Kevin McCracken On Helping Prisoners Build Intergenerational Wealth And Sustainable Employability
Kevin McCracken is Executive Director of The Last Mile.
Previously, McCracken served as Chief Operating Officer at Social Imprints and General Manager at Ashbury Images – both are fair chance hiring organisations that employ returned citizens. He is based in Marin County, California.
Kevin discusses the cyclical and systemic nature of recidivism in society and how more businesses can support individuals excessively punished by the criminal justice system through fair chance hiring practices.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in social impact and fair chance employment?
[Kevin McCracken] - Over 25 years ago now, I was somebody who would have been a client or student of The Last Mile. I had a heroin addiction, and I was living on the streets of San Francisco. I spent many months and years in and out of county jails both in California and the Portland, Oregon area, and I had more or less destroyed my life through my addiction.
At that point, I was arrested for the last time, and I didn't have anywhere to go; I'd burned all my bridges, and even though my family would still talk to me they were very cautious about helping me work through my issues. I had ignored them for over a year at that point, and I was lucky enough to have been arrested in San Francisco County. At the time, they had just instituted a policy called Treatment on Demand. Given the fact I had multiple felonies and misdemeanours, there was a good chance I was going to go to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
This is a state penitentiary here in California, it was looking like I would spend some time there. What happened was I ended up essentially being given a gift, which was I could either go and serve five years in prison or I could do this long-term treatment at a facility. The deal was if you graduated, they would essentially dismiss your charges. I chose the treatment facility, and at that point quite honestly, I never looked back.
I knew that this was it for me, I had spent most of my late teens and twenties (I was 28 years old at the time) drinking, drugging, partying and being a menace. I did a lot of petty theft and other activities which made a not so upstanding member of society. I just had this feeling that I was done. That was it, and at the time I weighed 125 pounds, I was very addicted to heroin (taking almost two grams a day) and drinking around a pint of vodka on top of that.
For me what happened was I had this physical transformation from detoxing alongside a mental transformation while I was in County jail.
I went to this treatment facility and became involved in not just a treatment there, but also work in relapse prevention, anger management, and the 12 Step program as well. Almost right away I made the decision that I was going to give back what I was so freely given while there.
My lawyer at the time said, "if you go through all of this stuff and stay clean for five years, we'll go back and have your record fully expunged.” She told me at the time that no one had ever taken her up on that offer, because most people relapse, or go back to prison or jail. I did it, I was lher first client who came back and wanted to do it.
Five years sober, I had my record expunged in California, and then I cleaned up my issues in Oregon. At the time I was working at Ashbury Images, and that was my first job out of jail and rehab. I had this opportunity to not just do great work and learn a new trade (which was screen printing), but to also give back to men who were coming in behind me.
At the time we were primarily hiring formerly homeless men with previous substance use issues or people who had less than a high school education, which is what started the whole process of creating Social Imprints. Jeff, the guy who hired me at Ashbury Images ran into me one day after we weren't working together anymore, and we decided we were going to start this new enterprise. I'm not going to go into all of this (because) this is already a lengthy story), but SI now have almost 50 employees.
They've done as much as $20 million a year in sales, and it's one of the most successful and transformational social enterprises on the planet. It's been a journey for me with starting and then leaving the company, it's been almost like going through a divorce (which I also have experience in, but I won't get into)!
Basically, over the years I learned the tools to run a business. I don't have a degree, I didn't go to college, and I only did well in high school because I was good at tests and retaining information. I learned how to be more disciplined, less reliant on my talent and more reliant on my skills. It took a long time for me to get there.
When I left SI, I had been talking to Beverly and Chris, the founders of The Last Mile. These are two of my mentors, people who I highly respect and who were very aligned in our purpose. They said, “what do you want to do?" I sent them some ideas and they sent me back a job description, so I started with them as a Chief Growth Officer focusing on partnerships and re-entry. These are my strong suits, sales and helping people get through the issues that they must get through to get a job.
Over the first six months we were talking about me becoming the executive director, and then in March it happened! I can't tell you enough how this is the greatest job I've ever had, these two people have not only invested in me personally, but they have invested in this organisation in a way that is setting us up for success.
