Putting Released Prisoners Back to Work

Destinee Evans was one of 637,411 people released from state and federal prisons in 2012. After serving a two-year sentence for a marijuana trafficking conviction, the 24-year-old applied for a half-dozen jobs in Ohio. One of the prospects, a telemarketer, met Evans for two rounds of interviews before running a background check. Then, she says, the company called to say it wouldn’t hire her. “It’s hard for a person who’s constantly being told no,” says Evans, who eventually found a job last September as a receptionist for a nonprofit.

Her experience highlights the obstacles ex-offenders face in reentering the workplace. The population of former inmates has swelled, in part because U.S. incarceration rates more than tripled from the mid-1980s to 2010. About 1 in 35 adults was imprisoned at the state, federal, or local level or was on probation or parole in 2012, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.