New York City — Every time Jorge Badilla shifts into gear, he’s sitting in the driver’s seat of an industry that’s running on fumes.
According to the American Trucking Association, the industry is currently facing a shortage of about 60,000 drivers.
With each mile, the 48-year-old Badilla is filling a critical need and mapping out a future he never thought he’d have.
“I have an opportunity to do something positive for my life,” Badilla told CBS News. “It feels great to be free.”
Freedom is especially meaningful to Badilla, who spent nearly a decade in federal prison for selling drugs from a housing project in New York City’s Queens borough.
“The FBI agent had his gun pointed to my face,” Badilla said of his arrest. “…I didn’t see the daylight for the next nine years.”
While in prison, Badilla earned his GED diploma. And while getting out of prison may have been the end of his sentence, it was the beginning of a different kind of struggle.
“When you come out of prison, you feel like all the doors are locked,” Badilla said. “Nobody wants to give you a job.”
Nationwide, six out of every 10 formerly incarcerated people are still jobless four years after getting out of prison, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Close to 70% will end up back in prison, according to numbers from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, a problem called recidivism.
Badilla said that while in prison, seeing “a lot” of ex-felons who were rearrested “also helped me wake up.”
Following his release, Badilla entered the Commercial Driver’s License Workforce Development Program, a pilot program that is a partnership between the New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, and Emerge Career, a tech company, that trains formerly incarcerated people who are considered low-risk for trucking jobs. It helps them get a commercial driver’s license and connects them with trucking companies in states across the U.S.
For incarcerated people who participate in initiatives that combine education and job training, the odds of returning to prison drop by 43%, according to a 2013 study by the nonprofit research group RAND.
“When you put more barriers in somebody’s pathway, they don’t see a way to actually make an honest living and that doesn’t benefit them, but it also really doesn’t benefit society,” Deanna Logan, director of the Mayor’s Office for Criminal Justice, told CBS News. “They paid their debt to society and now they need to come back.”
Logan said the trucking industry provides a promising on-ramp to the labor market while filling a critical need in the American supply chain.
“We looked at what was lucrative and accessible to people who are coming back from incarceration,” Logan said. “We don’t have enough people who are skilled, and it’s a very skilled profession…It gave [the formerly incarcerated] a really big opportunity to be part of the communities that they knew they did harm to.”
While the program may raise eyebrows for some New Yorkers who are skeptical of how their taxpayer dollars are being spent, Logan pointed to the impact of giving formerly incarcerated people a second chance to help drive the economy in their communities.
“If I have you incarcerated on Rikers, I have to pay for [the] facility, the officers, the food,” she said. “Whereas, when I take a person and give them opportunity, they pay taxes. So now, we as a society are getting taxpayer revenue from a person that is not in a box on a shelf.”
Emerge Career co-founder Uzoma “Zo” Orchingwa said the program is rooted in the belief that people coming out of prison are often undervalued and underestimated.
“Our people are just looking for someone that believes in them and someone that can give them a legit chance,” Orchingwa told CBS News. “These are people that — for the most part — have not had a fair shot for being able to be successful and contributing citizens. They just need that one opportunity that’s going to support them.”
In the 2024 fiscal year, 94% of participants in the training program graduated, according to data provided by Emerge Career. All of those graduates received job offers with an average starting salary of $75,000 per year, the company said.
Since the trucking program launched, 260 formerly incarcerated people have completed it.
Orchingwa emphasized that the training program provides its participants with more than just a paycheck, but a sense of purpose.
“When folks are getting access to job opportunities and income, they’re going to stay out of prison,” Orchingwa said.
Badilla described the freedom he now has, to drive anywhere, to that of a bird.
“A bird is free,” he said.