For anyone who has gone through any trauma in their lives to have this support is life changing, but to have been given it considering my history and the fact that over 25 years ago I was getting up off of a piece of cardboard in the mission district of San Francisco while ending up in county jail after a free ride to the pen, the fact that I'm doing this now is truly amazing.
I have a lot of gratitude, I don't take this for granted, but I will tell you the number one thing that changed my life is community support. Having people who believe in you is massive, and so I try to give back to people every day.
I talk to our employees no matter what their position is as much as I can. I get their feedback and let them know somebody cares about them.
As the Executive Director of The Last Mile, can you describe this organisation's activities and how it's changing the lives of people in American prisons?
I'll give you a quick history because I think it's important. The Last Mile started out of Chris Redlitz going into San Quentin State Prison, which is a notorious prison in the United States, not just California. It was at one point one of the most violent scary places on earth, Death Row (or Condemned Row) is there. Chris went in as a favour to a friend to review some of the resident’s business plans; these guys had written these plans down with a prison pencil and brought them to his event to share them. He was supposed to be there for 45 minutes to an hour, he ended up staying for three hours.
The first of what we now call Chris's crazy ideas was that this needs to be made a regular thing, an entrepreneurship course in San Quentin State Prison (which is now San Quentin Rehabilitation Center) which he would teach. He basically did it, he convinced his wife Beverly who was very suspicious when they first started doing this, and they went ahead and started an entrepreneurship class.
They went to San Quentin twice a week for 2-4 years and taught the men entrepreneurship. What happened eventually was he had another crazy idea. This all started in 2010, and by 2014 they'd spun up their first coding training inside a prison facility in the United States.
To give some context to this, you're not allowed access to the internet when you're in a state prison, you can't just freely go on Google and if you're doing a class on coding ask how to do something or steal some code from somebody. We must have a closed system. Our system is a cloud-based system, so the learning is all remote and individual. We use canvas, which is a very well-known LMS (a learning software), my daughter uses it at the high school she goes to.
We're using the same technology universities and high schools are using for teaching these men in San Quentin how to code a website with no access to the internet. When I talked to engineers about this, they were just mind blown that these guys are learning how to do this. Not only are they learning how to do this, but they’re also passing the classes. They're learning how to do full stack engineering and then coming out of prison and getting jobs in places like Checker.
At The Last Mile our goal is to disrupt the cycle of mass incarceration through learning technology, professional development, and now, audio video production. We have all of these amazing classes we're teaching across the country, and after we started in San Quentin in 2010, we're now in seven states with 20+ classrooms.
We’re opening in two more States in the next couple of months. We've had over 2,500 students, over 700 of them are home now and of that number about 85% have jobs. We boast a recidivism rate lower than 5%, and the national average is in the high forties or low fifties. If you go beyond the first couple of years, it's even higher. Beyond that, we're placing people in jobs that are sustainable, and that's our biggest difference.
If you give somebody a job where they’re making $40,000 a year to clean up garbage on the side of the highway, even if the job itself isn’t that bad the low wages are going to impact their chances of reoffending. When you start hitting that 60-80,000 dollars a year mark, people don't have a reason to reoffend, because they're making enough money to support their families.
When we talk about fair chance employment, for The Last Mile our goal is sustainable jobs, jobs that are going to pay the rent, pay the bills, take care of the family and change generational wealth, because incarceration is a generational problem in the United States.
We have whole families who are locked up, and the fact people keep go back to prison even though prison is such a bad place should tell you something. I've been in a lot of facilities, and I can tell you there's not even one I'm not grateful I get to go home from after knowing what goes on in there. I know that conditions have gotten more humane in some places, but the fact of the matter is we're giving people not just the skills to get these jobs, but hope.
If you've got somebody on the inside that's hopeful, it's a whole different thing. It's a whole different attitude and perspective on life, even in our classrooms a lot of our teaching assistants are lifers who went through our courses and are now setting the tone of the culture in that facility. The goal for us is we want people to be satisfied and happy with their lives, and we want to give them the opportunity to have jobs that are going to change their lives.
