The Durability Economy
Workforce Redesign, Fair Chance Hiring, and Household Stability.
For Leaders Who Measure What Lasts.
Sentenced to Prison
(During my Second Incarceration)
the Architecture
Featured Insight
From Policy Theater to Operating Results
The Fair Chance Paradox: From Policy Theater to Operating Results
The workforce system measures placements. Employers measure retention. Funders measure grant cycles. None of them measure household stability — and that's why outcomes haven't changed in 20 years. This piece names the blind spot and gives you the numbers to fix it.
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Fair Chance Hiring
The business case, the retention data, and the infrastructure that makes inclusive hiring sustainable — not just symbolic.
Workforce Architecture
Systems design for coordinated career pathways — connecting employers, training, support services, and retention infrastructure.
2Gen Economy
The household-centered model that invests in two generations simultaneously — parent careers and child development, aligned.
Policy and Metrics
What we measure determines what we get. Analysis of the incentive structures, funding models, and measurement systems that shape outcomes.
Reinvention and Lived Experience
The personal, the systemic, and the structural — why reinvention is a better frame than reentry.
The Ideas That Run Through Everything
We Measure the Wrong Thing
Workforce systems optimize for placements. Funders optimize for grant cycles. Corrections optimizes for compliance.
None of them optimize for household stability.
When the metric is wrong, the outcome is predictable. Change the metrics. Change the outcomes.
Household Stability Is the Real Unit of Change
You cannot stabilize a worker without stabilizing their family.
A parent navigating housing instability, child care gaps, and benefit cliffs is not a retention problem. They are a systems-design problem.
The household is the unit. Everything else is a workaround.
Hiring Is the Beginning, Not the Finish Line
The system celebrates placement. The worker needs advancement.
Fair chance hiring without retention infrastructure is a revolving door with better PR. Wage progression, manager support, and career pathways — that is the finish line.
A job is not freedom. A career is closer.
Systems Must Be Designed for Measurable Outcomes
Good intentions are not a substitute for good design.
If a program cannot articulate its outcomes at 12 months — with numbers, not narratives — it is not ready to scale. It may not be ready to fund.
Design for durability. Measure for accountability. Fund what works.
The ROI of Fair Chance Hiring: A Data Snapshot
Hard numbers and practical proof. The retention data, the tax credit math, and the business case — in one document.
- Retention comparison: fair chance hires vs. general population
- WOTC tax credit calculation framework
- Cost-of-exclusion model for employers
- Three implementation steps you can start this quarter
Essays and analysis on household stability, fair chance hiring, and the metrics that decide whether placements last. Written for the leaders who run workforce boards, employers, funders, corrections agencies, and the programs that serve justice-impacted families.
From Insight to Implementation
The thinking on this page is the foundation. Here's where it becomes action.
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Consulting engagements for employers, funders, workforce boards, and public agencies. We design systems, build playbooks, and stay through implementation.
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Keynotes, workshops, and executive briefings that challenge systems thinking and move audiences to action. Customized for your event and audience.
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The 2Gen Economy Blueprint — the systems-level blueprint for household-centered workforce development. The full explanation, the phases, and the tools.
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Every prison sentence is served twice. One person serves it inside. A household serves it outside, and nobody counts that one.
The household serves it in money sent to a commissary account and phone minutes bought at a kiosk.
In a child's school year spent e...
Work the first three steps of the Durability Household Company, free, and you finish with three documents you keep.
You will have a completed Household Stability Audit, a completed Asset Inventory, and a completed Offer Screen. Each is an exercise output you ...
Every hiring guide I have ever seen was written for the employer.
Conferences for it. Working groups for it. A whole profession has formed around helping companies hire people with records.
There are toolkits for talent acquisition teams. Playbooks for human...
Manufacturing Day fell on Friday, October 2, 2026. Each year, manufacturers and their partners open their doors to students, educators, parents, and community members.
The organizers at the Manufacturing Institute put the reason plainly: "Manufacturing's work...
Terence Platts was told a change in the law applied to him. According to Florida attorney and NARP board member Jaianna Seaborne, Esq., her investigation found that it does not.
That is the turn in this story. It is not a report that the case has been resolve...
Terence Platts was convicted of attempted robbery with a deadly weapon in 2001. He served his sentence, returned home, and set about building exactly the kind of life our systems claim to want for people.
On October 1, 2026, amendments to Florida's Career Off...
At the end of 2023, an estimated 3,772,000 adults were under community supervision in the United States. The probation population grew 1.3 percent that year while parole fell 2.9 percent, and among comparable agencies the total supervision population declined ...
You're measuring the event because it's easy to count. But the household pays the price for what your dashboard can't see.
The newest evidence does not support the story our field is most comfortable telling.
Garin and colleagues linked 464,919 felony defe...
Here’s what the data shows.
Moving to Opportunity (MTO) followed 4,604 households for ten to fifteen years, moving families from high-poverty neighborhoods to low-poverty ones and tracking adult earnings and employment.
No detectable effect on the adults.
T...
Every fair chance hiring conversation stalls at the same place.
An employer sits across the table, interested but cautious, and asks the question underneath every other question: is this risky?
The field has an answer ready. Fair chance hires perform as well...
In October 1973, the United States Board of Parole adopted the Salient Factor Score as the risk axis of its parole guidelines.
It scored the person. Prior convictions, age at first commitment, employment history. A number came out, and that number helped d...
Last week, I changed my own instrument.
The Durability Index measures household stability across five domains. Until July 23, one of those domains was wage progression. It is not anymore.
Wage progression now lives one level down, as a sub-measure inside emp...
The Durability Index
Free Household Stability Scorecard
Stop measuring placements. Start measuring what lasts. Score five domains across 12–24 months.
Download Free →
