Every Friday, two Syracuse University students go to jail.

They’re not going because they’ve done anything wrong, but rather because they want to help prepare women inmates in the facility for when they get out.

Each Friday around 1 p.m., Taylor Brady and Katherine Desy, both seniors at SU, arrive at the Onondaga County Department of Correction to work with inmates in a minimum-security jail in Jamesville, New York.

From 1–2 p.m., Brady, Desy and other volunteers from SU hold resume and cover letter workshops for women in the facility who are no more than 60 days away from their release. The program is called Best Foot Forward, and is a part of SU’s Enactus, a nonprofit group housed in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management that is dedicated to providing students with opportunities to assist local and international communities.

The workshop takes place in a small room with up to seven or eight women at a time, with computers that are provided by Best Foot Forward. Walking through a jail and seeing officers walk up and down the hallways can feel intimidating at first, but once Brady met the inmates, the feeling faded.

“Once you meet the women for more than about five minutes, you wouldn’t think that you were in a jail,” said Brady, a finance and marketing dual major and co-president of the program.

Best Foot Forward is the only job training program available for women in the correctional facility that have a GED diploma or a high school diploma, said Randy Adamakis, the education programs supervisor for the Onondaga County Department of Correction.

Without Best Foot Forward, Adamakis said women at the Jamesville correctional facility would have more difficulty getting jobs and transitioning out of jail than men, because most of the jail transition programs for women focus on housing, childcare and medical and financial assistance. Inmates do typically get jobs, particularly ones they want, after the Best Foot Forward workshops, he said.

Best Foot Forward began three years ago when an SU student wanted to work with a local disadvantaged population of women and reached out to the jail in Jamesville as a result, said Desy, a marketing and entrepreneurship dual major and co-president of the program.

Women are typically incarcerated for nonviolent crimes and are more likely to be coming from impoverished backgrounds, said Rachelle Ramirez, a staff member from the National Resource Center on Justice Involved Women.

In fact, Brady said one 65-year-old woman in the workshops last year was in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed her family. During the workshop, volunteers helped the older woman apply for the Higher Education Opportunity Program at SU, which provides students from lower economic backgrounds the opportunity to attend SU.

Brady said she helped the woman write an essay for the application about where she grew up and how reading and writing were her outlet.

“It was one of the most emotional pieces I’ve ever written,” Brady said. “You kind of had to gain her trust because you could tell she had gone through so much.”

Brady added that she felt most connected with the former inmate after the experience and said it is often difficult to make those personal connections with inmates because volunteers only spend an hour for eight weeks with an inmate.

When the women first begin the workshop they are asked if they have ever created a resume, and most have not, Desy said. Once Best Foot Forward volunteers help them create their resume, the women then must write a cover letter for a job they would like or one that is similar to the job they had before going to jail. The jobs inmates typically apply for are entry-level jobs, like at restaurants or chain stores, Desy said.

Volunteers will also help inmates fill out Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms and apply to local colleges such as Onondaga Community College if they want to go back to school, she added.

On Dec. 8, 2014, the Syracuse City Common Council passed a “ban the box” ordinance that prohibits all employers of the city and contractors that do business with the city from asking job applicants about their criminal history until they are offered the job. “Ban the box” will be effective in Syracuse on March 22, according to a Dec. 29, 2014 article from the National Law Review.

Brady said she thinks “ban the box” would definitely help women transitioning out of jail, particularly if they haven’t had a lot of work experience. But Desy said she thinks the legislation is unlikely to make a difference for former inmates.

“I think people still have their ways of finding out,” Desy said.

In addition to finding employment, most of the women Best Foot Forward has worked with have not returned to jail, said Amanda Nicholson, the adviser for Enactus and the associate dean of undergraduate programs at Whitman.

Job training programs for inmates are important, Nicholson said, because working can reduce the temptation to return to the lifestyle that led former inmates to jail in the first place. Nicholson said she would like to see Best Foot Forward recruit new members and one day possibly bring volunteers to help the men in the Jamesville correctional facility as well.

Best Foot Forward is an important program, Nicholson said, because the students and inmates gain meaningful insight from interacting with people of different backgrounds.

“At the end of the day, there’s a sense of humanity that you understand when you meet people whose lives started generally in very different ways than the students lives do here,” she said. “You learn as much as you give.”

Published on March 4, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact Anna: almerod@syr.edu