Finding jobs for people with criminal convictions

Work with offenders investigates the latest data showing just how few offenders are in work.

Everyone knows that, after a home, finding a job is the most important factor for most people trying to put a life of crime behind them. We have plenty of research evidence to back up this commonsense assumption. The literature highlights four key reasons why employment helps people move away from a criminal lifestyle:

• An individual can fill their time constructively and become economically independent.
• Employment facilitates reintegration into the wider society by helping individuals to move away from criminal networks and develop social relationships with a wide range of people.
• Being in paid employment enhances individuals’ self-esteem and helps them to build a renewed and positive sense of self, which helps to protect against a return to crime.
• The status of being an employed person acts as an important symbol to the individual of their ability to return successfully to a conventional life.

Over the last few years, there has been a feeling across the criminal justice field that the opportunities for people with criminal convictions to find jobs were improving. Faced with both very high levels of employment and the need for more staff, a growing number of employers were starting to consider people with criminal records as potential employees. There were even a number of household names (Greggs, Halfords, Timpsons and Virgin among them) who were proud of their willingness to give people a second chance and happy to testify that many of their employees with criminal convictions were the among the most hard-working and dedicated members of their workforce.

The number of employers signed up to the government “Ban the Box” initiative which involves companies using initial job application forms which do not ask about previous convictions had grown significantly. There were also a raft of new charities and social enterprises working in the offender employment field who were adopting new models of work which typically involve engaging employers and providing long-term (several months past hiring) support for individuals finding work.

They were also an increasing number of prison-industry partnerships which are now actively promoted by the New Futures Network (NFN), a specialist part of the prison service that brokers partnerships between prisons and employers.

Overall, then, the sense was that more people released from prison or on probation were in work than ever before. It was a bit of a shock, then, to read in last week’s official Ministry of Justice statistics that the number of offenders in work was actually falling.

The Community Performance Quarterly statistics, with information on the year up to this March (and therefore almost completely unaffected by the pandemic) found that just 12% of people released from prison and available for work were in employment six weeks after their release.

The same bulletin also provides information on the employment status of people starting community sentences under the supervision of the probation service. For this cohort of people, just under half (43%) were employed at the start of their sentence, two percentage points down on the previous year (45%).

These are surprising and worrying findings, especially with the whole economy currently ravaged by the impact of COVID-19. With very many thousands of people losing their jobs, and tens of thousands more anxiously waiting to see if their employment will remain once the furlough period has ended, there are real concerns that the shift in employers’ attitudes towards people with criminal convictions which we have seen in the last few years may not persist. Even if attitudes don’t regress, many people with convictions will not have the same history of employment of many people forced out of their jobs by coronavirus.

It is clear that prison, probation and offender employment staff will need to up their game in order to give many offenders a fighting chance of finding a job and making a new start in life.