Earlier this year, a 39-year-old Chicago man was sentenced to three years in federal prison for carrying a loaded gun on the CTA Blue Line while he was still on supervised release for a previous drug conviction. The U.S. attorney’s office’s news release details everything about his crime. It says nothing about the opportunities available to him when he first left prison.
The man is one of roughly 20,000 people who return home to Chicago from Illinois prisons every year on top of the roughly 25,000 admissions who cycle through Cook County Jail annually. Most return to a handful of neighborhoods on the South and West sides, and most come home to no job, no credentials, no savings and a record that slams doors shut.
We know what happens next. Roughly 4 in 10 people released from Illinois prisons are back behind bars within three years. The Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council has put a price on that revolving door — roughly $152,000 per reconviction, which factors in police, courts and corrections expenses, costs to victims and lost economic productivity. On top of that, there’s $13 billion in projected costs to taxpayers over five years. Some more numbers to ponder: Cook County spends more than $130 a day to hold one person at the jail. That’s over $400 million a year in operating costs. Illinois spends up to $37,000 annually to incarcerate one person.
We are paying premium prices for a system that manufactures the very outcome Chicago area residents want to end, in part, because ex-offenders face difficulty looking for work.
Nationally, formerly incarcerated people face unemployment rates more than a dozen times the U.S. average. In Illinois, nearly half of people released from prison are still unemployed three years later. Would a second chance have changed the story of the man arrested on the Blue Line? The data says, most likely. When men and women in his position come home to real training and a good job, the revolving door stops spinning.
A 2013 landmark study by RAND found vocational training in prison raises the odds of finding work after release by 28% and cuts people’s odds of going back to prison by 43%. Illinois’ own work-release data tells the same story: Participants were 37% less likely to be reincarcerated.
Closing the gap
Consider a different set of statistics. The American Trucking Associations estimates the industry is short roughly 82,000 drivers this year and will need to hire more than a million over the next decade as the workforce ages out. The Chicago area feels this reality: Job boards list more than 9,000 open commercial truck driver jobs. The same story plays out in diesel technology, fiber optics and heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
Employers are desperate for skilled workers. But many potential workers, including ex-offenders desperate for a career, can’t move forward without training.
New York City decided to close that gap — and the results should make every Chicago leader take notice. Last year, the Big Apple launched Next Mile NYC, a partnership between the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and my company, which offers ex-offenders free job training. Participants are screened, matched to a suitable trade and given individualized coaching from intake through job placement and beyond. Since launching, hundreds of ex-offenders have graduated and secured full-time jobs with annual salaries ranging from $70,000 to $125,000. To date, not a single participant has been reported rearrested.
Just as important is how the city pays for it. The contract is outcomes-based: The city pays up to $10,000 per participant who graduates and lands a job — paid only when milestones are verified, credentials obtained and jobs secured — not for seats filled or hours logged. If participants don’t succeed, taxpayers don’t pay. Compare that to the $152,000 cost every time someone cycles back through the justice system.
The model has also passed the hardest test in politics: surviving an administrative change. Launched under Mayor Eric Adams, the program was expanded under current Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who brought training inside Rikers Island last spring. Now, outreach begins before release. Jurisdictions including Massachusetts, Sacramento and Denver have since contracted for versions of the same approach.
When two mayors with different politics double down on the same program, there’s no argument: Public safety comes from opportunity, not just enforcement.
It is a costly and moral failure to keep demanding bootless men and women pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Chicago can keep paying for each trip through a revolving door, or it can expand training and job opportunities for its residents who come back home.
Uzoma “Zo” Orchingwa is the co-founder and chief executive of Emerge Career, a workforce development technology company that trains and places current and formerly incarcerated people and other underserved populations into skilled trades careers. The Chicago native, who now resides in New York City, is also a Public Voices fellow with the OpEd Project.