Program turns felons into businessmen

Brent Taylor will never forget the day he met Catherine Rohr. It was dusk, and the prison basketball court painted a strange backdrop for a classy brunette in a business suit. More than 100 orange-clad Texas prisoners sat at her feet as she explained why she had quit her Wall Street job and moved halfway across the country to turn prisoners into businessmen.

Taylor, a first-time offender with a robbery conviction, was skeptical. “I couldn´t understand why someone like this was doing what she was doing,” he said.

A year earlier, Ms. Rohr, 26, was a Wall Street venture capitalist making $200,000. She was invited by Chuck Colson´s Prison Fellowship to attend a Christian outreach at a Texas prison over Easter weekend.

”I thought I was going on a zoo tour,” Ms. Rohr, now 31, acknowledged. But that weekend, something changed because, “I got there and saw people, people who were in need of as much grace as I was.”

She also noticed that the very entrepreneurial skills that landed these drug dealers and thieves in prison might be the very thing that could help them get back on the right track. In 2004, she secured permission from the Texas Department of Corrections to launch the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), where murderers, burglars and drug lords are given the chance to become businessmen. She quit her Wall Street job, and along with her husband, Steve, relocated to Houston.

In five years, the program has graduated more than 400 prisoners. Ninety-eight percent have landed steady jobs within four weeks of release, most making at least $11 per hour. Fifty-eight have started their own businesses, ranging from T-shirt printing to software development.

Taylor, 25, didn´t fit the profile of a typical career criminal. Raised in an upper-middle-class family from Dallas, he began heading down the wrong track in college, partying more than he attended class. Then came the robbery.

Early into his two-year sentence, he noticed a flier for PEP in his prison dorm room. When he met Ms. Rohr on the prison basketball court three weeks later, he decided he didn´t want to waste this chance to head back in the right direction, and, potentially start his own business some day.

Many of PEP´s volunteers - made up of more than 450 MBA students, hailing from 24 schools, including Stanford and Harvard, and more than 1,000 business executives - helped Taylor put the gears in place for his business plan for a pressure-washing company.

Ms. Rohr, who is a strong Christian, doesn´t hide her convictions, and PEP´s Web site tiptoes the line as follows: “We do not know of a better catalyst for transformation than God, and participants desiring to pursue their walk with God are encouraged to do so, though no one is required to do so.”

“It´s not a faith-based program,” Taylor explained, “but you will always find God in PEP.”

Since Taylor joined the ranks of PEP graduates, a few things have changed. One of the first things Ms. Rohr now does as a part of initiation is dole out silly nicknames - like “Peaches” and “Pumpkin” - to members of new classes. Then they have to do the chicken dance.

”I bring out the inner child in them,” Ms. Rohr explained. “Everyone played those games except for these guys; they´re relieved to finally let their guard down.” They also take classes on interviewing, dining etiquette, drug and alcohol abuse, marriage and dating, fatherhood and resume writing.

Many graduates find well-paying jobs, and several become the entrepreneurs they dreamed they would be. While more than half of the nation´s prisoners are rearrested within three years, PEP´s recidivism rate is less than 10 percent.

Officials at the Cleveland Unit, a private prison north of Houston, can´t speak more highly of the program. One administrator said he opposed the idea when he first heard of PEP.

”I´m the first to say I was wrong,” he conceded. “These guys are significantly less of a security risk, and they´re much better behaved.” PEP has also watched many slide back down temptation´s slippery slope - particularly those with drug problems - and have concluded that PEP´s ideal candidates are those serving time for violent - not drug-related - crimes.

”We have a lot of guys who have drug problems, and we don´t really address it,” said Kami Recla, PEP´s chief of staff.

While more than 90 percent of PEP´s graduates have gotten out and stayed out, the remainder still breaks Ms. Rohr´s heart.

”The most difficult thing for me is seeing someone not make it after believing in him with everything I´ve got,” she said. “To see someone throw himself away … is crushing. I don´t get accustomed to it.”

But on Dec. 5, 2005 - the day he walked off the Hamilton Unit, a pre-release facility near College Station - Taylor returned to Dallas with a new set of skills, a renewed commitment to his Christian faith and the name of a man who might give him a job. Forty days later, he was working as a trade desk analyst, making more than $100,000 a year.

Although he was one of the fortunate ones, he still faced a few hurdles, like not qualifying for a real estate license because of his felony.

But three years, a new wife, a new house and a new life later, Taylor is squarely on the road to entrepreneurship.

With a chunk of investment capital from his mentor - a businessman Ms. Rohr introduced him to - Taylor started his own real estate company, Team Taylor Investments. He just flipped his first house, and is looking for a renter. He hopes to keep rent low, so he can someday rent to other PEP graduates and their families.