It’s an interesting question. My first reaction is that I’m not as much interested in focusing on ex-felons in diversity training as I am in making sure they are fully included in recruiting and hiring. Once they are in the door, their past mistakes shouldn’t (based on a normative hope that the information is not shared in the organization until they personally choose to reveal it) have anything to do with how people treat them in the workplace. So, although I suppose this is a form of closeting, I’d rather let them show their value to the organization first, then deal with people’s misconceptions about their legal past. As we get more successful at getting ex-felons employed, then we’ll have the foundation for talking about all that in the training room and begin to initiate conversations about the diversity aspects of the question. Truth is, given who we are incarcerating in this country, racial diversity in the workplace is still apt to be the topic that many organizations need to work on first, to get folks in the door and fully included and engaged.
The real work is at the front end, getting the initial screening, testing, and interviewing to focus on their potential to contribute, rather than on the stories in the heads of the HR and hiring authority folks. Truth is, we’ve jailed so many people in this country that we could soon find ourselves in the position of hiring an ex-felon or leaving the job vacant, which would be both mean-spirited/ignorant and bad business.
