Leon Phillips grew up in a hard-scrabble family in rural Ohio, where his grandmother, known affectionately and a little fearfully as ‘Big Momma,’ preached from the gospel of hard work.
“I learned to work from 7 years old on up, and I haven’t stopped working since,” said Phillips. “I don’t mind because I was raised to work.”
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Finding work became a chore after Phillips was incarcerated three times in three different states, with his last stint ending in 1996. Though potential employers did not explicitly tell Phillips his background cost him a job, he’s sure it had an impact.
“It was subtle, but firm,” said Phillips. “Any time they do a background search on you, it’s going to be an issue.”
Today, the 70-year-old is working part-time at a Mid-South Food Bank warehouse on Perkins Road near Lamar Avenue in Southeast Memphis thanks to the state-run American Jobs Center located at Crosstown Concourse and the Tennessee Office of Reentry, both of which fall under the umbrella of the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
Most states help formerly-incarcerated people find work through the correction department, so Gov. Bill Lee’s decision to house Tennessee’s Office of Reentry in the labor department to boost job placement and retention was a novel idea when the office was established in 2021.
While the move has improved job placement support for justice-involved people across the state, local criminal justice reform and reentry advocates say the office could do much more if it had more power and better funding.
The office does not have any legal, regulatory or statutory authority to mandate changes in the public or private sectors. It had a budget of $2.3 million for fiscal year 2025, and 10 employees, including four in its Nashville-based central office. By comparison, Tennessee’s roughly $60 billion state budget includes around $1.5 billion for the Department of Correction. In fiscal year 2023, the DOC spent $907 million on incarceration alone, 79% of its total budget for the year.
“I want to give credit where it is due,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, the Memphis-based criminal justice reform organization. “The fact that they created this office, it’s a good thing. It’s progress, but it’s a drop in the ocean (the state) created by constantly expanding the reach of the criminal legal system.”
A small team tackling a big problem
Not being able to find a job is a major reason many formerly incarcerated people end up back in prison, said William E. Arnold Jr., director of the Office of Reentry.
It’s a problem Arnold understands intimately. He struggled to find work after his conviction was overturned nearly seven years into a 25-year prison sentence. “No one seemed to be hiring, or wanted to have a conversation with me about employment or anything about a new life,” he said.
Twenty-seven percent of formerly incarcerated people living in the United States are unemployed, according to a 2018 study by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit that does research on mass incarceration. That’s nearly nine times Tennessee’s unemployment rate. With no way to support themselves or their families, Arnold said these people will do what they have to do to survive, even if it means breaking the law.
“Jobs and employment are a good way to refocus people,” Arnold said. “It gives you the ability to increase your self-esteem, because now you’re able to provide for your family through legal means. That’s the power of work.”
Formerly incarcerated people face multiple barriers to finding meaningful and stable work, including stigma, lack of access to education and training, and discrimination from employers, but Tennessee’s Office of Reentry doesn’t have the budget or staff to tackle these issues directly.
Instead, the office tries to make existing state offices, agencies and policies work better for formerly incarcerated people, Arnold said.
Reentry officials leverage existing Labor Department services and help coordinate statewide reentry efforts, highlighting reentry barriers and opportunities to disparate state offices and a large, patchwork group of civic and nonprofit organizations across the state, said Trevor White, data and research coordinator for the Office of Reentry.
“We’re not as one-on-one as people want us to be sometimes, but the advantage we have is that we are that 30,000-foot view,” White said.
“A large part of it is getting people in the same room to talk to each other,” he said.”You can have two organizations right down the street from each other who don’t know the other ones exist and serving the same population of people, and to be fair to them, it’s because they’re busy with their own work.”
The overall goal is to reduce the state’s recidivism rate. In 2021, the year the Office of Reentry launched, the Tennessee recidivism rate stood at 46%, meaning nearly half the people released from a DOC facility in the state returned to confinement within three years.
