The Research Case for Hiring People with Criminal History Records: California in Focus

Anita Chandra
Vice President and Director, RAND Social and Economic Well-Being; Senior Policy Researcher; Professor of Policy Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School

Anita Chandra (she/her) is vice president and director of RAND Social and Economic Well-Being and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. The division also manages RAND's Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy as well as other Centers on climate, housing, drug policy, policing, and civil justice. She leads studies on civic well-being and community planning; disaster response and resilience; public health emergency preparedness; health and health equity; child health and development, and effects of military deployment on families. Throughout her career, Chandra has engaged government and nongovernmental partners to consider cross-sector solutions for improving community well-being and to build more robust systems, implementation and evaluation capacity. This work has taken many forms, including engaging with federal and local government agencies on building systems for emergency preparedness and resilience both in the United States and globally; partnering with private sector organizations to develop the science base around child systems; and collaborating with city governments and foundations to modernize data systems and measure environmental sustainability, well-being, and civic transformation. Chandra has also partnered with community organizations to conduct broad-scale health and environmental needs assessments, to examine the integration of health and human service systems, and to determine how to integrate equity and address the needs of historically marginalized populations in human service systems. These projects have occurred in partnership with businesses, foundations, and other community organizations. Chandra earned a Dr.P.H. in population and family health sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Joy Moini
Senior Policy Analyst, RAND Corporation

Joy Moini is a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. During her tenure at RAND, Moini has worked on a wide range of projects related to organizational design and reform, governance, strategic planning, and program evaluation, with a focus on translating research findings for policy audiences and implementation, both in the U.S. and internationally. Currently, she manages two large evaluation studies that assess program effects and outcomes for historically underserved low-income and underrepresented youth. She also manages Project Reset, an effort to disseminate important evidence on risk assessment for individuals with criminal history records and develop background check decision tools that are more accurate, equitable, and fair. On these projects, Moini collaborates with senior RAND researchers on strategies for effective communication and dissemination efforts. Moini earned her Masters of Public Policy from Georgetown University.

Dr. Shawn Bushway
Senior Policy Researcher, RAND Corporation

Shawn D. Bushway is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. He has spent most of his career in the field of criminology, where he has been recognized as a Distinguished Scholar for the Division of Corrections and Sentencing, and a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. He is also a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Law and Justice. His work has been cited over 15,000 times and a network analysis of co-authors place him at the center of the field. He has done research on the causal relationship between work and crime, the use of discretion by actors in the criminal justice system, and the process of desistance. Occasionally, the areas intersect, such as his collection of studies on the appropriate role of criminal history records in employment decisions.

On the basis of his research, Bushway has provided testimony to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Maryland Public Service Commission, and served as founding member of the New York State Permanent Commission on Sentencing Reform. He was one of the founders of what has become the NBER summer workshop on Economics of Crime, the largest annual conference in the growing subfield of economics and crime. He has a Ph.D. in public policy and economics from the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, which recently recognized him as a Distinguished Alumnus.

Shelley Winner
Surface Specialist, Microsoft

Shelley Winner is a formerly incarcerated restorative justice activist who advocates for justice by educating the public on the benefits of hiring people with criminal records. 76% of people released from prison will re-offend and return to prison; this is known as recidivism. Winner is working to turn the tide on this statistic. She believes that someone must challenge the societal stigma that prevents companies from hiring people with criminal records and Winner has taken up that mantle. Winner, a surface specialist at Microsoft, is very active in the restorative justice movement in San Francisco. She’s also given a TEDx Talk on hiring the formerly incarcerated, and was featured in a PBS special called Searching for Justice.

Ken Oliver
Vice President, Checkr.org and Executive Director, Checkr Foundation

Ken Oliver is the executive director of Checkr.org, the corporate social responsibility arm of Checkr, Inc. Checkr.org was created to redefine the narrative around arrest and conviction histories and to build a fairer future of work through Fair Chance skill development, employment, and policy change. Oliver and his team’s work centers on galvanizing businesses, policymakers, and community stakeholders and being a catalyst for the creation of pathways for opportunities, livable wage employment, and economic mobility for all individuals impacted by the criminal justice system—transforming lives, healing communities, and driving economic growth. Oliver’s remarkable journey started in 1996 when he was incarcerated and sentenced to 52 years to life in prison under California’s three-strikes law for “joyriding” as a passenger in a stolen car. He spent close to 24 years in prison, more than eight of them in solitary confinement, for reading a book by former Black Panther George Jackson. With the help of Stanford University and the corporate law firm Mayer Brown, Oliver won a civil rights lawsuit against the state resulting in a monetary settlement and his release from prison in 2019. Shortly after his release, Oliver became a paralegal at a public interest law firm and, shortly after, a state policy director. In 2020, Oliver became a co-founder and the Executive Director of a nonprofit reentry organization created to provide justice-impacted people with housing and to reskill in the technology and knowledge-based economy, where he secured a historic investment of $28.5M from the State of California to build the first of its kind residentially based campus and tech career training center for justice impacted people in the country.

Kevin Kish
Director, California Department of Human Rights
Keynote Speaker

Kevin Kish is a civil rights attorney whose career has been dedicated to public service and advancing justice for disadvantaged communities. He was appointed by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. as director of the Civil Right’s Department (CRD) in February 2015 and confirmed by the California Senate in January 2016. He was reappointed to the position by Governor Gavin Newsom in February 2020. CRD is the largest state civil rights agency in the nation and is the institutional centerpiece of California’s commitment to protecting its residents from unlawful discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations and from hate violence and human trafficking.

