Christopher Watler: “All work you do is essentially prevention work”
Center for Employment Opportunities New York State Executive Director Christopher Watler on the challenges of re-entry for the formerly incarcerated and why immediate employment is crucial
Christopher Watler is the New York State Executive Director of the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), a non-profit organization that provides job training and employment services to formerly incarcerated people. Watler grew up in New York and joined CEO after two decades of working on justice issues, and we spoke to him about the many challenges faced by people who are leaving prison or jail and what organizations, individuals, and government can do to make reentry easier and more productive for both the formerly incarcerated and the communities in which they live.
CEO’s approach is holistic: the organization provides job training and coaching and transitional employment, but also addresses the psychological aspects of adjusting to reentry. As Watler explains, cognitive tools to make better decisions are just as important as hard skills.
“In the criminal justice space, those kinds of innovations have been proven to be effective, so we’ve incorporated that into our program early on and then throughout.”
New Yorkers for Justice: Can you tell me a little about what got you interested in this work in the first place?
Christopher Watler: I’m a native New Yorker. I grew up in Central Brooklyn, where I still live with my wife and two kids. And growing up, from an earlier age we were taught to be of service to others. So that meant sometimes when I wanted to go out and play stickball or football with my friends, if there was a neighbor who knocked on my door who needed me to go to the store or to run an errand for them, that would happen. And so as a young person, I was made available by my parents to my neighbors if they needed anything — typically our elderly neighbors.
And my mother works in government, so I think that social impact — social work, if you will, that kind of overlay — was always a part of my upbringing.
And then I went to college. When I graduated college I got a job working for a program serving high risk youth, and I caught the bug at that point. I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t much older than a lot of the young people Iwas working with, but it was during the Koch administration, and it felt like we were still trying to do big things in the city for young people.
And that just started a career that led me to justice reform work. I spent twenty years working at the Center for Court Innovation. And I actually ran a justice center in Harlem for a while, and that’s where I learned more about prisoner reentry, and I came to CEO two and a half years ago.
So how did you up at CEO?
So it’s an interesting story. We partnered in Harlem with CEO. CEO had a great reputation, and did very good work helping the men and women to get jobs who had criminal convictions. And my predecessor in the job and I were in a meeting at the mayor’s office one day, and she told me she was leaving and thought I should interview for her job.
And I thought she was crazy at first, but the more I thought about it, there was a point where I thought, you know, I’m middle aged. I wanted to have a bigger impact in this reentry space and this just seemed like a great opportunity. And it, in fact, turned out to be.
Can you talk to me a little bit about the specific challenges for reentry that are local or specific to New York as opposed to other states?
When we talk about reentry, there are kind of two populations in the criminal justice space — those individuals who’ve been sent to state prison, from about 56 facilities around the state. So you could be from New York City and wind up at a facility way up north in the state, really removed from your family.
And then there are those individuals who go through the city’s jail system. There’s a lot of work that’s been done around Rikers, but traditionally, reentry — I like to call it the last mile of justice reform — is often the least funded aspect, that gets the least attention.
So it’s been really heartening for me over the last ten years to see both the city and the state really move in a direction that I think is very important, because when people leave incarceration, it really is a golden moment to turn the tide. I think all work you do is essentially prevention work. I know people think about prevention before you go to jail, but when you’re coming out there’s prevention also.
I think all work you do is essentially prevention work. I know people think about prevention before you go to jail, but when you’re coming out there’s prevention also.
You should be preventing recidivism, preventing unemployment, preventing dads not having connection to their children, and supporting their children. We should be preventing all this host of other things that are important.
But for CEO, employment is important and I think the governor has done some really good things around that. CEO expanded in 2009 to Buffalo, Rochester and Albany, so we started in New York and we’re now in these upstate counties, so this idea of reentry employment is important in our evaluation. There was a randomized control trial that studied the evolution of CEO that showed a 22% reduction in recidivism. And that’s really huge in our space.
Normally, if you eke out even five percent, that can be a big deal. And a recent analysis by DCJS is showing these kind of long term employment outcomes at 36 months out relative to folks who don’t come to CEO.
