68% vs. 1.8%. That’s Not a Statistic. That’s an indictment!

Let me give you two numbers and let them sit for a second.

68%. That’s the recidivism rate for people released from incarceration in America who don’t have naccess to stable employment and support. Two out of every three people cycling back through the system. Families disrupted. Communities fractured. The same people, the same pipeline, the same tragic loop.

1.8%. That’s the recidivism rate for graduates of Persevere who get placed into meaningful tech employment.

Read that again. 1.8%.

I run Corporate Development for Persevere — perseverenow.org — a national nonprofit that trains and places justice-impacted talent into tech careers across the country. And every single day I’m in conversations with CEOs, CHROs, and business leaders who are genuinely surprised by that number.

Which honestly surprises me back. Because if a product had a 98.2% success rate in your industry, you wouldn’t be surprised by it. You’d be buying it by the truckload.

Here’s the thing nobody talks about in polite company. The conversation around second chance hiring has been framed wrong from the very beginning. It gets filed under “social good” and “corporate responsibility” and “DEI initiative” and all these categories that, however well-intentioned, immediately signal to the CFO that it’s a cost center and not a growth driver. And that framing has done more damage to this movement than any policy ever could.

Because the actual data tells a completely different story.

The pattern I see over and over in my work at Persevere is that employers who approach second chance hiring as a talent strategy instead of a charity program get fundamentally different results.

They’re not doing anyone a favor. They’re accessing a pipeline of people who are credentialed, trained, motivated, and hungry in a way that the traditional labor market simply cannot replicate at scale.

Think about what it takes to get through a rigorous tech training program while navigating reentry. The obstacles alone would filter out most candidates from any talent pool. The people who come out the other side have demonstrated resilience, focus, and commitment under conditions that no behavioral interview question could ever surface. That’s not a liability. That’s founder energy in an employee.

My job at Persevere is to build the employer ecosystem that makes this pipeline sustainable. I spend my days in conversations with corporate partners, investors, and civic leaders who are starting to connect these dots. The ones who get it first have a genuine competitive advantage. Not just in talent acquisition but in culture, retention, and increasingly in ESG positioning with their own investors.

The 68% to 1.8% gap isn’t just a human story. It’s a market inefficiency. And in my world, market inefficiencies are opportunities.

If you’re a business leader still treating second chance hiring as a line item in your philanthropy budget, I want to have a different conversation with you. Because the numbers say you’re leaving real value on the table. And the numbers don’t lie.