerated in their youth. “The work around reentry and workforce development is a tenet of the fund,” Carter said.
When Carter referred to a reimagining of what’s possible around reentry, that isn’t just limited to creating more organizations and programs. It also doesn’t stop at direct workforce development approaches like, for example, providing training for a career in accounting or the building trades. Instead, she said, there’s a need for a more holistic approach to reentry that takes into account the many factors that prevent returning citizens from getting and holding a good job — including and in addition to a past conviction.
“When people are coming home from jail and prison, most of them are not coming home to well-resourced environments. If they’d had that, a number of people would never have been in this system in the first place,” Carter said.
Imagine the necessities that are required before someone can apply for, secure and keep a job — basics from internet access and clothing to transportation and the ability to bathe and keep that clothing clean. When people are cycled from poverty to incarceration and back, they may not even be able to afford a change of clothes, a single month’s water bill or a bus ride to an interview, let alone the wider galaxy of goods and services that make employment possible. The holistic approach Carter is calling for involves “acknowledging the full range of human needs and understanding that having meaningful access to resources is imperative for full success and reintegration into society.”
A key to combating poverty, racial inequity and more
Before there can be organizations or programs focused on reentry, there has to be money to fund the work. Despite significant growth in the field over the past five to 10 years, Candice C. Jones, president and CEO of Public Welfare Foundation, said that philanthropy hasn’t come close to addressing the problem, especially in comparison to the scale of the need.
Jones said that more resources are becoming available to help formerly incarcerated people secure employment, particularly if they wish to become leaders in the criminal justice reform movement — for example, the MacArthur Foundation’s JustLeadership USA initiative. However, she said, people returning from incarceration have a wide variety of needs, and not all of them want to work in criminal justice reform. “They just want to be able to return to the community and integrate into a successful career, whether that’s small business, political leadership, journalism or some other field,” she said. Public Welfare Foundation is one of the initial funders that partnered to create the Michigan Justice Fund in 2020.
Making it possible for returning citizens to integrate into those successful careers is practically a must-do for any funder that really cares about issues ranging from systemic racism to economic mobility, given how deeply interconnected the carceral system is with those issues. So is supporting wider reforms to the criminal justice system itself. “Can you [alleviate poverty or racism] without focusing on holistic criminal justice reform? I think not,” Jones said.
Public Welfare Foundation announced a new strategic plan focused on adult and youth criminal justice reform, including support for formerly incarcerated people, in 2019. According to Jones, “This is one of those issues where [you have to serve] the folks in our society that we know are being the most marginalized, the most harmed. If you can figure out how to serve and lift them, you’ll lift the whole tide.”
On the other hand, she said, “it’s hard to work on either of those issues [racism and economic mobility] and feel like you’re going to get where you need to go” without working on criminal justice reform.