With the mark of April’s Second Chance Month comes a call to fine-tune successful reentry for one of the nation’s most vulnerable populations.
Amid heightened national awareness for barriers faced by returning citizens, justice warriors in D.C. and beyond are championing an inclusive future starting from the ground up — be it challenging low wages and benefits, or working to obstruct the systems recycling inequity.
As for Simone Price, director of organizing at the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), the path forward means shaping an infrastructure with tools to rebuild a life, coupled with a desire to branch that promise nationwide.
“Starting from the moment of release, there has to be comprehensive support. People are leaving prison with no ID, no money, and no way to rebuild,” Price told The Informer. “An equitable economy means a level playing field. We can achieve this, but it will require that we remove the structural barriers that keep qualified workers excluded from full participation.”
While challenges range from programming to policy to the functionality of institutions themselves, Price emphasized glaring trends that tend to thrive in the spaces holding the highest rates of incarceration.
Hailing from the New York-based CEO, she pointed to a state that spends more than $3 billion annually on incarceration, despite committing less than 5% to the general budget for reentry.
“Too many people are leaving incarceration without any kind of meaningful support. Then, they’re caught in the cycle…as harmful to the individual as it is to communities at large,” said the director. “The biggest gap isn’t just a lack of evidence-based programming, it’s a massive systemic imbalance in investment.”
Here in the nation’s capital, holding one of the highest incarceration rates nationwide, Rylinda Rhodes admits the realities are no different.
The founder of Mane Rhodes Soap and Wellness sparked an entrepreneurial vision not long after she was released on parole in 1999, later turning a homemade eczema treatment into a push for trauma-informed care in the city that raised her.
But before colorful soaps and creative marketing, the self-starter recalls re-entering a society equipped with “the emperor in the new dress mentality,” built on a notion of empty fixes that only contribute to cycles of inequity in “broken” communities.
“We do have community-based organizations and District government resources; we have to find a way to actually connect [them] with the community in a way that they understand,” Rhodes, 55, told The Informer. “We need to continue building community engagement, we need people to show up…who really care about what it is we’re asking for and what we need. That will create real change for returning citizens in our community — that’ll build real wealth for us.”
D.C. Self-Starters Build the Future of Wealth From Within
At the top of the list for local entrepreneurs is reimagining the impact of trauma and violence on African Americans — who make up 37% of the nation’s incarcerated individuals, despite accounting for only 13% of the U.S. population.
Data from Opportunity Insights (OI), a Harvard University-based data hub, shows white low-income households can gross up to $22k higher within the same city as their Black counterparts, who also hold a noticeably higher percentage rate of incarceration.
Meanwhile, in Southwest, D.C., the predominantly Black quadrant Rhodes calls home, a 0.8% gap in incarceration can translate into as much as $11,000 more in household income for white residents.
“The main problem I see…we live in a patriarchal America where everything is a structure of top-down — it’s always the nonprofit providers or government telling the people directly impacted what they need…and nobody is asking them,” said Robert Barton, founder of the D.C.-based More Than Our Crimes nonprofit. “On top of that, [with] reentry services: job training, resume writing, they even connect you with the jobs, but it’s usually shuffling this demographic or this population into [work] with no economic mobility. Now you’ve got a class that stays at the bottom.”
As an advocate of second-chance amendments, Barton emphasized how long-term seeds of opportunity are planted within these institutions, and even long before that.
The 46-year-old’s own bout in the justice system began with a life sentence at the age of 16, ushering him into the juvenile block of an adult prison that lacked the educational and rehabilitation programming it claims to serve from day one.
Matched with statewide relocations, as a result of D.C. not having its own prison, punitiveness trumping progression was the norm, he adds, which heralded a deeper look at what it takes to propel returning citizens to success.
“If a person doesn’t have the intrinsic tools to rehabilitate themselves, it doesn’t happen, and that’s thirtyfold for a juvenile, because they’re not even thinking in those ways yet,” he said. “In actuality, most people who go to prison, regardless of what their sentences are, come home. What type of people do you want to be your neighbors?”
A beneficiary of the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act (IRAA), Barton launched More than Our Crimes in 2020 to model a justice system where civic engagement and social integration begin within the walls of institutions themselves.
Since his release in February 2025, the local advocate has been an active voice championing the education and resources he says could have redefined his own path. His public advocacy includes protecting bills like IRAA and the Youth Rehabilitation Amendment Act (YRA), as well as pushing for on-site programming for mental wellness and youth development, among others.
“No kid is born evil, no kid is born a criminal. I understand that there has to be some type of accountability, but it shouldn’t be their whole life,” Barton said. “I needed to be held accountable, but I also needed to be understood, and…in a setting where I had the time to mature. I didn’t need 30 years to do that.”
