Chapter Nine
Erasing Retribution Bias
The impact of retribution bias is broad, and it can feel over-whelming to consider what it may mean to erase such an institutional bias. In this chapter, we will be introducing people whose lives have intersected with this bias and we will be sharing with you how they are working to erase it. We’re doing this because retribution bias tells you to steer clear of particular people.
As we explored in the last chapter, retribution bias works by consolidating many of our previously held biases and distilling them into the belief that criminals are threatening and dangerous; they’re certainly not human and they’re most definitely not to be a part of our organizations and workplaces. But when you get close—when you move in and encounter the people behind the mythologized images of criminals that have been held up for decades—you will find that retribution bias is not actually working to keep communities safe. Retribution bias is only keeping communities fragmented and broken by inequity.
Before we look at ways that folks are working to erase this particular institutional bias, we wanted to introduce you to someone who has experienced retribution bias firsthand. As we said before, retribution bias is upheld by one community while the effects and impacts are often felt over a lifetime for other communities. This is, in part, because incarceration is spread unevenly across the adult population for the reasons we addressed in the last chapter. Retribution bias capitalizes on racial bias, customer bias, and misinformed pictures of who and what makes a “criminal.”
Iesha Williams is in her mid-30s, works as a nursing admissions manager and lives in a close-knit community in Richmond, Virginia. She’s the mother of two teenage boys and divides her time between work, church activities, and her family. Iesha is well known among her friends and in her community for her endless kindness, her laughter, her loyalty, and her incredible discipline.
Iesha is also someone for whom the impact of institutional retribution bias has been tremendous—her felony record for two separate nonviolent, non-drug-related crimes has permeated her life in social, spiritual, and financial ways far beyond the reasonable limits of her convictions. In the early 2000s, Iesha deposited four bad checks at an ATM during a time when she was struggling to make ends meet. Because there were four separate checks, and because she deposited them at an ATM, Iesha was charged with nine separate felony charges and her life was radically altered when she served three years for these charges, handing over her newborn infant son when she was first locked up. She describes how having a felony record takes much of her emotional energy, even years after being released:
I think about [my record] every time I think about new opportunities, whether it be careerwise, if I want to volunteer at my kids’ school, any opportunity that I know for a fact would consider my background makes me think about it, and I quickly eliminate the possibility if the opportunity could even be for me because I have a background. I have come to believe that no matter the reason for my background, because I have a background, I’m immediately going to be shot down, so I won’t even try for new things.
You can take the promotion at my job that I recently got—I didn’t apply for it, they had to seek me out. I wouldn’t have applied for it because of my background. I was working as a receptionist initially. She thought I had a great personality and was warm and welcoming, and she told me she thought I’d be a great fit for this new role.
But I often wonder if she knows about my background, if she’s actually reviewed the files. I wonder if my job performance will be enough to keep my job? I’ve heard that they run background checks every year and I often get concerned if my background has been seen. I have this low-level anxiety all the time. I have just decided that I just have to do the best that I have and hope and pray that my performance will just speak for myself.
Iesha’s workplace anxiety is about more than just a desire to be employed and provide for her family. And countless studies show that living with even low levels of stress and anxiety can wreak havoc on a person’s physiological wellbeing. Iesha must keep a steady income in order to continue paying the courts for her felony charges. Each month for the past 15 years, she has paid three separate Virginia courts 10 percent of her total monthly income, which is no small feat for a single mother of two teenage boys. Her payments are for court costs and felony fines and if she misses a payment, Iesha will forfeit her driver’s license. If she forfeits her license, she will be unable to get to her job which, in part, enables her to pay her fines.
At her current rate, Iesha estimates that she will pay the courts off in ten years. Should she lose her license, she will be unable to take her boys to school or get to and from the places that she needs to get to in order to maintain the life that she has worked so hard to put back together. While she was still on probation immediately following her release, missing this payment would have meant reincarceration for Iesha, so keeping up with this payment has, at times, meant not paying other bills in order to keep this bill paid above all else.
To be honest, even now, financially, short of Jesus, I would not make it. It’s impossible the way the system is set up. I don’t know if this is intentionally that way but after being incarcerated, I cannot make ends meet. I am on salary, but I work 50 to 60 hours a week because I feel pressure to overperform because I want to be so good that if they ever see my record they’ll have my performance and my presence to look at.
