An Incubator for (Former) Drug Dealers

Over the past decade, a number of government, academic, and nonprofit programs have attempted to address the structural problems that face convicts when they’re released from prison—a campaign known as the “re-entry movement.” One of the biggest contributors to misery and recidivism is an inability to find steady work. Former inmates encounter stigma, bias, and even formal obstacles to getting hired. Connecticut, for example, has 423 employment restrictions based on criminal records, including bans on obtaining a teaching certificate, operating commercial motor vehicles, and becoming a firefighter.

Amid calls for more job training, less automatic background searching, and other changes that would make it easier for ex-felons to become employees, an alternative idea has slowly taken hold: Encourage them to start their own businesses. The largest nonprofit pushing entrepreneurism of this kind is Defy Ventures, based in New York, which over the past six years has trained more than 500 formerly incarcerated people and incubated more than 150 successful startups. Defy has become a critical darling among social scientists, boasting a 3 percent recidivism rate among alumni, compared with the national average of 76 percent of released inmates who are reincarcerated within five years. Numbers like that made me wonder if Defy was a solitary success, peculiar to its founders or its home in a thriving city—or if similar efforts could help ex-convicts elsewhere, on a smaller scale. One interesting program, I was told, was under way in Hartford.