The need for post-incarceration services in Tennessee is immense. Tennessee has an incarceration rate of 817 per 100,000 people, which means it locks up more people in jails, juvenile facilities and prisons than any democratic nation on the planet. 55,000 Tennesseans are incarcerated, and the vast majority of those people will eventually be released and will have to reintegrate into society, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
DeAndre Brown, director of the Shelby County Office of Reentry, said that while the state’s focus on employment for the formerly incarcerated makes sense, much more can and should be done to reintegrate people who in many cases are essentially restarting a life and may need help with a variety of needs, including employment, transportation and housing.
“I think it’s a good thing they’re focused on employment, it’s a step in the right direction, but in my experience, reentry has to deal with every facet of a person’s life,” said Brown.
“We’re trending in the right direction, but I just think we need to reimagine what reentry looks like and provide the appropriate investment,” he said. “It takes time, it takes effort, and it takes investment.”
Arnold, a Memphis native, said a major benefit of having the Office of Reentry in the Department of Labor is that it is free from the responsibilities — and the possible taint — of being part of a law enforcement agency, like the Department of Correction or a sheriff’s office.
“They’re carceral facilities,” Arnold said. “Many justice-involved individuals have a distrust of those groups because they were just incarcerated by them.”
Making do
The Office of Reentry has made the 21 American Jobs Centers across the state the tip of its spear. The centers and their staff already had years of experience connecting people with employers and other public and nonprofit services, as well as established relationships with a variety of providers.
The Office of Reentry worked with the AJCs to make them more helpful to justice-involved individuals. For example, instead of having one reentry specialist at each AJC to assist the justice-involved, the office trained every career specialist at each location to handle their unique needs. Last year, the Office of Reentry provided AJC staff members with the opportunity to receive national certification to assist formerly incarcerated people.
“It is our job to make sure that the case worker knows how to do the work and has those resources, and knows the questions to ask and the barriers to look for and what resources are available in that local area,” White said.
It all paid off for Phillips. A staff member who helps veterans find employment, Latoya Curry, connected Phillips with an existing community service and work-based job training program for older Americans. That’s how Phillips got his job at the Mid-South Food Bank warehouse. He works four hours a day, which he said leaves him time to look for other jobs or receive education and training. Phillips receives a stipend for his work, free groceries every week and on-the-job training in a warehouse environment.
“I didn’t know about that program at all until Ms. Curry and the AJC brought it to me,” Phillips said. “I like what they’re doing for people.”
Is the office making a difference?
It is hard to determine the Office of Reentry’s effectiveness. The office relies on people self-reporting their status as justice-involved individuals when they visit AJCs in person or if they register online.
Since the state Office of Reentry launched in July 2021, at least 9,000 justice-impacted people have registered for services, and 6,000 obtained a job after exiting a program, White said.
Recidivism in Tennessee is trending downward — in 2023, the Department of Correction said recidivism from its facilities dropped to 29.6%, the first time it had dipped below 30% in a decade — but there’s no clear picture of exactly what role the Office of Reentry played.
The DOC, which operates its own reentry programs, measures recidivism as criminal acts that result in arrest, conviction or a return to prison within three years after release from a DOC facility. It does not include recidivism from local jails, which DOC estimates is close to 50 percent statewide. Data on the first three-year window since the Office of Reentry’s creation isn’t available yet.
Arnold welcomed the recidivism decline and believes the strategy of using American Job Centers as a launching pad for reentry is paying off.
“We tend, as a Department of Labor entity, to view successful reentry and reduction of recidivism through a labor-focused lens,” Arnold said. “We work for people who often have imaginary or unnecessary barriers put in place simply because of stigma and discrimination, these collateral consequences that keep people locked out, looking in.”
Phillips, meanwhile, is using the hard-working spirit instilled by his grandmother to keep moving forward. Knowing that his physical labor days are mostly behind him, the septuagenarian plans to keep working with his local American Job Center to find job training in IT and emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence.
“I believe in having a Plan A, a Plan B and a Plan C,” said Phillips, with a hearty laugh. “That hard work, that’s for the young bucks. You can do a whole lot more work if you’re not doing physical labor.”
Amos Maki writes about labor issues for MLK50. He has produced award-winning breaking news and investigative stories about Memphis business and government for Memphis Business Journal, The Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Daily News.
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