Edit: Thank you everyone for the incredible wealth of insightful suggestions. To anyone who wants to continue the conversation, I'd appreciate your pinging me at richard@70millionjobs.com with your continuing ideas, so we can stay in touch. Many challenges lie ahead for us, but your help will keep us on the right track.
Again, on behalf of all the folks with records trying to get on with their lives, and myself personally, thanks again for your incredible support. Richard
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Hi HN,
My name is Richard Bronson and I'm the founder/CEO of 70MillionJobs (https://www.70millionjobs.com). Our website is the Internet's first job board for 70 million Americans—1 in 3 adults—with criminal records.
I'm something of a domain expert in this area because I myself have a criminal record. In the early 1990s, I worked on Wall Street and some of what I did was illegal. For a time I was a partner at the infamous Wolf of Wall Street firm, Stratton Oakmont (Scorcese film). I ended up with a 2 year Federal prison sentence. I was guilty.
I experienced first hand how difficult it was to get on with life after going through the "system." I served as Director at Defy Ventures, a great non-profit in the reentry space, but was interested in a scalable solution to ex-offender unemployment and resultant recidivism. I felt a new, for-profit, tech-based approach was necessary, so I launched 70MillionJobs. We're seeking "double bottom-line" returns: make money and do social good.
Like most job boards, our business model is based upon employers paying to advertise their jobs. We expect additional revenue to come from municipalities, who spend tens of billions of dollars annually, when someone is rearrested.
You might not be surprised to learn that most formerly incarcerated men and women are petrified to discuss their background with prospective employers. So we created a "safe haven" where all parties knew the score, and applicants could relax knowing that jobs being offered were with companies that accepted their pasts.
Since many of our applicants don't have a laptop or easy access to the Internet, we send out text alerts they can easily respond to. Because most of these folks have limited work experience and limited formal education, we plan on building a video resume platform to accompany their resumes. In person, many of these folks are respectful, bright and personable, so this will show them at their best.
So many people deserve a chance to redeem themselves from being 'branded', yet are denied the exact opportunities that would allow them to do so. This problem goes back a long, long ways.[1]
Anything you can do to help is great. Best of luck!
Not associated with that company but one reason to hire a convict is that you get a pretty decent tax break[0] out of it
I would love to hear from company founders about what factors they use to discover this information in their external job listings that are not on jurisdictions like this.
Source: http://www.millerlawgroup.com/publications/alerts/San-Franci...
"... that almost a third of men [in Britain] have a criminal conviction by the age of 30, according to the Home Office. Research on men born in 1953 showed that about 30 per cent had clocked up a standard list offence - one that is dealt with by the courts but excludes minor motoring offences - by their thirtieth birthday. Research in Scotland points in the same direction, suggesting that about 25 per cent of men have a record by age 24."
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2002/apr/14/workandcareers...
I find it extremely admirable. Best of luck with your approach.
[0] See for example this archived blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20150222003545/http://www.timpso... or a search for "Timpson ex-offenders" https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=timpson+ex-offenders
The parent is confusing criminal record with incarceration duration. The UK has nearly just as high of a criminal record ratio among adult men for example. The difference is the US assigns far longer incarceration times for the same crime vs the UK. Further, Europe as a whole has a higher crime rate than the US does. [1]
70 million jobs has plenty of room for international expansion accordingly.
"[2011] Contrary to common perceptions, today both property and violent crimes (with the exception of homicides) are more widespread in Europe than in the United States, while the opposite was true thirty years ago. We label this fact as the ‘reversal of misfortunes’."
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1889952
https://jobboardhq.blob.core.windows.net/assets/prod/2ttp/lo...
here's a direct link to FB's open graph debugger with your site already loaded into it: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=https...
The US has about 4.4 percent of the global population and about 22 percent of the global prison population. So either we are seriously fucking up as a country and incapable of producing decent human beings, or our entire justice system is broken.