So in this reentry space, we know what to do now. This is not something that was the case 30 years ago. We now know what to do broadly in justice reform, but particularly in reentry. Science-based, evidence-based stuff, community engaged, family engaged work. People go to prison for lots of reasons. It’s not always the headline crimes, right? It’s often not the case. It can be addiction, or young people getting caught up in gangs or violence. All of these things are preventable.
Where we fail to do that, the prisons and jails have become the default and so we need to change that dynamic. And I think both the government and the mayor serve some credit for continuing a process that began in the late ‘90s.
Can you explain what the challenges are for somebody who’s just coming out of prison or jail? What are the immediate things that are problems?
There are often three immediate needs when someone just comes out. The first is to reconnect with their families. You can imagine, depending on the amount of time someone’s been away, you may have missed kids’ birthdays and you may have missed important events, so coming home to your family and figuring that out is important.
The second is housing. We have a housing crunch to begin with in this city. Every New Yorker knows that, so imagine you’ve been away, you come home, where are you gonna live? So it’s still the case that sometimes people come home and wind up in shelters. We should try to end that as much as possible, but getting a stable house is very important.
And then the third big thing is employment, right? You need money, you need a job in order to function, to pay child support, to take care of yourself to make contribution, so when you’re home with your family, you’re not a quote/unquote burden. You’re also a contributor. And all of the individuals I’ve ever worked with, this is what they want. They want to be contributors. They want to have a place to live. They want to have a job. Almost any job, in many respects. So I think those are the big three.
And I think other things that are important would be access to treatment if someone has drug issues, substance abuse issues, mental health issues. I’m a big proponent of making sure they get treatment on the inside, but that doesn’t always happen for everyone, but where it does, you want that care to continue, you know, in the community.
Often people who are leaving prison and there are images, you know, that everyone is in their a body builder and that’s actually not the case. You know, the prison population is getting older. They’re sicker. It’s really gratifying to see in the governor’s budget that compassionate release is in there. A lot of us have been speaking about that and making that law is a good idea.
And so helping people to be healthy in the communities is important. They’re also often coming back to parts of our city where there are huge health disparities — diabetes, heart disease, asthma — we should care about that broadly and people who are formerly incarcerated should be plugging into a robust system of healthcare when they come home.
And again, the state has done things like making insurance available, making sure that you can restart your Medicaid if you’re eligible before you come out. If someone is eligible for benefits, it’s important to line that up for them when they come out, so there’s not this gap. If someone needs medication, making sure that they get a supply of medication. So that when someone comes out, you know, we want them stable in the community so they can begin to get their lives together.
Can you talk a little about the specific programs that CEO has?
So we’ve been around for 30 years and so we know this city. Our model is essentially four parts: Someone comes out of incarceration and comes right to CEO. They will do a five day orientation — we call it “pathways to employment”. And in that orientation we’re going to talk to them about CEO, and what we do, and how we do it. We are going to help them to get ready to work because everyone who comes out of CEO, we want to make sure they have all the documents that they need — the IDs they need in order to be able to legally work in the country.
And then we also are doing some cognitive change elements to the orientation. And thinking about how you’re thinking is very important. And for everyone else, it’s just like Weight Watchers or smoking cessation. The idea is that you can help people to reduce the behaviors that might lead to them getting incarcerated if you help them to really think about what they’re thinking, and to make better choices.
So you’ve graduated from orientation. You’re going to go right to work in one of our transitional work crews at CEO. This is a component of our program that’s really unique. Most job programs you come, you do a class, you see a job developer. You won’t get paid to do any of that, so you will have no money and you’ll be hungry often. You might get a MetroCard if you’re lucky, but the idea is that in six to eight weeks you’ll get a job.
At CEO, you work for us immediately and we put you right to work. And the work that we do is with the communities that we serve. We started in NYC, we’re now in 22 cities around he country, so every day, over 400 people around the country are going to work. And in NYC, that number is about 130 folks every day on our crews.
We do work for the public housing authority, for CUNY, for local elected officials — the city council has cleanup funding, so we’re able to work directly in some communities. And the work is mostly light maintenance, light construction work, the kinds of things that when they’re not done, the experience of the people who use those public resources can be affected.
