Job fair provides services, job options to Indy ex-offenders

Every year, approximately 10,000 of them leave prison and return home. About 2,000 come back to Marion County every year.

With a reported IDOC recidivism rate of nearly 40%, jobs and access to services can play a key role in breaking the revolving door cycle that returns to many ex-offenders back to prison.

”They’re not looking for handouts. They’re looking for somebody who can give them a hand that will help them build up.”

Before she was laid off in the recent DEI purge at Ivy Tech, Dominique Robinson-Scott organized a Justice-Involved Resource Fair along with the Marion County Reentry Coalition to help ex-offenders find the support they need to stay out of prison.

”We have employers who are willing to do on-site interviews who are second chance employers, they are looking for those employers, those employees who have that background,” said Robinson-Scott. ”When they get out and can get connected with an organization immediately, it lowers that risk. It lowers the chance to do something that will cause recidivism. It lowers the chance of being put in that place where you feel like you have to do whatever crime that may be that sends you back to where you were.

”If they’re out looking for employment, they want it. That is something that they are choosing to look for and they are hard workers.”

It’s a lesson not lost on the floor of Recycleforce, the east side plant where on any given day up to seventy ex-offenders are disassembling electronics and earning a steady paycheck, for many of them, for the first time.

”My ways of dealing with life were real missed up but Recycleforce had changed me into a way now that I look at life different,” said Brian Lynch who spent six years in a state prison before being paroled a year ago and working his way up a production team lead at the plant. ”The way I was raised in Chicago it was more like street life. Now I realize that that ain’t what its about. Its about being successful and trying to make it in life and having a job and being a reliable parent.”

Each week Recycleforce hires eight to 12 new ex-offenders and transitions as many out into the community and new jobs.

“Some people this is the first job they’ve ever had,” said Employment Specialist Calvin Houston. “They’ve never had to show up anywhere on time at eight o’clock in the morning. How to communicate with employers. Warehouse safety. Just the intangible things. Soft skills that people aren’t familiar with.”

Recycleforce invites state parole officers into the plant to meet with their clients and holds daily peer engagement sessions to encourage employees to keep building their law-abiding careers and lifestyle.

”Not only do we save the environment by recycling electronics, we’re saving people’s lives,” said Houston. “I mean, work is therapy. If people are here working, nine times out of ten they’re going home to rest.

Recycleforce accepts only referrals from IDOC which interviews and places offenders before prison release.

Houston said the plant’s workforce boasts a recidivism rate of just six percent.

”I’d rather work every day of my life right now,” said Lynch. “I don’t even wanna look back to the streets.”