'It’s Got to Start on the Inside': How a Business-Training Program for People in Prison Aims to Keep Them From Returning

Timothy Jackson never thought about becoming an entrepreneur until he spent 12 years in prison.

That’s where he came across and got inspired by other formerly incarcerated people who had started their own businesses. He then enrolled in a training program that gave him the skills and confidence to do the same.

“I saw people come back from the program empowered — they were changed,” Jackson said.

Now, he owns and runs Quality Touch Cleaning Systems, a San Diego-area business he started mostly to keep himself employed. He oversees five employees plus a couple of independent contractors and has clients in biotech, health care and other industries.

Jackson, 43, marveled at how far he’s come since he got out of prison in 2017 and started his business a year later. “Five, six years later, and I’m signing checks,” he said. “This is crazy.”

Defy Ventures is a national nonprofit organization that runs the program that helped Jackson eventually launch his business. Its chief executive, Andrew Glazier, said the six- to nine-month program teaches employment-readiness and business skills to people in prison.

The program also addresses “self-limiting beliefs,” he said. “It’s about coming to terms with past trauma and creating a new narrative for yourself that isn’t based on liabilities of your past.”

The organization is one of many around the nation trying to minimize recidivism rates through its in-prison and community programs. Defy’s definition of recidivism aligns with the federal one: a return to prison if convicted of a crime or because of a parole violation. Defy — which is funded with public and private money — said its graduates have a 10% recidivism rate at the one-year mark and 15% at the three-year mark, compared with the U.S. rate of 20% and 39%, respectively, according to the most recent federal data.

Jackson, who was among a cohort of almost 100 people who went through the program, placed second in a business-pitch competition. Defy awarded him a $7,000 grant to help start his business and connected him with a mentor, who Jackson said “was there every step of the way” and who has become like family to him.

California an ‘outlier’

Defy’s programs operate in 11 prisons in California and nearly a dozen in eight other states. Glazier said California and Wisconsin are the only two states that help provide grants for its programs, and the rest of its funding comes from corporations and foundations. Last year, 18% of the organization’s funding, or about $245,000, came from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the California Community Reinvestment Grants Program and federal funds.

Glazier said California is an outlier not just because it provides funding but also because of its openness to programs like Defy’s. “Access and space are just as important as the funding,” he said.

“It’s got to start on the inside,” Glazier added, saying programs like Defy’s end up saving state money in the long run, given that the cost of housing a prisoner in California is now more than $132,000 a year. “If you wait till people come home, by and large, it’s too late.”

A total of 936 people took part in Defy’s prison programs last year, 497 of them in California. The organization helped an additional 168 people nationwide with career and re-entry services after they were released from prison, 123 of whom were in the state. And 19 of its graduates launched businesses last year, 10 in California.

Among Defy’s funders is Checkr, a San Francisco-based software company that does background checks for employers. Checkr advocates for fair-chance hiring and says its workforce is 5% formerly incarcerated people. In California, the Fair Chance Act prohibits employers with five or more employees from asking about potential employees’ conviction history before making them a job offer. And a new state law that took effect last year allows for most people with felony convictions to ask for their records to be cleared.

Checkr Foundation, the company’s fledgling philanthropic arm, recently awarded Defy a $25,000 grant. The foundation’s executive director is Ken Oliver, who spent more than two decades in prison and has been advocating for formerly incarcerated people since he got out in 2019.

Oliver said Checkr just launched an apprenticeship program, bringing in nine men and women at “all levels of the business, giving them nice salaries for being fresh out of prison, and benefits.”

He said that kind of support can do wonders for formerly incarcerated people since society tends to “judge” them — a sentiment echoed by several such people who spoke with CalMatters, all of whom faced challenges getting a job when they first got out of jail or prison.

“Give people a job for $80,000, all of a sudden they’re model citizens,” Oliver said.

Post-prison success stories

Other Defy graduates already have jobs at Checkr.

They include Jaylene Leslie of Contra Costa County, who went through Defy’s training program after she got out of Santa Rita County Jail in Dublin and had trouble finding a job because of her record. After she finished Defy’s program, she won some grants to start a catering business and did that for a while. Then, she landed a job at Checkr, where she has been for the past six years, most recently on the customer-success team.

Leslie, who is 55, said that at one point, she had lost “everything — job, house, car.” But getting a job at Checkr helped her get those things back. “If I didn’t have the compensation from a full-time tech position, I don’t think I’d be able to live in the Bay Area,” she said.

Adam Garcia, who lives near Grass Valley, an hour northeast of Sacramento, has similar feelings about Defy — and Checkr. That’s why, despite completing an almost 20-year prison sentence in 2019, he returns to prison to volunteer and try to inspire others. Garcia, 43, went through Defy’s program, then eventually got a job at Checkr, where he is on the talent team and will soon be a recruiter.

About 10 years into his sentence, Garcia said, “I didn’t want to hurt my family anymore.”

So he thought, “If I get a whole bunch of certificates, let me do the song and dance for the [parole] board so I can get out of prison.” But after the various programs and group sessions he attended, he said his mindset genuinely began to change.

All of that prepared him for Defy’s program. Garcia likened its “very intensive curriculum” to a semester in college. The program only has a 65% graduation rate, according to Glazier, its CEO.

Garcia, who entered the program with about a year to go in his sentence, said it also provided him with a laptop and a gift card to Men’s Wearhouse when he got out of prison.

Now, at Checkr, he is doing some of the things he was previously volunteering to do “and getting paid for it,” Garcia said. “I was excited for myself and excited that the company was investing in me and people like me.”

Jackson, the cleaning business owner, is similarly enthusiastic about how his life has changed. He said going through the Defy program helped him “transition from hope to transformation.”