So with the housing authority we help the groundskeeping crew to keep the developments looking good. We clean out trash. We clean up leaves. We’ll shovel snow, and that’s the kind of stuff that can make a difference to residents who are going about their lives. And it’s not unusual for our crews to be thanked by local community members for what they’re doing.
So you’ll graduate orientation. You’ll do transitional work. You’ll work on average three to four days a week. Another day or two will be spent meeting with your job coach. You may be going on what we call “reentry errands” to do other things you may be trying to get together, whether it’s child support issues or other things you’re trying to resolve, and we’ll help with that.
And then as you’re working on our work crews, our crews are supervised by our staff and they’re rating you every day on how you’re doing in five areas, including whether you are cooperating with your supervisor. Do you work well with others? Are you showing up on time? The kinds of things that are really connected to being successful to getting and keeping a job.
And then we use a system called SalesForce, so all our data rolls up into Salesforce and the supervisor does that review every day. That information goes right into Salesforce, and the participants each week are meeting with their job coach and reviewing how things are going. The job coach is helping them to reduce barriers to employment, making sure that they’re getting their resumé together, that they have an email address. If they have other issues that might prevent them from working, we work with them to have a plan for addressing those issues.
And once they’re what we call “job start ready”, they go to a job developer, and our job developers work with over 250 businesses in New York City, mostly small and medium size firms, but some like Fresh Direct and others put our participants into jobs. And initially our goal is to connect people to work. Many of our participants have never worked. Many of them don’t have even a high school diploma, so we realize that they’re kind of starting at the bottom.
But to support them we provide free credentialed trainings that they can take too to help them be more employable when they go to an employer. Usually someone will work with us about 2–1/2 to 3 months before they’re placed in a job. And then once they’re placed we stick with them for a year in retention services. We actually will pay them to come back. We pay them to come back with pay stubs. This is how we prove that they’re working.
And if all goes well after the year, they’re set. You know, they’re kind of off and running but they can always come back to CEO. The door is never closed. We’ve had situations where people have lost jobs, and they’ve come back. They’ve gotten re-arrested, but eventually wind up back here. We’re always available to them.
So you talk about an empirical, science based approach. What have you learned in the last 30 years that’s changed the way you think about these problems or the way you’ve attacked them?
I think both for CEO in the field, broadly, one is, as I mentioned earlier, it’s really important to work on cognitive change. It’s not enough to give someone services when you’ve been conditioned to behave in a certain way. Those automatic responses are often the things that get you in trouble. So our participants will often score high on assessment tools as being very impulsive, and that’s very traditional in the criminal justice space. And frankly, in other spaces, too.
But for our participants, the challenge of that is that you can make quick bad decisions and so we want to teach them how to make decisions differently. So I think that’s an area, an evidence-based area, that’s very important.
There’s been a lot of work done around procedural fairness in justice, that when people are treated fairly in any situation — it could be an employer-employee situation, or you’re before a judge — when authority figures treat you fairly, people tend to comply with whatever decision, even if the decision is not one that they wanted. So that’s the work of Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares. You’ll see some of those experiences going on all over the justice system these days, so if you go into the midtown community court, this idea that the judge will address you and your lawyer that someone will talk to you in the court about what you want to do for yourself, what kind of services you want to engage. That becomes part of the process.
Then I’ll add employment. I think we know that when people are rapidly attached to employment after incarceration, they tend to recidivate less, so that’s really important.
And you know, it’s also about communities. I think the fact that the city’s crime rate is low is very important. You still have disparities though, so we have to keep working to bring down crime. People should feel safe in their communities and I think it’s just terrific that we’ve been able to do things with incarceration and crime, because when I was a kid in the city, people thought the two were related — if you wanted lower crime, you needed more incarceration. And if you did anything to lower incarceration, you were going to increase crime. That’s not the case. We know the act of incarceration can drive crime.
Besides compassionate release, are there things in the budget that you’ve seen that you’re optimistic about, and what do you think isn’t being done on a policy basis that really needs to be?
There’s a lot in the budget to feel really good about, and I sit on the governor’s reentry council so I’ve been close to the work that the governor has been able to administratively. So it’s good to see some of those things going into law.
