There are 70 million Americans with a criminal record. In Idaho alone, there are currently 10,000 people behind bars, and every one of them will eventually walk out the door and try to rebuild a life. What happens in that first month, whether they find work (finding work in the Idaho workforce can be challenging for anyone), housing, and support, or fall back into the patterns that led them there in the first place, has consequences that ripple out far beyond the individual. The estimated economic impact of successfully reintegrating people with criminal records, versus watching them cycle back through the system, runs into the tens of billions of dollars nationally.
On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, host Tommy Ahlquist sat down with two people who understand this reality not as a policy abstraction but as lived experience. Dwayne Sessions is the president of Dennis Dillon, one of the last family-owned dealership groups in the Treasure Valley, and has been practicing what he calls second chance hiring for more than 20 years. Joey is a Dennis Dillon manager who got out of prison in 2012 after three and a half years, got a call back from Dwayne thanks to his mother’s persistence, and has spent the 14 years since proving that second chances are worth taking. All of which helps to bolster the hiring pool available to the Idaho workforce.
The The Idaho Workforce: The Business Case Is Real
The conversation opens with a premise that most business owners haven’t fully examined: in a tight labor market where recruiting and retaining good people is the hardest operational challenge most companies face, writing off 70 million Americans because of a box on a job application is a significant self-imposed constraint.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 85 percent of HR professionals and 81 percent of business leaders report that employees with criminal records perform the same or better than those without. Dwayne Sessions didn’t need a study to tell him that. Two decades of experience at Dennis Dillon taught him the same thing firsthand.
“A lot of people and businesses, as soon as they find out somebody is getting out of prison or on work release, they’re done,” he said. “They don’t even consider talking to them, they don’t interview them to see if this is a viable candidate.”
Dennis Dillon does. The results aren’t perfect, Sessions is candid about failures alongside the successes, but the pattern is consistent enough that it has shaped how the company thinks about culture and hiring at every level. One of their most effective managers today is a woman who called Dwayne from a parking lot to tell him she’d just bought her first house, a couple of years after getting out.
Joey’s Story
Joey was born and raised in Boise, second-generation car business, and was working at Dennis Dillon’s Nissan store when addiction to opiates derailed everything. He spent three and a half years incarcerated, had his share of time to think about what went wrong and what needed to change, and was 17 years clean and sober at the time of this recording.
When he was getting close to release, his mother called Dwayne Sessions. She didn’t know him. She called because Joey had worked at Dennis Dillon years earlier, had always talked about Dwayne, and asked his mother to make the call. Joey’s first instinct when he got out was actually to call his old boss at the Nissan store directly. That conversation ended with a door closed firmly in his face. He went to the GMC store instead, got his opportunity, and six months later had the satisfaction of that same former boss acknowledging he’d made a mistake.
What Joey describes about that early period is the dynamic Ahlquist has observed in his own experience helping a close friend reenter society: the simultaneous pressure of financial obligations, the search for housing, the need to rebuild trust with family, and the absence of any buffer between those demands and the moment you walk out the gate. Essential for the Idaho workforce.
“I knew I was motivated, I knew I could sell cars,” Joey said. “I just didn’t know how well I could sell cars. I didn’t know that I could be such a good employee. I had never done that before.”
He’s now a manager, mentors other employees navigating their own second chances, and brings to that role something a traditionally hired manager rarely has: the lived understanding of exactly what the people sitting across from him have been through.
What Momentum Actually Means
One of the most useful frames in the conversation is the word momentum, which Ahlquist raises specifically because it cuts both ways. The path into trouble is often a slow accumulation of small bad decisions, each one making the next easier to justify. The path out works exactly the same way, except in reverse. A job creates stability. Stability creates confidence. Confidence creates better decisions. Better decisions create a life.
“Having people like Dwayne and Brad and my family tell me, ‘hey, we’re proud of you, we see what you’re doing, keep it up’, those things are like more valuable than anybody could even imagine,” Joey said.
The loyalty that Sessions has seen from people his company has given second chances is notable and consistent. They don’t just perform, they invest. They watch out for newer hires who might be drifting, they call people out when they’re making bad choices, they become part of the culture that made space for them in the first place. The culture at Dennis Dillon, which Sessions describes as built around mentorship and promoting from within, has been both a product of this approach and the thing that makes it sustainable.
The Programs That Already Exist
For businesses that are curious about second chance hiring but don’t know where to start, Sessions pointed to a resource that most employers have never heard of: the Community Work Center program, sometimes called the community resource work center, run through the Idaho Department of Corrections.
The model is straightforward for the Idaho workforce. Participants are still technically incarcerated but within 18 to 24 months of release. They leave the facility each morning, work a full day at a participating employer, and return in the evening. They’re paid market wages, a portion of which funds the program and a portion of which goes into a savings account they access upon release.
“They get dropped off at nine in the morning, they get picked up at six o’clock,” Sessions said. “They are the best employees.”
The program requires employers to understand its parameters, something Sessions learned the hard way after an early mistake. But the Department of Corrections will send staff to walk employers through everything they need to know, and the structure of the program gives businesses a lower-risk entry point into second chance hiring than a cold hire from the general population.
The Housing Problem Nobody Has Solved
The conversation ends on the hardest part of the reentry picture: housing. Getting a job is the critical first step, but without somewhere to live, the job alone isn’t enough. Halfway houses exist in the Treasure Valley, Joey estimates fewer than 10 and while they provide affordable structured housing, supply is far short of demand and the quality of the environment varies significantly depending on who else is living there.
For someone coming out of prison in Boise in 2025, the combination of supervision costs, restitution payments, and market-rate housing, in a city where a modest apartment starts at $1,500 a month, can easily add up to $2,000 or more in fixed monthly obligations before they’ve bought groceries. Without an employer willing to take a chance and a support network willing to help bridge the gap, the path back is genuinely brutal.
Ahlquist and Sessions are in the early stages of building a coalition and eventually a resource hub where Treasure Valley businesses can find information on the programs that exist, connect with employers who are already doing this work, and figure out how to get involved. The goal is straightforward: make it easier for more businesses to say yes, so more people have a chance to build the kind of life that Joey has built.
“If you’ve been closed-minded to this,” Joey said in closing, “give it thought. Because it’s worth it.” If for nothing else than to help improve the Idaho workforce.
The Idaho Department of Corrections’ Community Work Center program information is available through idoc.idaho.gov. The second chance coalition Ahlquist and Sessions are building will be announced through the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce.