As the former Chief Operating Officer at Social Imprints, a social enterprise based in the United States, can you discuss what unique challenges you faced as a social entrepreneur and why this model can meaningfully support disadvantaged communities?
I think the challenges for any business owner are relatively similar. It's generally resource management, things like HR and how are you interacting with your employees. How are you incentivising them? What's the secret sauce that will make them excited to come to work for you?
Over in the U.S. you can go on Indeed or Glass Door, and these websites track people's satisfaction with their jobs. You can watch former employees just blow-up companies, and so I think the challenges are the same.
The difference I've seen in hiring people from marginalised communities, especially individuals who have had a ton of adversity and trauma is that there's a certain level of caring and dedication to their job they will have. They’re willing to put in extra work because they've been given an opportunity.
I don’t mean this as, “go take advantage of them," what I'm saying is they utilise their inherent ability to grind in a way that's meaningful for them and the company. Don't overwork them, don't make them hate their jobs because they're working too many hours, but use their ability to adapt and work in difficult situations to your advantage.
Nurture those skills. I think any business owner will say the same thing, the number one issue is always people. Obviously, there are ups and downs in any market, and personally we got crushed during COVID-19 because Social Imprints was highly focused on live events. When COVID hit, we had to pivot and almost create our own market around sending swag out to individuals directly?
Everybody was working from home, so we wondered if we could send stuff out to people for virtual events where they get their t-shirt for their event before it happens. The answer was yes, and the year after we had all the lockdowns here in the U.S. (2022) was our best year ever because we had pivoted to this model of sending individual packages to people. Companies caught wind that we were doing a good job of it, and so we were getting these massive orders of thousands of items to all over the world. These orders were to remote offices and people's individual homes.
The market's going to do what the market does, but I think when you concentrate your efforts on job satisfaction and people, you've got an opportunity to change how you do business, and I think that is a cornerstone of social enterprise, but it should be a cornerstone of business.
When I look at the challenges for Social Imprints, of course there's going to be different challenges and reactions among certain populations of people who are working for you, but the fact of the matter is if you've got a solid HR plan, you have benefits and you're willing to deal with people on a very human level, you're not going to have any more issues than any other employer.
In fact, in the U.S., If you talk to fair chance companies, 85% of HR experts or executives within those companies will say that the people they hire from the fair chance population are as good or better at their jobs as anyone else in the organisation. That is a huge number, and it goes back to what I was saying. I know for myself when I got that job at Ashbury Images working 20 hours a week in admin, that was all my job was when I started there. That's all I could handle, I was getting my feet underneath me and dealing with sobriety, but I had such an aptitude for learning.
I learned how to operate the presses on my own, shoot screens, and create separations for art. I learned all of that on my own because I was so interested in being the best employee, and then I ended up doing sales. I was good at sales, so then I ended up as the general manager after Jeff left. My story is not unique. It's a great story and obviously I'll talk about myself as much as someone will allow me to because you start to develop a little bit of an ego and it feels good!
The fact of the matter is my story is not unique. We have examples like my story all over the country, and our best example right now (in fact we've filmed a video about this individual) is a woman named Billy Edison. She was in a TLMs classroom at Indiana’s women's prison, and she could have qualified early release. She stayed an extra year to do our program in prison, and she had to tell her kids, "I'm not coming home. I'm going to stay and do this." She did it, and when she got out, she was struggling to find a job.
We got a call from the Indiana Pacers (an NBA team who are in the playoffs right now), and Steve Simon the owner was hot on doing a fair chance hire. He wanted to do it with The Last Mile, and so we got her a job with the Pacers. She's a lifelong Pacers fan, but these are the things that are totally possible, and not just possible, they're happening. When I look at a social enterprise and talk to other entrepreneurs, I ask, "what is your focus going to be?"
I'm very invested in life after prison, it is literally the most important topic to me. I've dedicated my entire life to it, I moved out of my job at Social Imprints and into a job where I can do more of it, and before that I was volunteering and working with an organisation which teaches resume writing and interview skills in prison. I know what my purpose is.