So yeah, there’s some very interesting stuff in the workforce space, which is good. I know this is about New York City mostly, but also upstate. There is some really amazing stuff going on in investment around the east side of Buffalo because that’s where a lot of folks that come to CEO live.
So those communities are getting more investments, and we’re involved with an initiative that the mayor’s office has up there to utilize vacant abandoned housing. We get them back on the rolls and get people living in them. I think that those kinds of efforts are terrific and they include people who are formerly incarcerated as a resource in their community and it makes it a huge difference.
There’s also obviously the stuff on bail, and the more we can get away from cash bail, I think there’s a lot of momentum there, and it’s really good to see. I know this is something Dan Quart has really pressed on. I think that that’s important.
Around reentry, I had hoped to see maybe more money for that. I think the government has done some good things around reentry employment. We think the idea of really scaling up alternatives to incarceration and reentry so that these are not just programs, they become a habit of the state in how we do criminal justice and it’s not just something nice to do. If we can give every person leaving prison a job, that should be a goal. I think we should really push on that.
At the local level, the mayor’s jails-to-jobs initiative that we’re a part of, we’re seeing some success there. I’m really excited about that.
And then there are things that are important that aren’t in the spotlight — we’ve been hearing a little more about parole violation reform. We are sending too many people back to prison on matters that are non-criminal. There’s growing momentum to really deal with that. I know both the state correction agency and the governor’s office is really looking at this closely, so I’m hoping to see more reform in that area. It’s not in the budget, but it’s something we could do to further drive down incarceration rates.
We have to do it if we want to close Rikers, because the violation population there has been growing, not going down. We think that there are ways to do that if you build local partnerships to address behavior and to provide opportunities and alternative ways of holding people accountable that don’t involved lengthy re-incarceration.
So my motto is days and weeks, not months and years, if you’re sending someone back on a violation. It should be for the minimum amount possible unless that person poses a serious risk to public safety, but it’s hard for me to see that when someone is going back because they violated a curfew, or they have dirty urine, or they accosted their parole officer. So it’s a tough job. Tough on the parole officers, too, to make decisions. Is this person safe to be in the community? So helping them and giving parole officers a resource because it’s obvious that they need it to do that.
So what’s your longer term vision for CEO, especially in New York?
I think what’s really exciting for me is this idea that we can scale reentry employment. CEO is the largest provider of reentry employment services in the country, but even at that, we’re only gonna serve 6,500, 7,000 people, and you know, there are 240,000 high risk persons that come out of prison across the country every year, just to give some context to that.
So I’d like to see state by state, and certainly in New York, let’s guarantee everyone a job when they come out. I’d like to see more opportunities opened up for people to work.
I think we can use government procurement to unlock transitional work for folks. That’s something we’d like to see. Government agencies spend lots of time hiring contractors and that’s great to get work done. I think CEO has proven we an get work done and improve public safety and make sure that our participants get access ultimately to a job placement where they’re actually paying taxes.
So I’d like to see some of the dollars be used for that. And our cost benefit analysis is one buck of investment is $3.30 of benefit, so let’s carve out a little bit to make sure. And that can happen under the state’s structure, but let’s get city and state agencies to spend some of their money providing opportunities for people. We all have a hand in creating mass incarceration. We can all, in small ways, have a hand in ending it.
What are some other organizations or people you think are doing cutting edge work in the space?
We’re so blessed in NYC. We have all these amazing organizations. And upstate, but NYC in particular is a real hub. I think New York in this regard around reentry can play a role that we traditionally play in this country, which is to really be a kind of innovator to prove what works because of the scale of the problem here, and the great organizations doing work. We can leverage that to really figure out, suss out what works and what doesn’t.
So yeah, the Fortune Society, the Osborn Association, the Legal Action Center does terrific work helping folks around their rights. There’s Just Leadership USA, and other advocacy groups and organizations. There’s a real strong inside-out approach. There are organizations that work very closely with government to do reform on the inside. And then there are organizations that are out there holding government’s feet to the fire around this issue. And I think both are necessary if we’re going to create change.
What’s the best way for people who are interested in your work to get involved?
