A few months after her release from federal prison in 2017, Charlotte Garnes finally found a job that renewed her sense of purpose and allowed her to rebuild her life. But when her employer found out about her conviction, she was fired immediately.
For 11 months, Garnes had been working with job centers that provide career training, support services, and resume workshops to formerly incarcerated people, connecting them with companies willing to hire workers with convictions on their record.
“I was told specifically by this employer that ‘we can’t have people like you coming in and [working here].’ But at the same time, this is exactly what [my work] was for, people like me,” Garnes said.
According to the National Institute of Justice, the likelihood of receiving a callback or job offer is cut in half for a person with a criminal record, and the penalty is “substantially greater” for Black people than for white people.
Atlanta-based activist and organizer Bridgette Simpson is working to break down the barriers that Garnes and many other people with a record face.
When the Georgia General Assembly reconvenes in a few months, Simpson is hoping a bill she is working on to designate people with a criminal record as a protected class finds support among state lawmakers.
In 2013, Garnes, a licensed mental health and substance abuse therapist in North Carolina, was convicted of healthcare fraud and sentenced to five years in prison. After three years and 10 months incarcerated, she was released. She moved to Augusta to be close to family.
When she lost her job, their support was what kept her afloat.
“After the termination, I felt very defeated because it’s like okay, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing and I felt, and still feel, that I’m a great representation of resilience and what happens when people are afforded an opportunity to turn their life around,” Garnes said.
Simpson’s proposed bill does not mean an employer or property owner cannot conduct a background check, and it would not prevent them from deciding to reject someone based on safety or other concerns. Instead, it would prevent people from being rejected simply for having a record without considering the charges and whether they were convicted.
In Georgia, a person can be legally excluded from employment and housing for having any kind of criminal record, including an arrest, nonconviction, and misdemeanor or felony conviction. This disproportionately impacts Black communities that are overpoliced and Black Georgians who are more likely to be detained pretrial and receive longer sentences if convicted.
Before Simpson herself was incarcerated, she had gone to college to study finance and accounting. Although she served her time, Simpson couldn’t find a job in her field and was living in her car after being released in 2018. A chicken plant in North Georgia was the only place that would hire her.
“When I came home [from prison], I worked at a chicken plant. I worked my fingers to the bone, probably about 80 plus hours a week,” Simpson said. “I was paying $50, $20, $100 application fees for these apartments, making it past the credit portion and never found a place to live.”
Six years ago, Simpson and her friend Denise Ruben co-founded Barred Business to help justice-impacted people establish economic independence through small business loans.
“If there had been statewide protections [back] then, I would have had a different reentry journey. I would have been able to participate in society way sooner,” Simpson said.
She’s received help with the legislation from organizers in other states, primarily Louisiana-based Voice of the Experienced and Minneapolis-based Justice Impacted Individuals Voting Effectively.
During the legislative session earlier this year, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers passed two bills that would improve hiring outcomes specifically for people with a conviction on their record. House Bill 162 requires automatic record restriction for anyone convicted under the First Offender Act, and Senate Bill 207 requires professional licensing boards to consider whether a person’s conviction is relevant to the occupation if they want to reject their application.
A report from the Clean Slate Initiative (CSI) estimates that each year, Georgia residents lose $18.5 billion in earnings due to criminal records. The advocacy group, which pushes for states to automatically seal eligible criminal records and expand eligibility, based the report on a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that began in 1997 with 9,000 teenagers and tracked them through 2021.
“Based on our findings, Black people with records are being penalized more severely than any other racial group we examined, which is white and Hispanic people,” said Liz Johnson, a data scientist at CSI and the report’s author.
Even though wages tend to be lower when compared with the Northeast and West, Johnson found that the South accounted for the largest share of earnings losses nationwide. When dealing with such large numbers, Johnson said it can be hard for people to grasp the impact these losses have on everybody, not just people with records.
“This is just the pre-tax earnings lost,” she noted. “This money can increase tax bases, go back into communities, into people’s pockets, and make their families stronger.”
The economic consequences highlighted in the report may also have a greater impact on lawmakers in more Republican-leaning states like Georgia. Because approximately 40% of adults in the state have some type of criminal record, Simpson believes protected class legislation has bipartisan appeal.
“There are approximately 4.3 million people in the state of Georgia that carry a criminal [record]. Don’t we want them to access jobs [which are] an opportunity to pay taxes and to contribute to our communities and our schools?” she asked.
In addition to the number of Georgians impacted by the justice system, there are millions more who have justice-impacted family members they may have to support.
When Garnes first lost her job, she had to rely on family just to keep her head above water.
“My mom would ask, ‘Hey, do you need money for this?’ My brother would pay my car insurance. My sister would help me with my rent,” she said.
Without their support, Garnes doesn’t know if she would have been able to pursue her dream of going back to school. In May, she earned a doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology from Liberty University.
Even though her original employer didn’t want her, Garnes was determined to continue the work she’d begun connecting formerly incarcerated people with job opportunities.
In 2020, she founded ReNforce, a nonprofit that offers professional development, training, one-on-one coaching, and support throughout the job application process for people with a criminal record.
Still, Garnes remembers when it seemed like everyday she was rejected from a job or an apartment building and how it impacted her self-esteem.
“It felt like I might as well go back to prison at one point, like I’m trying to do everything I need to do and everything you’re telling me and I keep getting all these no’s,” Garnes said.
Three years ago, ReNforce expanded its services by opening a group home in Augusta for women beginning their reentry journey.
“We pride ourselves on working with the justice-impacted individual and their family as a whole because we understand what [a record] means. And we understand that a conviction means your whole life has changed, and if you are a mother or a father, then your whole family has been impacted,” Garnes said.
