Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/57338
Break Prison W Executives, business professors, and students mentor prison inmates who hope to become entrepreneurs after serving their time. by Gary Carini and John Jackson hen MBA students hear that their professor is going to prison, they're usually incredulous. They're even more astonished when he asks them to join him. Yet their atti- tudes change when they learn about the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, in which volunteer business consultants teach inmates the skills they'll need to run their own businesses once they're released from prison. In our own experience with PEP, we have found that both students and inmates emerge from the program immensely changed for the better. PEP was founded in 2004 by Catherine Rohr, then a young Wall Street investor. After she and her husband offered to help a former inmate hone his business skills, she realized that hundreds of prison- ers could benefit from similar one-on-one time with businesspeople. Since that time, PEP has worked with more than 300 inmates and graduated its seventh "class" in December 2007. To participate in PEP, prisoners must fill out a 23-page appli- cation, take four tests, and undergo 11 peer and staff interviews. Only 56 percent of applicants are accepted into the program, and 70 percent graduate. Each class includes a group of about 50 pris- oners who move through a four-month business curriculum that culminates in a business plan competition. According to Rohr, the employment rate among the PEP graduates exceeds 93 percent, a far cry from the 11 percent average for former inmates. Moreover, the recidivism rate is less than 5 percent, compared to the national average of 70 percent. Rohr has recruited approximately 800 executives to act as con- sultants for the inmates as they develop their business plans. She has also established PEP partnerships with 12 MBA programs, includ- ing Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, MIT, the University of Califor- nia at Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, Rice University, Texas A&M, the University of Dallas, Baylor University, University of Oregon, and the University of Maryland. We believe that participating in PEP gives business students a chance to apply their newly learned skills to real business situations, while simultaneously giving back to society. It also allows individuals such as the two of us—a professor and a CEO—to share our knowl- edge and bring some tangible good into the world by doing more than simply writing a check. 50 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2008