So I could be committing malpractice if I didn’t say donate to CEO. You know, that’s certainly one way — and it’s always amazing to me just how — someone may think well, if I give $50 to a place, what difference did I make? It’s not just you gave $50, it’s that you and a hundred other people did that and you could fund a participant for a year at CEO. It’s these little things.
As a nonprofit you’re always kind of hustling for money. I wish I had less hustle and more work on the issue, so I do encourage people to be philanthropic. I do it in my personal life as well. So that’s one way, you can donate. So time, talent, treasure. That’s the treasure piece.
The time piece is to volunteer. The thing that’s so incredible to me is this, I think, pervasive sense of loneliness that people often feel when they come home from prison. And it’s so helpful when you have people who welcome you back. There’s Bruce Western’s book, Homeward, which is great and kind of speaks to the lives of people leaving incarceration and what the challenges are for them.
I encourage people to volunteer as a way to get to know the issues on a personal level and even if you don’t have money to give, your personal time and service to people is so powerful. We partner here with New York Cares, so if anyone is interested in partnering or volunteering at CEO they can come here. We have a longstanding relationship with them. They send us volunteers. They do resume writing help, mock interview help. It helps us to do what we do.
And then people may have talents, things that they can bring to the table. I worked with someone once, before CEO, who was a photographer who did a video for an organization that I was working for, that was really great. That really helped us. We used that video often with funders and talking about the program. So for someone can who can write, grant writing and other things help us to tell the story.
But the most important thing I think is to be a good citizen. Be informed about these issues. Know that when you watch the 11 o’clock news at night and you see some guy being handcuffed, know what that’s really about. It’s not all that it seems, so we have to balance that. Know what good policy is, vote for people that are not gonna vote for expensive systems of incarceration.
But the most important thing I think is to be a good citizen. Be informed about these issues. Know that when you watch the 11 o’clock news at night and you see some guy being handcuffed, know what that’s really about.
Like marijuana reform. The governor’s budget has a pathway to legalizing cannabis and regulating it. His father would not have done that. We’ve come that far. That’s not an accident. That comes from a citizenry that is engaged, knows the issue and begins to say wait a minute, this isn’t right, we can do better. That, to me, is what democracy is all about.
And what are the challenges of doing this kind of work?
Well, there’s a lot of trauma around this work. I mean I get to sit in an office now and, I’m removed from it, but I always worry about my staff. These are often young people, folks who are very committed and dedicated. They don’t get paid as much as I’d like to pay them. And this is tough work. It’s tough to hear people’s stories of abuse, of challenges that they face. For our participants, I feel the struggles that they go through every day, how hard it is for them.
And the stigma that they have to contend with all the time — people not wanting to hire them or family members shunning them. You know, those pressures, and then they’re just trying to be human beings. They have the same problems we all have in many respects, so that side of it is challenging.
I think it’s also challenging working in our justice system. Although at this stage we’ve made a lot of progress, there’s still a long way to go. Look how hard it is to get reform for our jail system, right. How much abuse has to happen before we can change? And again, we know what we need to do. It’s not a matter of knowing what’s in the system, it’s the political will to do it. So that frustrates me sometimes.
And then we have to hold these systems accountable more. It’s stunning to me that citizens still don’t know what’s going on with a lot of criminal justice agencies. There’s not a lot of transparency and the only time you hear anything is when it’s the worst thing, so we never hear what works for folks.
So a lot of frustration is around the kind of human tragedy that gets played out every day on both sides of the folks who work in the system and the folks who are consumers of the system. We can do better than we have been. And we have examples of that in this city.
Is there anything anything you’d specially like to highlight about the work?
Well, I’m inspired by people like Dan Quart, elected officials who have really taken a position. It’s not easy to stake a position on justice reform, particularly if you’re from a part of the city that may be considered very wealthy, where these issues are not issues. I think it takes political courage. And I give Dan credit for that, the way that he has engaged around these issues. I think we need more of that in the political space.
I think we need to get back to solving problems in this country, both at the federal level, clearly, even at the state and local level and to move away from this kind of divisiveness to electing people of good character who can help guide us towards our better selves.
On the criminal justice issue it’s good to see in this state that it’s kind of started to happen, but we need more of that.
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