Second Chance Hiring Starts with Leadership

In this country, we love a comeback. We are a nation that loves a redemption arc in sports, in business, in politics. Resilience is practically a core American value. But approximately 6,000 Coloradans walk out of state prison every year after completing parole or serving their full sentence.¹ They are ready to work; they need to work... And we largely fail them. Another 3,000 return to society from county or local incarceration.

By the Numbers

Nationally, more than 27% of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed. This rate is higher than in any recorded period in U.S. history, including the Great Depression.² Only 35–40% of formerly incarcerated individuals ever become reliably employed.³ In Colorado, our three-year recidivism rate sits at 28%.⁴ One interpretation is that's not a statistic about bad people making bad choices. It's a statistic about a system that fails to give people a real foothold.

Here's what makes this particularly important for anyone in a leadership role: employment is one of the most powerful levers we have. Coloradans who maintain employment for just one year post-release have a recidivism rate of 16% — nearly half the state average.³ Read that again. We can cut the recidivism rate nearly in half with a job.

The Purpose Hour Conversation

I'm so thankful for the conversation that came out of our recent Purpose Hour on incarceration and second chances in Colorado. It featured Stacey Putka and Duane Gurulé, two people who bring very different, and very powerful, perspectives to this work.

• Stacey is the co-founder and Executive Director of Breakthrough Alliance of Colorado, a nonprofit working inside six Colorado correctional facilities to help incarcerated individuals build professional skills, develop a reentry plan, and find stable employment after release. Breakthrough has achieved remarkable results: 85% of their full reentry participants are currently employed and fewer than 5% have returned to prison.
• Duane is a first-generation college graduate, a former Colorado Governors Fellow and the Mayor of Rocky Ford, Colorado. And he’s navigated incarceration, community corrections, and reentry himself. He now works at Hunger Free Colorado and co-founded the Small Town Project, focused on health equity in rural Colorado.

Together, they brought the three things a conversation like this needs and rarely gets in the same room: the data, the lived experience, and a call to action.

The Hiring Reflex

Here’s what they pushed our room to think about.

Most organizations (businesses, nonprofits, government agencies) don't decide in advance what they'll do if a background check comes back with something on it. So if it does, they're scrambling: making the call in the moment, without clear criteria, often driven more by discomfort than by actual risk. That's not a hiring process. That's a reflex.

Duane and Stacey put it plainly: if you're in a hiring role, you need to do your thinking before the background check comes back, not after. The question to answer in advance is a simple one. “Which convictions are actually disqualifying for this specific role, and which ones have nothing to do with the job?”

A prior conviction for drug possession doesn't disqualify someone from doing excellent accounting work. A financial fraud conviction might reasonably give you pause for a role managing funds. Context matters, the work matters, but too many organizations skip that thinking and default to blanket exclusion, not out of malice, but out of uncertainty and a lack of intentional policy. That's a leadership failure. And it's one we can fix.

The Case for Leaders

• If the economic argument is the one that resonates: connecting 100 justice-impacted individuals to employment generates an estimated $1.9 million in additional wage tax contributions and $800,000 in additional sales tax revenue over those employees' lifetimes.⁵ This is investment, not charity.
• If it's the workforce argument that lands: we're in a tight labor market but the talent and willingness to work is there. The barrier is almost entirely on the employers' side of the table.
• And if the human argument is what moves you: more than 55% of recidivations in Colorado between 2015 and 2019 were technical parole violations, not new crimes.³ People returned to prison because they couldn't meet parole conditions, conditions that stable employment directly helps people meet. We are, in some cases, literally sending people back to incarceration because we won't hire them.

Taking Leadership Action

Leadership is not about having the right values in the abstract, but rather about building systems that reflect those values in practice. Here's what that looks like for second chance hiring:

• Review your hiring policies before your next open role. Don't wait for a background check to force the conversation. Decide now what's actually relevant to the work.
• Train your hiring managers. The discomfort most people feel when a record appears is real, but it shouldn't drive the decision. Prep your team clear criteria and the confidence to apply them consistently.
• Consider the whole person. Time elapsed, nature of the offense, evidence of growth — these are reasonable factors. A checkbox that says "felony: yes/no" is not a fair hiring policy.

We say we believe in second chances. In Colorado, nearly 9,000 people a year are profoundly impacted by whether this is more than lip service. Leadership is the moment when we back what we say we value with meaningful action.

Sources

1. Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, 2024 Prison Population Forecast
2. Prison Policy Initiative, Out of Prison & Out of Work
3. Common Sense Institute, Ensuring Economic Success for Formerly Incarcerated Coloradans
4. Colorado Sun, How Coloradans Are Finding Work After Incarceration
5. U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Workforce Impact of Second Chance Hiring