Something needs to be done differently at the systemic level that doesn't involved holding every individual fucked over by the U.S. personally accountable for being crushed under the wheels of the goddamn system.
This is from G.K.Chesterton, around 1907, "The Perpetuation of Punishment":
https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504H7CQ#v...
The tickets had something else in common. Brownsville, the South Bronx, East Harlem, Bed-Stuy (at least eight years ago, when the ticket was issued), all of them are neighborhoods with large black or Hispanic, and very small white, populations. It was then that it became clear to me: the reason for the tickets wasn’t that these Lisa Davises were petty criminals.
If you are the wrong color and live in the wrong part of town, you get criminalized for existing. Then when something does go really wrong, you can be railroaded.
Derreck Hamilton* was a black kid guilty of minor bullshit who spent years and years in prison for a murder he did not commit (because some asshole cop was out to get him and he got railroaded). So, acting like not sending poor, non-whites to prison for basically existing somehow will make life scarier is basically racist bullshit. Or perhaps simply clueless about how things work in this country.
* http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/derrick-hamilto...
Have you met the guys behind https://pigeon.ly/?
Are there any other problem areas related to the criminal justice system that you are not addressing, that you think a startup could help with?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/...
The US has about 4.4 percent of the global population and about 22 percent of the global prison population.
The numbers are more startling using a different measure in the report: the prison population rate. Criminologists say this is a reliable way to compare incarceration practices between countries.
The United States had the highest prison population rate in the world, at 716 per 100,000 people. More than half of the countries and territories had rates below 150 per 100,000. The United States had a much higher rate compared to other developed countries: about six times Canada’s rate, between six to nine times Western European countries, and between two to 10 times Northern European countries.
So, I will suggest you work hard to frame it as "Many American citizens have a criminal record for the crime of being an American citizen. The system is broken and many people with criminal records really don't deserve to have them at all."
In other words, don't tell them "give a criminal a second chance." Tell them that many people with criminal records simply shouldn't have them and you are making a terrible mistake to hold that against them, both in practical terms by cutting out talent from the hiring pool for specious reasons, and in moral terms because you are denying someone an opportunity to recover from having been shafted by a broken system to begin with.
FYI: I'm a copywriter by trade.
That's a very interesting approach, but I believe a hard sell to potential employer. As true as it may be, an employer is more likely to appreciate the individual who says this is my background, this is what I learned and this is my vision of my own future...rather than, it's not my fault, I'm a societal statistic.
In fact, despite the ideas of US prison overcrowding and for profit drive conviction rates...I'd argue the opposite, that it's very likely the employer has already hired individuals who have committed various "crimes" and could but simply don't have records.
I know it's stance but all you need to do it look at the number of reported crimes (serious, not victimless like many would argue about drug possession) and the total prison population.
Example:
prison population = ~ 2.2M inmates
Every year in the US 60,000 children are sexually abused; ~220,000 adults sexually abused or raped; ~19,000 military members experience unwanted sexual contact. [1]
US prisons only seem over crowded until you see the number of violent crimes in the country, it basically works out to a sexual assault/rape every 90 seconds, it's pretty disturbing.
http://www.rochellestevens.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01... has a very slightly better summary (at least enough to prove I'm not making it up).
https://www.70millionjobs.com/page/Certification
I see nothing but some share buttons, the standard header and footer, and a blank white page. There's a Sumo login tab that slides out of the scroll bar if you mouseover near the top right corner.
It's perhaps only caused by the Show HN DDOS/hug of death, but better to learn now than later that the Sumo Listbuilder popup takes at least 30-60 seconds to load. I only waited long enough to notice it because I had to disable UBlock and reloaded watching the Network tab of the dev tools.
>Percent of sentenced prisoners under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities, by age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin, December 31, 2015
446,700 white male prisoners 501,300 black male prisoners 301,500 hispanic male prisoners 122,400 other male prisoners
Which means male adults of color (925,200) make up more than double the male white adult (446,700) state/federal prison population.
