Tankel was able to reinvent himself, becoming a two-time New Jersey state wrestling champion and graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1962 with a bachelor’s in economics. I went away for a little while as a kid, and they all know that so they don’t try to get over on me.” “I was never into drugs, but thuggery, robbery, beating. In his gritty Paterson neighborhood, kids made fun of his name. “We’ve got to make sure that Americans who’ve paid their debt to society can earn their second chance,” Obama said last November in a speech at Rutgers University. Companies including American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Facebook and Unilever have signed the pledge. He also has pushed for them to “ban the box,” removing the check box on hiring applications that asks job seekers if they have a criminal record. President Obama has been asking businesses to take the Fair Business Pledge, eliminating unnecessary hiring barriers for people with criminal records. There has been a lot of talk about how business can – and should – hire former inmates. With some 2.2 million Americans behind bars, and more than 600,000 released from federal and state prisons each year, prison-to-work programs have tried various approaches to reintegration. “They were trying to look for my mom when I was in jail.
“My oldest at four was saying she had nothing to eat,” he says, tearing up. In Benbow’s case, the aha moment was realizing that his young daughters had been abandoned by their mother, and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it from his cell. Recidivism, after all, is high among former prisoners: 47% of federal prisoners and 77% of state prisoners released on community supervision in 2005 were arrested again within five years, according to the government's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Tankel says he needs to know that a former inmate has had an “aha moment,” when he’s decided his criminal past is permanently behind him. “‘You’re up for going into the manager-in-training program, and when you do you’ll make about $1,000 a week, and I want to know you’re good before I make an investment in you.” “I say the same rap to everybody,” he says. But when he wants to know their histories as felons he brooks no excuses. He schmoozes his employees, hugging them and slapping them on the back, giving encouragement and compliments. A former wrestler who grew up in a tough part of Paterson, N.J., he wears jeans and a gray Boss brand T-shirt, a tattoo peaking out from under his sleeve on the right side, sunglasses perched atop his head. Tankel meets all of them, one-on-one, in surprise visits before signing off on any promotion.
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