As for Rhodes, she offered her own take on breaking cycles of generational trauma.
“Of course, there are things that need to be done outside of the community, but things that we can do ourselves: we can heal, we can stop being enemies of one another, we can manage our mental health, we can talk,” she said, “and then we can advocate for ourselves better.”
Having served five of a 15-year sentence for the manslaughter of her domestic abuser, the namesake founder said Mane Rhodes Soap and Wellness was as much about hand-crafted skin care as emphasizing a new approach to shape the future of healing through wealth.
“Not only did I want to bring some revenue to my family, but I wanted a social enterprise. I wanted a business that was going to take care of my community,” she told The Informer. “It’s such a big picture that you have to work on some of the pieces simultaneously…the hurt, the pain, and the disparity. Yes, I made a horrible decision based on environmental stressors and trauma, but I knew that I wanted to have a better life. I did my time, and I’ve been out here, boots on the ground, working hard to be the best version of myself that I could be.”
Advancing Citywide Resources, Entrepreneurial Talent
With eyes on boosting a new norm for returning citizens, Price highlighted transitional work models that center on income-supported reentry, including some of which call for a new norm in employee hiring.
On the pulse of financial assistance, the employment center prioritizes opportunity through paid, on-the-job training for people enrolled in their program, coupled with access to comprehensive job coaches and stipends for advanced training courses in professions like commercial driving, construction and/or building trades.
Meanwhile, efforts such as the Returning Citizen Stimulus initiative — the largest-ever reentry cash assistance program for formerly incarcerated individuals — and the recently launched Game Plan for Opportunity campaign mirror the CEO mission to provide more than jobs, but “family-sustaining careers.”
“We must use our own areas of influence to offer opportunity. If you’re an employer, look at skills, not background; if you’re a lawmaker, you should be looking to impacted community members to help co-design sound policy proposals,” Price said. “We need states to treat fair hiring as a matter of economic infrastructure rather than individual charity. We should be ensuring that we are interviewing for talent and potential first, rather than relying on the “blanket exclusions” that background checks often create.”
Price pointed to studies that show traditional tools — rigorous interview processes, resume scrutiny, and checking professional references — as far more effective indicators of job performance and workplace safety than a conviction record. More than that, the impact exceeds returning citizens, strengthening public safety in tandem with economic justice for all marginalized groups.
“There is so much fear fueling bias and discrimination against people with criminal records, and that stems from forgetting that we are all just human at the end of the day,” the director continued.
Back in D.C., Rhodes reflected on her own trek to entrepreneurship, which she chalked up to numerous trainings, cohorts and workshops that failed to produce a sustainable living — or, in many cases, a job.
After hailing the transformative power of self-starting, she credited the well-rounded support of the D.C. Department of Small and Local Businesses (DSLB) for fronting work that scales ideas to enterprises. Among the lauded initiatives: the Dream Accelerator in Wards 7 and 8; the We Aspire Program, a critical tool that eventually lit the fire for Mane Rhodes; and simply serving as an exemplar of putting “the wealth back in residents’ hands.”
On the flip side, she also urged all local government agencies to adopt mandatory training in areas like trauma-informed care and emotional intelligence, highlighting an endless loop of re-traumatizing the individuals these services are meant to support.
“I did the best with what I could do from the beginning of making the poor decision to being incarcerated…and then you come home, and you want to be better,” Rhodes said. “Incarcerated people do come home. Give them the tools and the skills that when they do, they don’t re-offend, they get some healing and get some support — so they can be better.”
Barton topped this with the importance of proactive support, such as helping struggling families the first time they ask, rather than once it’s too late.
Housing stability, food, and other core essentials aside, the local activist added a plea for D.C. resources to return to the community, particularly by investing in spaces that can offer recreation centers and mental health services.
“I always felt like I just needed to get free and I was gonna be all right, because I can do X, Y and Z. That’s not the case for everybody,” he said. “You never get the time to find yourself until you are older, or you just get indoctrinated in prison life in those ways … all those things that I needed in that time to find myself and make those changes, I would’ve turned out differently way quicker.”
Reflecting on her hopes for the future, Rhodes said she hopes all overlooked communities can start to reevaluate what opportunity looks like to them and how they plan to show up in that vision.
With a pulse on the power of healing, it starts with “one bite, one act of kindness, one community at a time,” said the entrepreneur.
“If we can heal the brokenness, then we can focus on the things that we really need to focus on, because we’re not [worried about] surviving anymore,” she told The Informer. “You look around the city, and it’s beautiful. It’s still growing, it’s still thriving…there are cranes everywhere. But where are we in that story?”
This story is part of a national initiative exploring how geography, policy, and local conditions influence access to opportunity. Find more stories at economicopportunitylab.com/.