[0]https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p15.pdf
The more disturbing statistic being that 1,745/100,000 black adults are incarcerated, compared to 317/100,000 white adults.
Female incarceration rates do not follow this same trend identically according to the data, and they make up only ~7% of the total correctional population.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/01/cory-...
So... I don't believe that "these attitudes are changing quickly."
1 - https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... (top of page 9)
Suggesting the Democrat party wants to decriminalize drugs and drug offenses isn’t entirely accurate. Some people in both parties would like to see that happen.
States with vast Democrat majorities haven’t decriminalized drug offenses. Some states have to some degree, but you have to ask, when Democrats has the White House, House and Senate, they could have acted, but didn’t – even when they had a super-majority.
My point isn’t that Republicans are better, but the Democrat Party has had chances, but they failed to act, so the parent comment is correct – no party is actually doing anything when given the chance – just a few isolated people.
Right now the demographic make up of companies don't match the population, that's true, but these companies do tend to match the demographics of trained programmers. The difference in demographics is from people choosing not to enter tech. If you want to fix the problem, work on training pipelines into tech.
The best way to summarize our different viewpoints is probably "Wanting Equality of Opportunity vs. wanting Equality of Outcome". And-- you assume that if the outcome of tech-demographics is different than the population, then it must be due to racism/sexism. There are other cultural and socio-economic factors that influence the demographics of tech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F89eycANUrQ
I definitely feel that American prison policy leans way too far on the side of moral judgement and retribution than rehabilitation. In my personal opinion, anyone who has served their term has already paid for their mistakes and we, as a society, should be more concerned with helping them get back on their feet than with further punishing them for their mistakes.
I also think the practice of denying former felons the right to vote is completely ridiculous. So if you commit a felony at 18, you can't vote even when you're a 100? What kind of sense does that make?
Edit: Well I need to get off my horse because it seems to be similar here in the UK as well: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2002/apr/14/workandcareers...
[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-m-granholm/debunking-...
http://thedollop.libsyn.com/228-boston-busing-1974
http://thedollop.libsyn.com/229-boston-busing-1975
It sounds more like a bad disaster movie than recent American history.
Here's a relevant piece from the Los Angeles Times.
'One example: Google's own data showed women were promoted less often than men because workers need to nominate themselves. Women who did so got pushback. Based on her studies, [Joan C.] Williams [law professor, UC Hastings College of the Law] found that women are rewarded for modesty and penalized for what men might see as "aggressive" behavior. Google began including female leaders at workshops to coach everyone — men and women — on how to promote themselves effectively. The gender difference among nominees disappeared, Williams said.'
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-women-tech-20150222-st...
I'm not talking about murderers or pedophiles or people who just probably don't belong in society at all, but when it comes to people with lesser crimes -- people who got greedy, people who were stupid and stole something, or even were involved with drugs (I'm an advocate for decriminalization), people who can be given a second chance and not resort to a life of returning to old habits.
The organization's URL is: https://thelastmile.org/
Another URL I came across: http://jobsthathirefelons.org/
Anyways, hope you don't mind, but I've added your URL to my article as well. I'd rather see productive ex-cons/former felons contribute to our society and not be relegated to a position at a minimum wage job for the rest of their lives, despite having massive amounts of skills and talents that can be used elsewhere.
* random example form googling, but I've seen a few on the topic https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/03/race-crimin...
One minor suggestion: review the assets on your website, the second background image[0] for example is 12 megabytes, you can probably compress it to much smaller size.
[0] https://jobboardhq.blob.core.windows.net/assets/prod/2ttp/sh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line
Yes... Helping people, communities, over the generations.
I just read this story and thought it might be interesting for you: http://www.sgi.org/people-and-perspectives/changing-lives-in...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/consequ...
IMO it's an important point that needs to be better understood. I wrote about it recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14917723 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14912821 if anyone's interested.
