Thinking Outside the Box

IN DECEMBER 2011, Eddie Bocanegra, a congregational organizer-in-training, invited me to a meeting held by members of the Illinois-based Community Renewal Society (CRS), a faith-based organization that works with communities to address institutional racism and poverty. 

I was researching how faith-based organizations facilitated recovery from gang life. However, I was also to learn how formerly incarcerated persons use faith to change their communities.

There were 30 people at the meeting—black, white, and Latino—from diverse Christian backgrounds: Baptist, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox. First, Bocanegra shared his testimony: The Illinois governor and the United Nations had recognized Bocanegra for his work in violence prevention, but the stigma of his old gang life and criminal record overshadowed his qualifications for employment.

We were asked to think of solutions to “records discrimination.” One person recalled visiting the state capital to lobby for ban-the-box legislation to remove the felony conviction question from employment applications. From that meeting arose a campaign against records discrimination. With the guidance of a CRS organizer, Bocanegra helped found and lead an ex-offender-led civic group called Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality (FORCE). Eighteen months later, FORCE earned its first legislative victory: Illinois House Bill 3061, which expanded the list of offenses that can be sealed for employment application background checks.

The National Employment Law Project reports that people like Bocanegra are not alone—65 million Americans have a criminal record. Even for those with low-level convictions, a criminal record carries a stigma and often relegates them to unemployment. While the dominant narrative of re-entry tells us that if the formerly incarcerated obey laws and accept social conditions they will be redeemed as good citizens, this is simply not true. In fact, such “blanket discrimination” against formerly incarcerated persons has a racially disparate impact that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

We are entering a new chapter in American carceral policy. Activists and advocates are waging and winning campaigns to decriminalize low-level drug use and to regulate how criminal records are used in job applications and interviews. The ban-the-box movement has led to the removal of the felony conviction question from public employment applications in 18 states, and state bills such as California’s Proposition 47 will redirect hundreds of millions of tax dollars from prisons to education and mental health. “We see this as a social justice” cause, said Karen Lang, a Prop. 47 organizer. “We have been punishing crimes of poverty.”

Religion has played a prominent role in campaigns to expand the rights of the formerly incarcerated. Theologian Helene Slessarev-Jamir argues that “varied ways of framing the prophetic have historically been used in the United States either to enhance or restrict ... the space necessary for a democratic politics.” The CRS organizing efforts are examples of the church opening and holding democratic space for prophetic action.

The ban-the-box movement was formed in 2003 by the civic group All of Us or None. By 2012, faith-based organizers through PICO National Network were leading various local and regional ban-the-box campaigns. To date, more than 100 municipalities have adopted ban-the-box ordinances.

Now there is a movement for national reform. In 2013, PICO asked President Obama to support removal of the felony conviction question from employment applications. In 2015, secular and faith-based groups are urging the president to issue an executive order to remove the conviction question from federal contractors’ employment applications.

Faith-based community organizing can empower those on the margins by making the democratic process accessible. Faith can provide the moral conviction necessary to engage those on the margins. And faith groups can provide the platform for those on the margins to be heard.

We are finally beginning to seriously consider the idea of reducing incarceration rates. Now it is important to understand the limits of prisoner re-entry programs—and the powerful role faith groups can play. Prisoner re-entry only integrates formerly incarcerated persons into the world as it is. But faith-based community organizing offers the possibility of transforming the world into what it can be. In movements such as ban-the-box, it is vital that people of faith provide spaces for formerly incarcerated persons to not only change themselves, but to change the communities to which they are returning.