Because the cards are stacked against me, I cannot give less than 200 percent. That means my job controls my life. That means my kids, my friends, nothing else gets my time but my job—that’s just my reality. This is what it means in order for me to sustain my life.
Though her physical incarceration is over, Iesha says, “this punishment that was supposed to be three years is essentially a lifetime.” Iesha’s “crime” has exacted far more than a proportionate penalty, demanding that she literally pay hundreds of times over the original cost of her crime and robbed her of years with her boys. Iesha has fought to have her right to vote restored, and has begun to share her story with others outside of her community in Richmond.
Retribution Bias and Employment
One of the biggest challenges for Iesha, and for others like her, is the difficulty that comes with getting a job after a felony conviction. Employment presents a significant challenge for folks coming out of incarceration. Though many employers come to the realization that even folks with the most serious felonies can make great employees, as is backed up by multiple studies,1 as many as three out of four people remain unemployed a year after release from prison, and just 12.5 percent of employers say they will accept job applications from an ex-offender because they think doing so would impact their business.2 Many people raise the issue of background checks as a metric for determining who they should hire and Iesha’s experience demonstrates how heavily the background check looms over the heads of those who have felony convictions on their records.
Iesha’s story demonstrates again the power of getting close and learning the stories of people who have been impacted by the criminal justice system and retribution bias. Her workplace performance has been noticed by her colleagues and she has managed to earn a promotion.
The felony challenge, however, is a largely a perceptual one that is rooted in our retribution bias. The problem is not that ex-offenders are somehow bad employees or that it would be too risky to employee them. Northwestern’s Workplace Science Project has researched the question of how it actually impacts business’s bottom line to hire people with criminal records and Deborah Weiss, the study’s lead researcher and director, has concluded that people who look to background checks to determine a potential hire’s risk to the company are “overreacting.”3 She says there is occasionally a very slightly elevated misconduct risk. When quantified, it does not amount to money saved; people hired with records often stay with companies longer. Furthermore, it does not take into account that criminal records are distributed unevenly, given to those who are poor more often than to those who have the financial resources to build a good legal defense. Their conclusion? You should always be diligent about who you hire. Criminal justice records are, by and large, not good indicators of who is a riskier hire.4
Oftentimes, retribution bias is masked in hiring policies that make it difficult to employ undocumented people, criminalizing employers who hire them. Our friend Lana Heath de Martinez works in public policy doing advocacy for immigration issues, and as a white woman she has worked hard to continually evaluate her role in institutional bias and elevate the voices of those who are most impacted by unjust immigration policies. She shared a time with us when consequences of retribution bias had a direct impact on her work:
I am constantly thinking that I should not be the person doing this job. At least, it should not be just me. So, during the summer when I had the opportunity to hire a year-long fellow, I prioritized finding someone from the impacted community. Two women quickly became outstanding candidates, both from Mexico, both with uncertain immigration status.
I was so excited to put my money (well, the organization’s) where my mouth is and invest in leadership from the impacted community. But I couldn’t hire either woman. The fellowship is funded by a denomination that stipulated the person be hired as a fulltime employee with benefits. Without a social security number, my two best candidates were not options. I hired an excellent fellow who shares my commitment to intersectionality and deference to those most impacted by policy, but yet again, the money, benefits, and opportunities are withheld from those we say we should follow. I guess their leadership is expected to be free.
American criminalization of the other has historically set up systems that ostracize and subdue minority people for the gain of those in power. The means to work are withheld or hidden behind absurdly complex systems as a form of punishment for those who have entered our country’s borders. Even as Lana has worked to bring light to these issues, she herself has found herself facing the same systems at play that she works to fight to end. Lana writes that:
Every day is an ethical quandary for me. I use every opportunity to amplify and elevate the voices and experiences of people who are undocumented. And I am getting paid to do that work while the people I seek to amplify and elevate are usually not compensated.
I love my job, but I also really deeply love the communities I work with and I hate benefiting from a system that contributes to their oppression. Instead of saying, “We can’t hire you because you don’t have a social security number” why aren’t we saying, “How can we create a place for you here?”
