‘What does General Motors have in common with a drug cartel?”
When Mark Goldsmith posed this question to a group of inmates at Rikers Island, he meant no disrespect to the car company. He was trying to figure out a way to get the attention of his audience and show them “how they could possibly get a job in the real economy.”
There are people in both legitimate companies and criminal enterprises who do the books, people who are in sales and so on. But, as Goldsmith, a former cosmetics-industry executive, explains, “no one had ever mentioned this idea to [the inmates]. The self-worth is not there. They don’t recognize how smart they are.”
Goldsmith recounted this story to an audience last week as he accepted the Manhattan Institute’s Social Entrepreneurship award for nonprofit leaders “who have founded innovative, private organizations to help address some of America’s most pressing problems.”
Goldsmith’s first visit to Rikers was in 2003, when he went to the Horizon Academy — the jail’s high school. He volunteered for New York City’s “Principal for a Day” program and told the organizers to send him somewhere with “tough” kids. Boy, did he get his wish.
By all accounts, Goldsmith’s lecture was a success, and he was asked to return the following year. By then he had started to learn more about one of the most intractable problems of America’s inner cities — the recidivism rate.
Some 700,000 prison inmates are released into society each year and more than 40 percent end up behind bars again within three years. The rate is as high as 67 percent for men 18 to 24.
The biggest reason, according to Ingrid Johnson, who’s worked with returning inmates and is on loan at the Manhattan Institute, is “barriers people returning home from prison face in achieving employment.”
He was great entertainment.