My purpose is to find as many life-changing sustainable generational wealth developing jobs for individuals who are just as impacted as I was. That's my goal for the rest of my life, I have no other goals. For how we will get there we're going to come up with different ways to do it, but that's my personal mission. I have honed this thing; this is my life.
People will say, "I want to start a business that cares,” or, “I want to start a business that's a social enterprise." The question I would ask any entrepreneur is what is your purpose? What is the thing that you think about when you wake up in the morning, the one thing on this planet you want to change that gets you excited? Find it!
Find that thing, get good at it, be an expert in that field and make that business hum, because if you're not passionate about what you're doing, the people around you will know. They're going to feel it. I love screen printing, it's the strangest thing. I enjoyed teaching guys how to operate a press.
Ultimately what I realised is it wasn't the actual action of printing a t-shirt that I loved, it was having somebody standing there with me and their eyes getting huge when that first shirt came off the press and it was printed perfectly. That's what I liked. I like to see that awakening and feeling of, "oh my gosh, I can do this thing.” I know what my purpose is, and I hope other people can find that and start businesses.
For people who own businesses, if you don't want to be a social enterprise you can at least do a fair chance hire. Ask to me about it, I'll tell you exactly how to do it, and if I don't know about your industry, I will find somebody who does.
What are the systemic elements underpinning the issue of recidivism and what is required to break the cycle of people re-offending?
The United States is a unique case. We have 25% of the world’s incarcerated population living in our country. That's insane. We're not 25% of the population of the world, yet we have 25% of the incarcerated population. A primary factor behind incarceration in this country is unfortunately and honestly race. When we look at what is happening in the U.S., there's a million things I could point to and say is the problem.
We have this belief that if people do something that is illegal or averse to society, they need to pay a certain price for that. I can get on board with that; if you kill somebody, you should probably spend some time away from society. The problem I see in the U.S. is that the sentencing for crimes is obscene. Until recent years, rehabilitation has been a second thought. We can say that it's the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, but is it really?
That's one issue, and I think the other issue is when you serve your time and you have paid your debt to society, what are we then going to offer to you when you come home? If it's probation, parole background checks, and no job because you have a criminal record, are we upholding our end of the bargain as a society?
If someone kills somebody and then they do their 20 years of time, they don't have any write ups, they're studying programming, they're taking care of their family, and they're working on themselves, but when they come home, they are continually punished after that prison sentence, are we fulfilling our end of the bargain? My answer is no, and so how do we couple safety with justice? How do we do that?
I want to live in a just society, I want people that make mistakes to be held accountable and responsible for those mistakes, but I also want to be accountable and responsible for making sure the process that they go through during this time of punitive action is something that's going to bring them home a different person. We don't need the same person that went in to come home, and traditionally in the United States, prisons have been a place where people are often retraumatised or traumatised in other ways.
Prisons are places where they might hone their skills around certain illicit activities, where there's a major power dynamic between the staff and residents, and they're not set up to rehabilitate and get people home in a way that's genuinely different than the person that went in.
The other thing we don't do a good job of is considering age. Up until the middle of the last decade there was no problem in the US with sentencing people under the age of 18 to life in prison without parole. All the science in the world points to the fact that before 25 your brain is not functioning correctly.
As far as adult decision-making, you're making them based on an undeveloped brain. We saw all these kids in prisons in states like Pennsylvania where youth were being sentenced to life without parole. Hundreds of youths in Michigan and Florida were being sentenced to life without parole. Even hundreds of youths in California, the most liberal state in the entire country were sentenced to life without parole. How can we justify that? Every other country in the world considers this torture and it is banned by international law.
We are the only country in the world that imprisons its youth for life without the possibility of parole, the only one, there is no other. We can about the problems with our system, but the fact of the matter is we over punish, we're overly punitive, we do not allow people to serve their time, get out and start a new life. We allow them to serve their time, come back and get more problems generally. It feels like there are 40,000 rules to parole in most States, so how are people going to follow those rules?