For the communities that Lana works to advocate on behalf of, retribution bias says that these communities deserve punishment and denial through racial stereotyping and criminal language. But in addition to their contributions of humanity, gifts, and abilities, immigrants are actually a net positive for the American economy and make important contributions across the workforce.5
Martha Rollins, a local antique dealer in Richmond, experienced this firsthand when she was running her shop and regularly moving furniture. In the late 1990s, Martha became aware that while there were wealthy white customers coming in the front of her shop, the people helping to move the furniture in the back of her shop were mostly African American men in their late 20s to early 40s, and most lacked full-time employment. After knowing many of them for some time, eating lunch with them, and developing friendships with many of them, Martha became curious about why they were unable to secure full-time employment. They all expressed a desire for full-time employment and, from her vantage point, were kind, intelligent, creative, and smart people. So, she finally asked one day, and they shared with her that they’d all been incarcerated and their felony backgrounds made full-time employment virtually unattainable. “It made me notice,” shared Martha.
Gradually, over time, Martha became involved with the prison system and the more involved she became, the more she described her understanding of the prison system to be like the primary antagonist of Les Miserables, Javert. A police officer, Javert is obsessed with retribution and pursues Jean Valjean throughout the story for his crime. Javert eventually drowns himself in the river Seine when he cannot reconcile his ethical system with the idea that Jean Valjean is more than his transgression.
In hopes of creating a place where others could be seen as more than their transgressions, Martha worked with neighbors and community members to build Boaz and Ruth, a nonprofit focused on providing support, job training, and transitional support to folks coming out of the criminal justice system. Boaz and Ruth has grown to house several business ventures and a year-long job training program for people just coming out of the prison system.
Let’s see how Martha has been doing the work of erasing institutional bias by looking at our six steps:
1. Set a clear intention.
Martha wanted to bridge the employment gap for her friends who she saw as gifted people whose presence was needed in the world and, yet, were struggling to find work because of a felony conviction.
2. Lead with data.
Martha’s data came from learning more from neighbors in the economically depressed neighborhood where she lived, and from friends who shared stories of their own experiences with the prison system. It became clear that employment was a significant barrier to successful reentry for these people. Her prayer partner had been in a director role in the New York State Prison System and she participated in several round-table groups where those who had both worked with incarcerated people and had been incarcerated themselves were participants.
3. Diagnose accurately.
As Martha enlisted partners from her community to support her vision of empowering those who were coming out of the criminal justice system, the need she identified in those conversations with the men who she met at her antique shop was confirmed. Employment after a felony conviction was both a dire need and extremely difficult to obtain.
4. Deconstruct: eliminate subjective processes.
Martha’s initial experience with this work issue revealed her own subjective biases: she assumed that good, smart people who were capable and wanted to work would always be able to get a job. As someone whose experiences were quite different from those who were returning from incarceration, she felt it important to eliminate subjective processes by refusing to lead the initiative alone.
5. Reconstruct with objectivity.
Martha reconstructed her jobs initiative and shared leadership with Rosa Jiggets, a woman who had deep roots in Highland Parks and expressed a desire to work with Martha on the transitional jobs for ex-offenders. This helped Boaz and Ruth’s be a more objectively welcoming space.
6. Build accountability and ongoing measurement.
While Boaz and Ruth’s measures of success were less about numbers and more about lives that were transformed, their accountability was primarily set toward the community in which they were housed. Thus, while there were people from outside of the community on the board and serving as volunteers, Martha and other staff have worked diligently to always protect the places of community leadership.
Another way they have stayed accountable to their intention includes a commitment to changing the language used about people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system. They have done this is by framing re-entry in terms of one of their core principles, “The release of a prisoner is a release of tremendous gifts and abilities (as well as potential earning power and tax revenue) into communities in great need of those gifts.”6 This language directly confronts images of criminality and invites both ex-offenders and communities to rebuild with an air of hope and optimism.
Retribution Bias and Business
Martha and Boaz and Ruth have been working to erase institutional bias by supporting ex-offenders themselves. Still others work to erase institutional bias by confronting the policies and procedures that are in place that contribute to the incarceration epidemic. While it may seem difficult to conceptualize what a for-profit business could do to confront retribution bias, business and corporate voices carry significant policy weight. Another friend (and Ashley’s husband), Alex Mejias, is the president of the Business Coalition for Justice, which was formed out of Alex’s own experiences with retribution bias and his conversations as a business leader and community member. Alex writes:
Throughout 2015 and 2016, as police killings of innocent and unarmed men of color seemed to proliferate on social media, my boss and I began to have conversations about what, if anything, we could do as a business to affect change. We saw the toll that these incidents were taking on our African American team members and read about the potential days of protest.
