Business News
One man’s journey from prison to profits
By Justin Mitchell
When Derrick Faulcon returned home after 11 years in prison, he knew he had to make a change.
“Nothing about prison made me want to hustle. I was a hustler before I got there. Nothing about prison made me dedicated. I was dedicated before I got there. That’s how I survived in prison. I was already disciplined,” said Faulcon, founder of Cloudy Donuts, a vegan donut enterprise with locations in New York City’s Nolita and Brooklyn Heights neighborhoods and run as a pop-up in Baltimore.
“It wasn’t because I wanted to be a baker or [nothing] like that,” said Faulcon, a native of that Maryland city. “It was just really, I was coming from the streets, having a lifestyle and I wanted to transmit that energy into something legitimate.”
According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s latest available data, between 2008 and 2018, 82% of people released from prisons in 24 states were re-arrested at least once within 10 years of their release; 43% were re-arrested within the first year.
People who’ve been incarcerated were 5% more likely to become entrepreneurs than the general public, according to research University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business professor Damon Phillips co-authored during his previous tenure at Columbia University. Especially for formerly incarcerated Black men, entrepreneurship led to higher wages and lower rates of recidivism.
“Part of the reason for those high recidivism rates,” said Nazgol Ghandnoosh, co-director of research at The Sentencing Project, “and part of the reason that we have racial disparities in incarceration is because, as one of my colleagues once said, ‘When the criminal justice system is done punishing you, you’re not done being punished for your whole life … Those ways that the criminal legal system and the society, more broadly, create barriers for people to effectively re-enter society … push people back into criminal activity.”
Faulcon said his business strategy is straightforward. “So if you can sell a product, then you can save. And if you can save, you can scale. You know what I’m saying? So, it’s the three Ses: saving plus sacrifice equals scale … Like, how can you look at a brand and a concept? And how can you galvanize it and make it much better?”
He has been fortunate, Falcon said. “For Black people, we are already built for this internally. It’s just a matter of getting a platform and an opportunity. Even with the donut shop, like, I could be as big as Dunkin Donuts, if given the opportunity … “