When Larry Miller, chairman of the Jordan Brand at Nike, publicly revealed that he had been incarcerated as a young man, it felt like a weight was finally lifted. However, Miller knows that few other people have the resources to successfully re-enter society. His JUMP initiative, a project of The Just Trust, aims to change that.
Miller announces this initiative— short for Justice and Upward Mobility Project—ahead of NBA All-Star Weekend, as it brings together leaders in sports, entertainment and the business community to support workforce development and economic mobility for justice-impacted people.
ESSENCE spoke with Miller and JUMP’s Managing Director, Ken Oliver, who is also The Just Trust’s Chief Innovation Officer, about their new project, the second chances that helped save them and how JUMP could impact people’s lives.
Miller’s story is remarkable, but it’s one he kept a secret for decades.
Soon after his release from prison, he realized that his criminal background made him practically unemployable if he wanted professional work, so he stopped volunteering the information to employers. After Miller graduated from Temple University with honors, he landed an interview with the accounting firm Arthur Anderson. He passed rounds of interviews when he finally got to their hiring manager.
“I decided that I’m going to share my story with him,” Miller recalls with ESSENCE. “And as I’m talking, I could see his face changing. And he said, ‘Wow, that’s an amazing story.’ And [the hiring manager] reached in his pocket, and he pulled out an envelope and he said, ‘I have an offer letter here that I was all ready to give you, but I can’t give it to you. I can’t hire you now.’ And at that point, I had some decisions to make.”
Miller, an engaging storyteller, finally (and literally) shared the arduous chapters of his life on his own terms with the release of his 2022 memoir, JUMP, which he co-wrote with his daughter Laila Lacy.
“For 40 years, that’s how I built my career, afraid that somehow it would come out and I would lose everything that I had built. And for 40 years, I carried that burden around. I had migraines and nightmares. The people that I worked with over that time period had no clue about my background—Phil Knight, Michael Jordan, none of them.”
That background included a life of street crime as a teen when he joined a gang. To avenge the death of someone in his gang, at age 16 he killed another teenager he mistakenly believed was a rival, leading Miller to years in a juvenile correction center.
After he released his memoir, Miller says it “has been incredibly cathartic” to no longer hide his past, with even his voice sounding lighter as he reflects on the years since he published it.
“I no longer have the nightmares; I no longer have the migraines. Before, when I would talk to young people and share my career story, I always felt like I was cheating them because I wasn’t able to tell the whole story. And to me, the most important part of the story is that I overcame [those challenges] to be able to do what I’ve done,” he says.
What he’s done is build an illustrious business career, among them serving as president of the Jordan Brand and as president of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers. “It definitely has been freeing for me. I feel like it lifted an incredible burden.”
Miller didn’t get here alone. The Philadelphia native thanks a man he met at the Graterford prison in Pennsylvania. “His name was Wazir. He had a major impact on me and in keeping me focused on doing the right thing and getting my life on track.”
Miller’s collaborator for the JUMP project, Ken Oliver, also had the resilience and support to find a new life after incarceration, and it is why both men want others who have been imprisoned to get a second chance.
Oliver was serving a life sentence in a California state prison after being convicted under the state’s notorious “three-strikes law.” During those years, Oliver spent nearly a decade in solitary confinement after trying to organize fellow inmates. After his release, he rose to prominence as a policy leader in the justice space, continuing to organize outside the confines of prison walls.
A man named Ward Johnson, an attorney at the law firm Mayer Brown, embraced Oliver while serving time and walked him through the litigation process as Oliver filed a civil rights lawsuit, later winning a settlement for being illegally placed in solitary. “He saw more in me than probably anyone in my life,” Oliver states.
The odds are stacked against the formerly incarcerated, and Miller and Oliver hope to improve those chances with the JUMP project, named after Miller’s memoir.
“There are thousands of my homies and friends that I grew up with that are in prison and elsewhere who will never have a Stanford University or a Mayer Brown to support them to get out of prison or to move forward in their careers like I have,” Oliver shares. “So I feel it’s incumbent upon me to go back and give back to our community and support brothers and sisters and others who need a light and a pathway to get to where they need to be to be successful.”
The numbers for people who are released from prison are dire. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 60 percent are unemployed a year after release. It’s no surprise then that recidivism, the instances of people returning to prison, is high. Nearly 70 percent of incarcerated people will reoffend and return to prison, according to U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero.
JUMP aims to disrupt those patterns.
The project has four main pillars: education and employment, advocacy and policy, media and narrative, and coalition building. Within education and employment, JUMP aims to create “education and workforce development programs that catalyze pathways to livable wage employment and economic mobility for youth and adults who suffer from justice system involvement.”
They have some partnerships lined up for the project, including NBCUniversal, which Miller shares has agreed to hire some of its apprentices. Jobs for the Future, a national non-profit, is also working with JUMP to “design a model, gold standard apprenticeship program” for their workforce initiative, Miller notes. Overall, he says, their education and employment pillars are aimed to “close the skills gap and work to place them at companies in sports, entertainment, and in business.”
The announcement for the project is timely. JUMP’s launch event, featuring Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson as keynote speaker, is in San Francisco during NBA All-Star weekend and includes guests like Common, Lala Anthony, Soledad O’Brien and NBA leaders. Given that the league is known to promote social justice, and this year’s All-Star weekend is in a state that has guided much of the strict criminal justice laws that have influenced the rest of the country, there is fertile ground to build upon an influential audience.
“What Larry and I believe is that things that bar people from reintegrating into the community—specifically around livable wage employment, and in this capitalist economy [people need to] afford access to housing, and food, and to take care of their children— perpetuates a cycle of poverty.” Advocating for a thriving wage, consequently, is important to JUMP.
“The system is designed to do exactly what it’s doing,” Oliver notes. Which is why both men want to help others navigate it.
Citing a Harvard Business School case study modeled after his experience, Miller notes that “if people were able to learn a trade, a skill, some type of marketable skill set, [recidivism rates of about 70 percent] dropped to 30 percent.” Miller adds that the launch of JUMP “is about helping people find that vehicle that takes them to the life they want to live and should be living.”
“I’m just one person,” Miller states. “There are a ton of Larry Millers and Ken Olivers out there if given the resources and the opportunity. What Ken and I have been able to do would be replicated thousands and thousands of times if people were given the opportunity to do it.”