From prisoner to influencer: Tony’s story

by David Bass | Oct 9, 2019

From prisoner to influencer: Tony’s story

The day that Tony Kitchens was released from prison in 1985, he did an unusual thing: He got down on the ground and created a fake “snow angel” on the grass.

“I was elated, but nervous. Free, but I didn’t know anything. The sun was very bright. Red was very red, green was very green,” Tony recalls.

Tony faced significant struggles early in his life. He grew up in segregation-era rural Georgia and Atlanta, in neighborhoods riddled with drugs and crime. His dad was an alcoholic and abused his mom.

Tony was incarcerated as a teenager for 12 years. After his release in 1985, he knew he had a choice to make—follow a path that would lead him back to prison, or make the hard choices that would provide him with a future.

For Tony, the choice was simple: “I knew one thing: Even if I had to sleep in a gutter, I wasn’t going back to prison.”

That’s not to say the road wasn’t challenging. Far from it, in fact.

Digging out after incarceration

At the time, Tony had no job, no formal training, and no education. He didn’t know how to communicate appropriately, and he suffered from feeling like an outsider all the time. He looked for a job, but his criminal record was a huge roadblock.

The big difference came when an employer took a chance on Tony and hired him at a service station pumping gas. The pay was just $5 an hour, and his commute was two hours by bus. But Tony didn’t mind—he was moving forward.

“I was always grateful for the small things, because I know what it was like to have nothing at all. I don’t complain about jobs,” says Tony.

A life transformed

Soon, Tony began to climb the economic ladder, pursuing an education and eventually earning a bachelor’s degree. Another monumental change came in his life when he married and had his son.

“Up to then, I would smoke two packs of cigarettes today. I decided to quit then and there and focus my life on someone other than myself,” Tony says. “That’s when I came to realize the more I focused on other people, the better I felt. I began to understand that everything wasn’t about me.”

Today, Tony has dedicated his life to helping other men and women, just like him, transition to a fulfilling life after prison. He is Field Director for Georgia for Prison Fellowship, and formerly served as a Prison In-Reach Specialist for the Georgia government.

And we’re thrilled to report that Tony recently joined our board of directors here at the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

From prisoner to influencer. And the key driver was a job.

Celebrating work

We’re celebrating the life-transforming power of work all during the month of October. Our groundbreaking, community-driven program Hiring Well, Doing Good offers a unique solution to chronic unemployment across Georgia. Learn more.

As Tony often shares, “I keep all my possibilities on my windshield and my prison experience in the rearview mirror. If you’re always looking in the rearview mirror, you’re going to run into something. In the end, I know that if my prison experience didn’t kill me then, no matter what I face today, I know it won’t kill me.”

Medicaid Waiver An Opportunity To Help Income Inequality

by Corey Burres | Oct 8, 2019

Dr. Alexander Ruder of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta testified on this “benefits cliff” during recent state budget hearings. Speaking on workforce development, he noted that we are having difficulty moving entry-level employees up a career ladder because many can’t afford to take a pay raise.

He has agreement from “both sides” that this is an actual problem. Both the right-leaning Georgia Center for Opportunity and the left-leaning Georgia Budget and Policy Institute have written extensively on benefits cliffs.

Georgia became a national leader on criminal justice reform because the right and the left were willing to put down their partisan talking points and address some fundamental and basic problems that were incarcerating non-violent citizens and permanently inhibiting their contributions to society well after their public debt had been paid.

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Georgia considers restoring voting rights for ex-offenders

by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Sep 26, 2019

Georgia might be the next state to restore voting rights to past criminal offenders.

The state’s Senate Study Committee on Revising Voting Rights for Nonviolent Felony Offenders held its first meeting Friday to discuss if it will take the step in criminal justice reform.

According to the Georgia Center for Opportunity, one in 13 adults in Georgia is in jail, prison, on probation or parole. That’s significantly higher than the national average of one in 31.

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Georgia AG files legal brief protecting school choice

by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Sep 24, 2019

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr fears that if a Montana court’s restriction on school choice programs is not reversed, it will open the door for other state courts to enact similar laws.

The Montana Supreme Court’s decision excludes religious schools from the state’s tax credit scholarship program. Carr alleges that the ruling violates the parents’ First and 14th Amendment rights by discriminating against and punishing them for their religious decision. It could also limit access to adequate education for another quarter million children, he said.

Corey Burres, spokesperson for free-market nonprofit Georgia Center for Opportunity, said the state’s goal should be to provide the best education to every student regardless of the source. The organization works to open doors for all students.

“At this point, a lot of education choices for impoverished areas come from institutions with religious affiliations, so by excluding that option, limits the options that children have,” he said.

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More jobs in distressed areas could reduce Georgia’s poverty rate

by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Sep 13, 2019

More job opportunities for the poor could be the solution for poverty in Georgia, a free-market solutions advocate says.

Georgia’s workforce and economy have shown promising growth, but new numbers released by the U.S. Census Bureau show poverty has declined in the state but still sits high above the national level.

“This shows that there is much more to be done to address poverty here in Georgia,” Corey Burres, spokesperson for the nonprofit Georgia Center for Opportunity, said.

According to the Census report released this week, the average number of people living in poverty in the state has decreased by 2.8 percent over 2015-2016 and 2017-2018. The overall rate for the country dropped by 1.1 percent. Yet, the percentage of poor Georgians is 2.4 more than the national average, which is 12.3 percent.

Burres said one way to curb poverty in Georgia is to create more job opportunities in the impoverished areas of the state.

Based on the Census Bureau’s three-year estimates, there is an average of 1,522,000 people in Georgia living in poverty.

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DeKalb sheriff launches job training program for jail inmates

by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Aug 28, 2019

Some of the newest students at Georgia Piedmont Technical College reside in a high-rise less than two miles away. But the towering building is not one of luxury.

It is the DeKalb County jail, and these nine inmates are the first to participate in a job training initiative to make sure they never return…

Eric Cochling, executive vice president and general counsel of the Georgia Center for Opportunity, applauded the initiative.

Cochling’s organization is a non-profit think tank that has focused on making it easier for ex-offenders to re-enter the workforce. It notes that roughly half-a-million Georgians are either incarcerated or under parole or probation and there are millions more with criminal records that could make it difficult to get jobs.

“If you truly want to help returning citizens avoid recidivism, the best thing you can do is training them for work they can do immediately,” Cochling said.

He said that recidivism drops by two-thirds when a person can find and keep a job for at least six months after leaving jail or prison. “There is really no other intervention that has that kind of impact.”

The idea that they’re trying to give practical skills that are in demand in the market, that is exactly the kind of thinking that we need across the board when we think about the men and women who are coming out of prison and even jail,” Cochling said.

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