Over 20 years ago, Sontcerá McWilliams was driving her car on Chicago’s South Side near 83rd Street when she got into an accident.
The man who’d crashed into her saw her gun, which had been in the trunk with her groceries. Though she had a license, she was taken to jail and charged with unlawful use of a weapon, she said.
Three months later, McWilliams, from Chicago’s Jefferson Park neighborhood, was fired from her new job because her weapon charge was still in the system as a felony, not the misdemeanor she had ended up with, she said.
She sold weed to make money and was put in jail again for about a week, then spent a year on probation. “I could not find a job at all,” she said.
McWilliams, 49, now works with criminal justice reform coalition Cabrini-Green Legal Aid as a social justice advocate for people with criminal records, after Cabrini-Green helped her get a job. She appeared with Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Gov. J.B. Pritzker earlier this year in support of a new Illinois law placing limits on how companies can use information obtained during background checks, including restricting their ability to rescind job offers.
The law, which went into effect late March, comes at a time when corporations are taking new steps to improve second-chance hiring practices as they face hiring challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic alongside broad calls to advance social justice.
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