Here’s why this matters: More than 650,000 people are released from prisons every year, and more than half of them are re-convicted within three years, according to the study.
But when the Northwestern team examined the actual performance of the hired ex-offenders, it found that they were no more likely than anyone else to engage in workplace misconduct. (The study doesn’t provide definitions for misconduct since the data, culled from employers, is coded by general descriptions of HR-tracked events in an employee’s history, such as misconduct, without specifics about what happened in each individual case.) There was one exception: ex-offenders in sales had a slightly higher rate of misconduct than non-offenders.
Perhaps the most promising way to push employers to hire ex-offenders may be to incentivize the practice. A federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit already exists, giving $2,400 to companies for hiring convicted felons within one year of their conviction or release from prison. And earlier this year, the Obama administration launched the Take the Fair Chance Pledge initiative, an informal promise made by more than 100 companies to not discriminate against ex-offenders in their hiring.