We get people going back to prison on parole violations where they’re not even recommitting, it’s just things like they drank a beer, or they were in proximity to another person who has been convicted of a felony, they were in the wrong neighbourhood, the wrong zip code, or they came too close to a school. There are so many rules around what you can do when you're supervised after release. Post release supervision is a nightmare, so we have all these problems going on that we need to solve.
The reality of it is what we need to do is educate individuals when they're inside, because every level of education that you go up, whether it's a trade, a bachelor's degree, an advanced degree, or just skills that will get you that sustainable job, if you can get that job earning over 60-70,000 dollars a year, your chances reduce to almost zero of going to go back to prison. You've got a purpose, you've left your past behind, you've been allowed to leave your past behind, and then you become a solid community member.
We lose billions of tax dollars every year in the United States because of the amount of people we incarcerate. This doesn't even mention the community effect of this issue. When you're missing your dad, uncle, cousin, mum, grandfather, brother, sister or child there are problems. We can’t even measure the societal effects of incarceration and what we've done to entire communities in this country.
What I would offer is that we need to give people an opportunity to rehabilitate when they're inside, a real opportunity. Give them the skills that they need to get sustainable jobs when they get home, and then allow them to turn a page in their lives if they've shown that they can be good members of society.
We're not just talking about tax dollars either, can you imagine how much better some of our lower income communities would be if they had all these men and women coming home from prison and earning $80,000 a year? They would allow them to buy stuff in their community, they'd support their kids and send them to college.
There are so many positives to rehabilitation, I can't find a single argument against it. I'd be happy to argue with anyone! The truth and the most amazing thing about this entire issue in the U.S. is we have Democrats and Republicans, red and blue states. This is not a political issue. We get support at The Last Mile from the most conservative Republicans and the most liberal Democrats. We're in Indiana, and their governor is one of the most conservative governors in the country. We're also in California where the governor is one of the most liberal governors in the country, and they both love The Last Mile because they believe people should be given the opportunity to change.
What they do when they get out may be a different dream for each of these sides. I could see in Indiana it might be they want people to give back now to their communities through tax dollars and other stuff. In California, it might just be a more liberal belief that they want people to do better. Regardless of the reason, they both agree it's a human rights issue and that people who are in prison deserve the opportunity to do better.
We've worked with administrations here like Trump and Biden, but what matters to us is that we are doing the very best we can for incarcerated people, residents of the Departments of Corrections. Politics needs to get out of this game completely and we need to understand we've got a human rights issue in the United States that is critical and quite honestly a crisis.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?
There are a ton of them out there quite honestly. We've partnered with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, and they go into facilities and present different ways for men and women to better themselves and to stay out of prison.
I absolutely love the dog programs that are now in most of the California Departments of Corrections Facilities. They bring in dogs for training and they work with canine companions and some of the rescues around the state to get dogs trained so that they can be adopted or used as guide dogs for the blind or service dogs for individuals who need them. That's one of my favourite programs, and I love it when I go into a facility and the dogs are there. I'm a huge dog fan, I've rescued a pit bull and when I see him it just lights me up. Animals are such a great tool to reduce stress and trauma, so seeing those programs is amazing.
One of the things I'm most excited about with The Last Mile right now is we're going to be launching some social enterprises. We're going to basically take the learnings we've acquired from other parts of our careers and launch enterprises we can use as training grounds for individuals that are coming home, to give them fair pay, industry wages, and on the job experience.
When they go and find the thing that they love, they'll have a resume to present and show that they can do their job. The biggest thing is getting their resumes built up in a way that's super healthy. There are a lot of opportunity for more of this work, there are some solid organisations working on housing. There are others that are doing work around making sure people have clothing or transportation to and from work. These are all issues regular people don't often think about, how has somebody who has been in prison and doesn't have a driver's license going to get to work?
There are organisations tackling a lot of these problems, it’s good. I just love when organisations are also thoughtful. Honestly, the Pacers are an influence on the NBA, so I'm hoping that other NBA teams will step up and hire people from the population we work with. There's so much going on right now, and it's such a hot issue, especially re-entry. There are so many great organisations out there and my hat is off to all of them.
