This story was produced in partnership with WTTW as part of FIRSTHAND: Life After Prison — a year-long, multimedia initiative focusing on reentry in Chicago and Illinois.
In many ways, Nicholas Crayton symbolizes the new approach to reentry in Illinois.
He spent the last two years of his 24-year prison sentence at the Kewanee Life Skills Re-Entry Center, one of two state facilities opened since 2017 to help people transition from prison back to life outside. While at Kewanee, Crayton took classes, got help with his resume, and worked outside the prison walls, cutting trees and cleaning up in the city of about 12,000 people in western Illinois. He made real money — $12 per hour — not the pennies that many prison jobs provide.
“They gave me a state ID,” Crayton said. “They gave me access to the internet — not full internet but partial internet where you can look up jobs and submit your resume.”
But since he was released in October 2022, he’s still had trouble finding a full-time job. He said he’s been upfront with prospective employers about his 2001 conviction for murder. But despite getting an associate degree and a master’s degree while in prison, he’s been turned down from more than two dozen warehouse and other low-wage jobs, he said.
“It weighs on you,” he said. “You have to think, if I fail at this, you’re not just talking about me being homeless, you’re not just talking about me having to sleep on somebody’s couch; you’re talking about a chance that I could go...
Blow the whistle, get paid. A Justice Department bounty program that incentivizes employees to blow the whistle on their employers could lead to more whistleblowing as the Trump administration inte...