The ‘first chance’ culture at Brown’s ShopRite | Morning Newsletter

You can expect clear, sunny skies with a high of 62 today.

Before he launched his bid for the city’s top job, Philadelphia mayoral candidate Jeff Brown was mostly known for owning about a dozen grocery stores, where he made it a priority to hire ex-offenders.

At his stores, about 1 in 5 employees are people who have been formerly incarcerated.

Our lead story shares what his employees have to say about working for the empire. 🔑

If you see this 🔑 in today’s newsletter, that means we’re highlighting our exclusive journalism. You need to be a subscriber to read these stories.

— Taylor Allen (@TayImanAllen, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

Careem Hines landed one his first real jobs at 35 years old — after years of jail stints for drug, assault, and gun offenses, and a seven-year sentence after a probation violation.

At 44, he now helps run the ShopRite in West Philadelphia’s Parkside neighborhood as an assistant grocery manager.

People who got a second chance at life, like Hines, have become a major piece of Philadelphia mayoral candidate Jeff Brown’s political platform.

The scope: Philadelphia is home to 400,000 people with convictions and criminal records. About 40,000 come home from incarceration each year.

Brown’s Super Stores partner with organizations like Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity to provide their employees with record expungement and pardon services at no cost to workers.

The criticism: After Brown said Black people have been his “life’s work,” and touted the jobs he’d created by putting grocery stores in predominantly Black neighborhoods, mayoral rival Cherelle Parker said Brown had “white privilege wealth.”

Ex-offenders who are or have been employed with Brown’s Super Stores — and advocacy groups that work with them — told the Inquirer that Brown’s programs mostly work.

Notable quote: “For a lot of us, it’s not a second chance. It’s the first chance because the reason why you was in the situation was because nobody never gave you a chance,” said Lamar Hunter, another employee.

Keep reading to learn more about Brown’s system — and why it isn’t accessible for everyone.🔑

The city has agreed to pay a total of $9.25 million to about 350 people who were teargassed, struck with rubber bullets, or detained by police during the response to the 2020 racial justice protests following the police murder of George Floyd.

The city will also contribute $500,000 to a fund that will provide counseling to victims of police violence and offer community-led programming.

The settlement is the largest mass protest-related case in the city’s history, according to one of the attorneys representing the largest cohort of plaintiffs.

Reminders: The lawsuits focus on the mass teargassing of protesters on I-676 on June 1, 2020, and the police use of military-style armored vehicles, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and tear gas on demonstrators and neighborhood residents along the 52nd Street historic Black business corridor in West Philadelphia.

Keep reading for more details about the settlement.

Approximately how many black bears are in Pennsylvania?

A) 30,000

B) 15,000

C) 20,000

D) 10,000

Find out if you know the answer.

👀 Watching: Former President Donald Trump could be charged any day now for hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels before he was elected president in 2016.

❄️ Reminiscing: Past winters when it actually snowed.

💻 Submitting: My cheesesteak bracket. You should do it, too.

Hint: Get your 🥨 fix at Reading Terminal Market

MITT’S WILLERS

We’ll select a reader at random to shout out here. Send us your own original anagram to unscramble if you’d like. Cheers to Andy Gutman, who correctly guessed Monday’s answer: Betsy Ross House. Email us if you know the answer.

And that is it from me. I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning. ☀️