Prior to his appointment, Kish served as director of the Employment Rights Project at Bet Tzedek Legal Services, one of the nation’s premier public interest law firms. During his nine years at Bet Tzedek, Kish led the firm’s employment litigation, policy, and outreach initiatives. His cases focused on combating violations of minimum labor standards in low-wage industries and human trafficking for forced labor, and included individual and class-action lawsuits on behalf of workers in the garment, warehouse, carwash, trucking, restaurant, and janitorial industries, among others. He led trial and appellate teams in employment and trafficking suits. Among other important civil rights achievements, in 2009 Kish prevailed in the first civil case to reach a jury verdict under the California Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Kish has been recognized for a creative approach to advocacy that complements legal strategies with innovative collaborations involving non-profit organizations, law schools, public agencies, industry leaders, and organizing campaigns. He has frequently been named to top-lawyer lists including California Lawyer’s “Super Lawyers” and the Daily Journal’s “Top 75 Labor and Employment Lawyers.” In 2016, Kish was a recipient of the California Lawyer’s Clay “Attorney of the Year” Award.

Kish developed and taught an employment-law clinic at Loyola Law School. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Yale Law School, he began his legal career as a Skadden Fellow and as a law clerk for Judge Myron Thompson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.

Dr. Malcolm Williams
Senior Policy Researcher; Director, RAND Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department; and Director, Pardee RAND Graduate School, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Program

Malcolm V. Williams is a senior policy researcher at RAND. His background is in health services research including access to care, disparities in health and health care, and community resilience to disasters. He has extensive experience developing and assessing community-based projects addressing population health and health equity. He currently leads an evaluation of the social networks developed to support the Million Hearts initiative which is a CDC/CMS funded initiative focusing on cardiovascular disease prevention. He is also leading an evaluation of the Healthiest Cities and Counties Challenge of the Aetna Foundation which is seeding multi-sectoral partnerships to address health and health equity issues in 50 communities across the country. He recently co-led an NIH-funded study bringing together a partnership of over 60 churches in South Los Angeles, CA with the Los Angeles Department of Public Health and various community-based health centers to address obesity and diabetes disparities among Latinos and African Americans. He has worked extensively with state and local public health departments around a number of issues relevant to chronic and infectious disease and health care delivery. Most recently, he led an assessment of how state and local health departments are engaged in outreach and enrollment into insurance options available under the ACA. Prior to these activities he participated in a study of the public health implications of prisoner reentry.

Rod M. Fliegel
Littler Mendelson, Co-Chair, Background Checks Practice Group

Rod Fliegel has broad subject matter experience and significant knowledge in class action defense and the intersection of the federal and state background check laws, such as Title VII and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and their state law equivalents. He also has extensive experience defending employers in state, federal and administrative litigation, including matters with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the New York Office of the Attorney General. As the national coordinating counsel for a large nationwide retailer and a large nationwide background check company, he handles and oversees civil and administrative matters throughout the country.

Joshua Kim
Root and Rebound, National Director of Litigation for Economic Opportunity

Joshua Kim is the national director of litigation for economic opportunity at Root & Rebound. He will be moving litigation forward in both California and South Carolina. Kim is one of the premier litigators in the field and has built the reentry litigation program at the LA nonprofit: A New Way of Life. Kim brings a depth of experience in this specific area of reentry and litigation. As an attorney in this space for more than 12 years, he has overseen multiple litigations around occupational licensing and employment litigation and is considered a foremost expert in California on these reentry litigation issues. He is eager to take on the challenge of continuing his groundbreaking work in California and expanding his work to South Carolina and nationally. Kim is really excited about working with Root & Rebound’s attorneys, paralegals, and advocates in both jurisdictions, to help our clients move their issues forward system-wide.

Ken Kuwamura Jr.
Talent Acquisition and Manager Effectiveness, Union Pacific

Ken Kuwamura Jr. is the talent aquisition and manager effectiveness at Union Pacific Railroad. He is from San Antonio, Texas and has been with Union Pacific Railroad for 17 years. Kuwamura has held several positions in talent acquisition. He started as a field recruiting manager at Union Pacific and managed all union professional recruiting and hiring and all external manager hiring for Union Pacific. Kuwamura has also led the employee engagement team to help mediate issues in the field between employees and management. Kuwamura is also the host of Rail Zone, an internal podcast, which is directed at front line managers and leaders. He has developed several programs for Union Pacific for the Military Recruiting 101 Training, which received the highest civilian award in Washington D.C. He currently leads Union Pacific Railroads Second Chance Program and recently received the Community Works award, which is given to individuals who are in the Colorado communities making a difference. It is the highest award given to an individual for his community efforts in the state of Colorado. He currently oversees developing strategic community partnerships.

Greg Baumann
Senior Communications Analyst, RAND Corporation

Greg Baumann is the manager of the Research Communications Group at RAND, specializing in ensuring audiences understand and can act on RAND research. Baumann spent 20 years in business journalism, including a stint as the bureau chief at Bloomberg News in Los Angeles, after getting his J.D. from George Washington University and a B.A. in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. Baumann is a named author on RAND research papers focusing on employment background checks and recidivism risk.