Creating Success with a Criminal Record

By Archie R Whitehill

This book is a simple to follow guide to help become employed if you have a criminal record. The steps include preparation, résumé building, interviewing, follow-up, and continued success once hired.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648950896

Archie R Whitehill

Archie Whitehill, a navy veteran, has decades of experience helping people find jobs, including thirteen years working specifically with incarcerated and recently released people with criminal records.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Iam deeply indebted to Sandra W. Brandt, executive director of STEP-UP Incorporated, who took a chance on hiring me about a quarter century or so ago and taught me the skills to work with and assist people who were encumbered with criminal records. She is truly the Guru of Reentry. Thanks also to Sheriff Gabriel Morgan Sr. who was my program landlord at Newport News City Jail for almost fifteen years.

Further gratitude is owed to too many people to name separately, men and women within the Virginia Department of Corrections, Probation and Parole chiefs and officers, local and regional jail staff members, community services counselors, and all those who do what I did to help returning citizens reenter our communities and, perhaps most importantly, to the thousands of clients with whom I worked, learning from them as I assisted them.

Introduction

As the VASAVOR (Virginia Serious and Violent Offender Reentry) case manager for STEP-UP Incorporated

(www.stepupincorporated.org) for thirteen years, I worked closely with Department of Corrections staff, particularly Probation and Parole, with the sheriff’s staff, with the Community Services Board, and with many agencies and other nonprofit organizations. Most importantly, I worked closely, one-on-one, with hundreds of people, men and women, who had been incarcerated for violent and serious felonies. Convictions ranged from drug distribution, to murder, to rape, to sex offenses, to child molestations.

I worked for STEP-UP Incorporated for over fifteen years and thoroughly enjoyed my work. My responsibilities were to conduct classroom training and work with ex-offender clients in the field, assisting with housing, employment, reintegration into society, and other aspects of helping people who have recently been released from incarceration. Additionally, my work included visiting correctional facilities throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, working with individual inmates and groups of inmates to help prepare them for their release back into society.

Job development has been an important aspect of my career since 1982. My first job after leaving the military was with a government contractor, reviewing résumés and conducting initial interviews. I worked for several other companies requiring the review of applications and résumés and conducting interviews of prospective employees.

While working on my master’s degree at Old Dominion University, I operated my own business, the Write Place Incorporated, which specialized in creating résumés for a variety of people, from recent graduates to retiring military personnel, as well as for those already in the workforce who were changing jobs for one reason or another.

During a four-year stint as a department head for a local business school, I taught career development classes. Career development, job development, looking for work—these all mean about the same thing. The key feature of most who look for work, ex-offenders or not, is that a person who wants to work is not working.

While working as a job corps placement coordinator, my job involved assisting graduates from the Federal Job Corps program transition from student to employee. With this population, attitude of the job seeker is also a major hurdle to overcome. Attitude and self-confidence are key tools any job seeker must use. That is true for new graduates, seasoned veterans, skilled workers, and people with criminal records.

My position with STEP-UP Incorporated centered on helping ex-offenders become employed. The clientele with whom I worked include men and women convicted of misdemeanors to long-term inmates who have committed violent and serious offenses. I mention this because if these violent and serious offenders can find decent employment, any ex-offender should be able to do the same. Let me repeat: positive attitude is the key.

Let’s Get Started

The process one uses to find work, develop a career, or become gainfully employed is not that much different for someone who has a criminal record compared to someone who does not have a criminal record. The difference is in the mind of the person with a criminal record. No one can change that poisonous thought process of an ex-offender except that ex-offender.

The same basic steps need to be taken and a strong focus on getting employed must be developed. The main difference is that a person with a criminal record must, for the most part, not make his or her record a part of the sales pitch to an employer. Think about it, are you trying to sell your criminal skills or your productive work skills?

Overcoming an employer’s reluctance to hire an ex-offender, or as they are called now, a returning citizen, is not as difficult as is popularly believed. So many who have a criminal record have been falsely led to believe that no one will hire someone with a felony record. That is just not true. My direct, one-on-one, hands-on experience in working with returning citizens is strong evidence that runs contrary to that false belief that ex-offenders, ex-felons, cannot be hired, that employers actively avoid hiring ex-offenders. We’ll see why later in this book. The key to success as you reenter your homes, your communities, is to stop thinking of yourself as a criminal and, just as important, stop thinking like a criminal.

Let’s talk about your thinking process for a few moments. A criminal thought leads to seeing others as victims, as people who owe you something, or as people who are weak and are ready to give you what you want by means of your taking from them involuntarily. That works, sometimes, in the short run; in the long run, it gets you right back behind bars with a loss of freedom and a loss of community status—and, of course, unemployed.

Just because something is left unwatched, or unlocked, does not mean it is an invitation for you to take. A locked door is not meant to be a challenge for you to overcome. There is no inherent right to harm or even kill another person, with the narrowly defined, legally defined exception of self-defense. Think of the Golden Rule,