He has been trying to leave his criminal past behind him, and start fresh. He wants to move forward, and build a new life. But the criminal justice system doesn’t want to let him go.
Since his release from prison on May 12, 2019, after 15 years in jail for a murder charge, James Gaiten, 43, has been trying to be the father he wasn’t for almost two decades. He doesn’t want to dwell on the past because he feels he has already paid his dues to society.
While he has gradually managed to build a father-daughter relationship, albeit fragile, with his 16-year-old daughter, who was a baby when he was incarcerated, things are more complicated with his eldest daughter, aged 20 and a student at North Carolina Central University.
“Just being away and not able to, like, support her when she was young,” he explained. “I be wanting to have certain conversations.” He meant he would like to give her the advice that a father would give to his daughter when she reaches a certain age.
Since last December, Mr. Gaiten has been one of the first students of the Lucky Leadership and Barber Academy, a barber school opened by Shaun “Lucky” Corbett, he himself a former felon, in Charlotte, North Carolina. According to state law, Mr. Gaiten must complete 1,528 hours of training to graduate and obtain his barber license.
Renewed family ties and a job training that will probably lead to employment in a barbershop: seen like that, his return to society seems to be going well.
Not exactly.
When I asked him how his life has been during the last two years, his tale of reentry takes a sad turn. It’s like he has never really left the criminal justice system, or to be more accurate, the criminal justice system never really let him go. It follows him like a shadow, thus ruining all his efforts to get out of what he sees as a trap.
“It’s been rough for the last two years,” Mr. Gaiten told me silently. It sounded like he was whispering so I had to listen carefully to avoid making him repeat himself.
Renting an apartment in his name and finding a job that matches his qualifications have been a kind of additional punishment from society, after his 15 years of incarceration. The scenario has always been the same, he told me on this sunny October day in Charlotte. I met him at the barber school. His class day was over. He sat on his barber chair. I sat across from him. He wore glasses, a black shirt and slacks, and a tie with grey, white and black stripes. He looked more like a teacher in a parent-teacher conference.
He said he applied to several jobs for which he was qualified in the past two years. He successfully went through the many stages of the hiring process. Then came the background check. Next thing he knew, it was a “no.”
Another example: he sees an apartment, likes it, expresses his interest. Everything goes well until the landlord wants to run a background check. Similar to the jobs he's applied for, his application gets rejected.
“I got a felony on my record, so that was blocking me from getting into living spaces, you know, that I can pay for,” Mr. Gaiten said.
In the state of North Carolina, private employers are permitted to run a criminal background check on a potential employee. The same goes for private landlords with a potential tenant. In both cases, the employer and the landlord, as required by the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), must have the consent of the candidate.
“Housing providers may use the results of the background check to determine whether a person qualifies for housing, so long as they comply with the FHA,” (the federal Fair Housing Act), Lateisha Thrash, director of Reentry Services at the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, said in an email.
Mr. Gaiten could reach out to the local reentry council office for assistance, Ms. Thrash added, and file a complaint for discrimination with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The problem is that many ex-felons, like Mr. Gaiten, don’t trust the system, and most of the time they give up. He said he has hope that presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Donald Trump would take an interest in adjusting the criminal justice system, which seems designed to hold back Black men, and especially ex-felons like him.
“I want to tell them my story," Mr. Gaiten told me. I want to tell them that every corner that I tried to go around, I got a blockage. So, you do got people that constantly want to elevate in life, [but] you continue to tag me as a felon. You’re not letting me elevate in life. So, I will be asking [Harris and Trump] about policies that will help elevate the Black and Latino communities from getting and being felons.”
I asked him to give me an example.
“So, I’ve been out here five, six years, and I’ve been progressing and I have been staying out of the system’s way or the system’s eyes. I’m looking for a shot, and everything that I do, I try to go at it with positivity. And even when I get the negativity, I still don’t show it. I still try to move forward. So, you’re constantly trying to get a place for you and your family to stay, and you can afford it, and they say, ‘No,’ because you’re a felon. That’s the reason. I’ve done my time. I’m not a felon no more. I used to be when you convicted me.
What he was implying was that the federal government should set a time limit for a criminal history review. Some states currently have a seven-year time limit, whereas there is no time limit in North Carolina.
“If you do a background check, I’m not active into the system as being on probation or anything," says Mr. Gaiten. "So, if you see that, that I’m not involved still…If I’m getting in trouble, okay, I can understand you saying: ‘No, we don’t want him around our community.’ But if you see me and I’m elevating, and I’m with my family, like my wife or my kids, and I constantly get no, no, no, it’s frustrating.”
A study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), published in December 2021, found that a third (33%) of the of 51,500 persons released from federal prisons from 2010 to 2014 did not find employment at any point during the 16 quarters after their release.
There is a risk, Mr. Gaiten told me, that faced with barriers they perceive as discrimination, ex-felons like him get into trouble again. He wants to use his vote, his first time voting in more than 20 years, for the candidate who will vow to change the criminal justice system.
“There’s a lot of guys and women that’s out here, that just went through the system, that don’t want to be a part of the system of constantly going in and out, in and out,” he said.
He is still undecided, but will make his mind by November 5, he said, adding that he continues to listen to the two candidates to figure out who cares about people like him.
Donald Trump won North Carolina in 2020 by less than 75,000 votes. On November 5, more than 56,000 ex-felons (according to court documents) could make the difference in the state, after a federal judge struck down, in April, a 147-year-old law criminalizing voting for people with felony convictions.
Black people in North Carolina make up nearly 53 percent of those in prison, according to a 2016 report from the nonpartisan racial justice organization NC CRED.
When some get out, it’s not easy as Mr. Gaiten’s case shows. Shaun “Lucky” Corbett launched his barber school to reduce the rate of local recidivism. Mr. Corbett, who became, in 2019, the first person to operate a barbershop in a Walmart, is himself an ex-felon who was selling drugs when he was 12. He turned things around by signing up for No Grease, a barber school in Charlotte, NC. At 45, which he just celebrated by taking a trip to South Africa, the successful entrepreneur has become a passionate advocate for the fight against recidivism and for providing ex-felons the resources they need to reenter society. This is his cause.
“It’s not necessarily addressing an issue, because there are a lot of issues in what I do, in what we do here, like everything from mental health to recidivism to workforce development, to mentorship," Mr. Corbett told me on that same day. "It’s not, it’s not a one trip pony. I think that for us in the Black and Brown communities, our focus needs to be to lift each other up.”
He continued: “We’ve been waiting for a long time for help, for someone to come in and save us. I think we have to just realize and understand that the answers are within us, within the community, within the village.”
This is a philosophy he applied with Mr. Gaiten and which he plans to extend to others, by opening an online school at the Mecklenburg County Jail, in Charlotte, NC, for inmates who are about to come back home. He also plans to launch a scholarship for young children of inmates.
The work will be done.