Everything seemed to be happening at the individual level, but it seemed like perhaps we could participate as a business and leverage the added influence we had as a business. Things came to a head for me on September 16, 2016, when I watched Terence Crutcher die with his hands in the air, unarmed and innocent. I couldn’t sleep that night. I was angry, but also scared to my core.
A few years back, I had been threatened by a police officer in Charlottesville, Virginia, who told me that not pulling out my registration fast enough was “a good way to get my teeth knocked in.” Upon moving to Richmond, Virginia, I once was pulled over twice in the same night by Henrico County Police after borrowing a white friend’s car with expired tags (he had never been pulled over).
But that night it became clear, in a visceral way, that my life was at risk. But beyond myself, I thought about all of the victims of police brutality going back generations and felt powerless against this seemingly institutionalized and engrained ritual.
Alex approached his boss and asked if he was serious about actually doing something. When his boss said yes, they got to work brainstorming ways to think about these issues and to be proactive.
We first imagined a day of protest, when we and other like-minded businesses would close our doors to protest police brutality. We pitched the idea to our upstairs neighbors at TMI Consulting and they were immediately on board. As a tech company, we reached out to some other shops and found a few more willing businesses. But some businesses were hesitant and we knew we’d need to explain ourselves. So I decided to draft a statement explaining our rationale and goals.
We began circulating the letter and asking other businesses to sign on. As more and more businesses got involved, we heard the desire for conversation, amongst businesses and even with the police. Moving organically, we decided to shift from a day of protest to a moment of conversation, when we as the local business community could gather with the police to talk about the issue of police brutality and how we could prevent it from happening in our hometown.
We called it Businesses for Black Lives (#B4BL). That meeting happened, coincidentally, the day after Donald Trump was elected. In a way, that reality put us all on edge, but also gave many of us a new resolve to actually work harder, knowing that the local government would now need to shoulder much more of the heavy work of dismantling structural racism. After #B4BL, many of us wanted to continue meeting and finding ways to work together to undo institutional racism.
Alex developed a steering committee with a few other business leaders and together they decided on a mission, vision, and name for the organization. They gathered input through surveys and got an overwhelming response that businesses wanted to be organized together to face these issues, so in May of 2017, they incorporated as the Business Coalition for Justice (BCJ).
Starting slowly, we decided upon two projects: first, a letter to the Virginia House of Delegates Subcommittee on Criminal Law regarding the felony larceny dollar threshold which, at $200, had not been updated in nearly 40 years. Second, we decided to help birth a charitable bail fund for the Richmond area, which is now called the Richmond Community Bail Fund.
Along with these initiatives, we plan to provide resources and support to businesses who join the BCJ, helping them seek racial equity within their businesses. We encourage all of our members to seek racial equity in four areas: hiring and diversity, company culture, supply chain, and community engagement.
Here is Alex and the Business Coalition for Justice’s work against retribution bias.
1. Set a clear intention.
Alex wanted to find a way, as a business, to leverage his workplace’s influence to work against the criminalization of minority people.
2. Lead with data.
Alex and his coworkers brainstormed ideas and then gathered the data they needed to see if their idea (a day of protest) would be effective by circulating a letter describing their intent to other businesses in the community.
3. Diagnose accurately.
As they circulated this letter, they were able to determine that while the issue of criminalization of minority people was on everyone’s mind, the business community had a strong desire for conversation amongst businesses and even with local police and specifically surrounding the issue of the felony dollar threshold. This gave the leadership of the BCJ a clear path forward.
4. Deconstruct: eliminate subjective processes.
Like Tim Ryan at PwC, Alex and the BCJ disrupted the status quo by making space for conversation between police and business owners who wanted to voice their concerns.
5. Reconstruct with objectivity.
Alex and the BCJ began to create a new objective space by making room for conversation between business leaders with concerns and local police.
6. Build accountability and ongoing measurement.
Alex and the BCJ established four areas of measurement for racial equity that coalition members are committed to. The BCJ has also taken up the cause of advocating for a specific policy measure, the felony larceny threshold.
While retribution bias can seem overwhelming to tackle, each of these folks began with their own experience and understanding of what it means to encounter another human being. The strength and sting of retribution bias will only stand as long as you allow the myth of criminalization to say that another person can be measured and understood by what she or he has done in her life. And often times, when we reach back into our own stories, we begin to realize that the marks of the justice system aren’t given equally. But that realization can bring us to a place of compassion and strengthen our fight for equity for others.