In the United States, one in three adults has a criminal record—though black men are six times more likely than white men to be incarcerated.
Over 60 percent of the formerly incarcerated will still be unemployed a year after release. Those who do find employment are typically in low-level jobs, earning 40 percent less pay than adults with no criminal background.
The more nonprofit leaders I met from around the country, the more it became clear that what we were really talking about was a national problem. Individually, our groups were serving our own communities, but what about the big picture: the 2.2 million Americans currently incarcerated, and what happened when they got out?
Though a huge segment of the national population, formerly incarcerated people had no seat at the table. Dorsey pointed to the United Farmworkers movement of the 1960s and how the workers themselves organized, demanding to have a voice. In this spirit, he proposed creating a national organization of formerly incarcerated people and their families.
I heeded his call and, in 2003, gathered in the hills of San Francisco with forty other men and women who had served time for felony convictions. We created a mission statement to advocate for the human rights of those in prison, and to demand full restoration of our human and civil rights after release. We vowed, “Nothing about us, without us.”
Dorsey had come up with a name for the group after visiting the San Francisco County jail and paying his respects at the memorial of his late friend and mentor, Nate Harrington. Convicted as a teenager for selling drugs, Harrington earned his GED in prison and, after his release in 1976, passed the American Bar Association exam and successfully appealed to the California bar to receive a license to practice law. Harrington then went back to prison, devoting his career to giving inmates a voice in civil law issues, such as child custody cases. In 1997, at forty-four years old, Harrington died in a freak home accident. The county jail’s law library was dedicated to his memory, with a memorial case featuring some of Harrington’s favorite things: Franz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth; a Snickers bar; and Bertolt Brecht’s poem “All of Us or None.” It was from the poem’s refrain that Dorsey drew his inspiration:
Comrade, only slaves can free you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
Christening the new organization All of Us or None, Dorsey developed a call and response. “All of us!” he shouted.
“Or none!” we answered, our fists pumping in the air.
Through President George W. Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives I received a sub-grant from a church, which I used to turn the garage of the Broke Leg House into an office—and it was there that our first meeting of the Southern California chapter of All of Us or None took place.
One of our initial goals was to hold Peace and Justice Community summits throughout California. Our first summit was in 2004 in Oakland. We taped large sheets of paper around the room, each with a major issue faced by the formerly incarcerated: Family Reunification, Housing, Jobs. We then handed out sticky dots and instructed everyone to place dots on the issues most important to them; they could put a dot on each issue, or all their dots on one. When the exercise was complete, Jobs had the most dots, which was no surprise—the effects of job discrimination extended to families, to children, and to entire communities. The correlation was crystal clear: when unemployment rates rose, so did crime and violence. From that moment forward, jobs would become All of Us or None’s top-priority issue.
But we were still learning as we went along. At our summit in Compton, we were surprised when the city council welcomed the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. Marching into the room were children with wooden guns slung over their shoulders. The council then began the Pledge of Allegiance. I looked over at Dorsey. This was our summit, we didn’t want to glorify guns or open the day with pledging allegiance to a flag under which we were denied our constitutional rights. From this day arose All of Us or None’s Self-Determination Pledge:
To demand the right to speak in our own voices; to treat each other with respect, and not allow difference to divide us; to accept responsibility for any acts that may have caused harm to our families, our communities or ourselves; to fight all forms of discrimination; to help build the economic stability of formerly-incarcerated people; to claim and take care of our own children and our families; to support community struggles to stop using prisons as the answer to social problems; and to play an active role in making our communities safe for everyone.
For our summit in Watts, invitations went out on the letterhead of U.S. Representative Karen Bass. Replies of attendance streamed in from officials from the Housing Authority, the state legislature, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
We gathered in Phoenix Hall, home of Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Museum, which—like the indomitable phoenix—rose from the ashes of the Watts riots. The politicians were led to the dais, but, to their surprise, they had no microphone. The only microphone was in the audience, for the community—to amplify the voices of those typically left out.
For the first half of the day, formerly incarcerated people testified to the challenges they faced after being released. They spoke from the heart of the difficulty of reuniting with their children, the lack of access to affordable housing, and the consistent rejection from jobs because of their criminal record. I watched the officials who were unable to interrupt or give excuses or make empty promises—and I saw them truly listening.
We instructed the officials that, after lunch, they would have the microphone—but they had to return with some answers to the target issue of job discrimination. They followed instructions, and the discussion narrowed to that question on all job applications: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? When you automatically had to check that box, your application went no further, regardless of your qualifications. That box superseded all other job skills, experience, qualifications, and talent. It weeded out people before they even got a foot in the door.
What if, we discussed, that initial box could be eliminated so that everyone who was qualified had the chance to get to that next step? This way, you could walk in with your strengths, as a full person, with no stigma blocking you. The question of a criminal record could come later in the process—during a personal interview, most likely—after a potential employer at least had the chance to get to know your qualifications and you. From this, the Ban the Box movement was born.
The city of San Francisco was the first to vote—unanimously—to Ban the Box on municipal employment applications. Though not comprehensive, it was a step in the right direction. First Boston, then Oakland, followed with Ban the Box legislation. These policy shifts spurred national discussion, and we saw the language evolve as a result: the word “ex-con,” which unfairly defined a person for the rest of his or her life, soon fell out of use in academia, journalism, grant applications, and in the words of elected officials.
But when it came to my hometown, progress was lagging. Los Angeles County was one of the largest employers in the state—and it also had the state’s largest population of people with criminal records. Despite this, it took years of clamoring before finally, in 2006, Ban the Box was slated to go before the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. Of the five members, three were Democrats. We were ready to celebrate an overdue victory.
Unbelievably, we lost. Despite other counties and neighboring cities, such as Compton, stepping up, Los Angeles failed to act. After several years, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at last banned the box from employment applications for all state agencies. And when Governor Jerry Brown took office, Ban the Box was further expanded to all public sector job applications in California.
San Francisco continued to enforce the broadest coverage of Ban the Box, with the law eventually applying to city contract employers, housing applications, and private companies with twenty or more employees. And it went an important step further by prohibiting employers from asking about criminal convictions during an initial interview, and from even considering a criminal history unless it had a “direct and specific negative bearing” on the applicant’s ability to perform the job. San Francisco employers were also required to display in the window a poster from the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, demonstrating compliance. To us, this was a beautiful welcome sign.
Sweeping the nation, twenty-one states and over one hundred cities and counties banned the box on government applications—some enacted broader bans extending to private employers. In 2015, President Barack Obama spoke the words “Ban the Box.” To think that we, a ragtag group of people with conviction records, came up with this! When Obama banned the box from federal job applications, it was another victory, though not as wide-reaching as we’d hoped. For every stride we made, it was clear how far we still had to go.
At Christmastime, All of Us or None members stood before a San Francisco community center full of families. Dorsey called children up by name and, one by one, eager kids raced to receive gifts they’d asked for—but not from Santa. “This,” Dorsey told them, “is from your dad. He loves you.” These children didn’t need to believe in Santa Claus so much as they needed to believe in their parents behind bars who desperately wanted to remain relevant.
For days I’d watched Dorsey running around collecting gifts, and now I stood back marveling at all the people taking care of each other, especially the men, looking out for other men’s children. A cadre of volunteers, most of whom were formerly incarcerated themselves, wheeled in bikes for the kids.
“I stole a bike when I was a teenager,” Dorsey admitted to the volunteers.
“So did I,” a volunteer offered up. Others nodded, that had been their story too.
Dorsey smiled. “Well, now’s our chance to give that bike back.”