R/GA’s Ashish Prashar: Agencies need to give formerly incarcerated people a chance

R/GA’s chief marketing officer Ashish Prashar argues that an approach to recruitment informed by social justice can help companies devise a better future for employees.Ashish Prashar took an unusual route into advertising. Before he joined R/GA from a role at Publicis Sapient, Prashar was a press secretary for both sides of the party political divide working variously for David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Tony Blair. Before that, at the age of 17, he was sentenced to a year in a London young offender institute, making him one of very few formerly incarcerated people in a New York boardroom today.”Incarceration is a human rights catastrophe in the United States. We have 5% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s prison population,” he tells The Drum. ”We have wasted talent that could be put to use if given an opportunity, not living in poverty. We are wasting the talents of millions out there right now.”Prashar, now global chief marketing officer at the prestigious agency, describes himself as ”an abolitionist and a radical”; he’s participated in Black Lives Matter marches, written publicly about his experiences inside and argued in favor of abolishing the death penalty.Speaking over Zoom from R/GA’s Manhattan headquarters, he suggests that welcoming more formerly incarcerated people into agencies and corporate life could be key to solving recruitment woes currently afflicting marketing businesses across the globe.His experiences in politics on both sides of the aisle and the Atlantic, and within the prison system, have given him a forthright perspective on the so-called ’Great Resignation.’”It’s kind of like an unofficial strike,” he says. ”Corporate America frames it as a labor shortage, which is simply wrong. It should really be accurately described as a pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, a healthcare shortage. It’s all underpinned by bad practices in the workplace across America.”People have realized they have bargaining leverage and asked employers in our economy to do better. They’re insisting on dignity ... and better protection of people in their lives.”The run-of-the-mill cruelties of adland are very real and people don’t want to go through that again. Folks won’t return to work [in the office] any time soon – they’re over it and they don’t want to ’reset’ to shit jobs.”Prashar argues that, not only can private enterprise help promote social justice in the US and UK, they’ll have an easier time recruiting if they do.”Our industry has made billions from Black and other communities of color’s cultures, and they’ve never been paid for that work. We’ve stolen their ideas off the street and sold them as our own packaged ideas to brands and businesses. Everyone in our industry has done that ... street culture is the stuff we sell to our clients.”The goal is to bring them into our boardrooms, to our leadership, on to our staff. Why not pay the people who have this innovation? They’re ahead of us.”Breaking down taboosFirst of all, he wants to bust the taboo surrounding incarceration in professional life.”People don’t talk about it. But when I first got hired here, it was quite public ... the amount of people that reached out to me before I’d even started, to say, ’Thank you for sharing, I have a young offender’s record.’ Or, ’Thank you for sharing, my dad’s been incarcerated.’”70 million Americans have a record: that’s a third of our [adult working age] population. That means, effectively, one in three Americans of working age are fucked. And the reality is, Britain’s doing the same thing.”It wasn’t until 2012, during a brief return to the British political scene, that he began discussing his experience publicly. ”It was time to help my people ... people who have been incarcerated by an injustice in both the US and the UK.”After helping to win Boris Johnson the London mayoralty as a press secretary, he began working with Eastside Young Leaders Academy, an organization that helped young people sentenced to time at Feltham Young Offender Institute re-integrate into society. ”It was the first time for a decade that I talked about it publicly ... I got to tell my story, my way, and that’s why I went back to do that.”In hindsight, he says he was dissatisfied with what the project achieved. ”To be honest with you, I don’t think [the Conservatives] gave a shit about it. I think it was just good PR for them, helping Black and brown boys out of Feltham and having an ambassador to run that program ... we didn’t really do much with it. It was sad, to be honest, but it was my first experience of that.”At a company like R/GA, Prashar argues he can make a bigger difference than as an activist on the outside: ”How many formerly incarcerated people do you see sitting in the C-suite? With R/GA, this isn’t a PR stunt, it’s real. They really believe in this work. They believe in social justice.”Publicis, he says, ”was not really a place that I could be me, in the long-term.” But he recalls R/GA’s Tom Morton hired him long after meeting him through his advocacy work, meaning there was little conflict around him bringing it to the office. ”Ideologically, we’re aligned as people,” he says.Hiring with graceSecondly, Prashar hopes to change the standard practices and received wisdom of recruiters during interviews and applications.”It’s about asking the right questions, about giving people grace. They’ve already done a lot of work to be in the room with you or on Zoom. Don’t ask what they did – how many people have asked that stupid question today? They’ve had to do a lot of work to be there, to transform their life.”In this vein, Prashar points to some areas of hope such as the movement to pass a ’Clean Slate’ law in the US, and efforts by other major US companies, such as JP Morgan, Verizon and CVS, to engage in ’second chance’ hiring initiatives. R/GA says it wants to ”design a more human future,” and is planning a redesign over the New Year, including a relaunch of its Future Visions publishing platform. Prashar promises the initiative isn’t ”just selling R/GA” but ”fundamentally reshaping how we show up in the world,” promoting social justice and cooperation between communities and the private sector.Furthermore, he tells The Drum that R/GA is plotting a campaign to persuade more businesses, including its own clients, to join them in hiring more formerly incarcerated people. ”It’s having people here who are not from traditional backgrounds, so you can design a thing that’s built for more people than just Silicon Valley or the ad world.”In an email after our interview, he writes: ”Even though people have been released and are said to be free, they’re not. The economic toll of a conviction record is especially devastating for Black and brown people, who represent 80% of those who have received a conviction.”We must create an environment where more people can tell a story like mine because we can’t simply rely on individuals to do the right thing.”The prison industry is a web of private corporations and public institutions that brings in more than $80BN each year from a brutal system of mass caging and control that owes its roots to slavery and the racialized terror that has continued since. @AdCouncil @4As— Ashish Prashar (@Ash_Prashar) November 10, 2021As someone who’s already experienced campaigning politics at a high level, will he remain satisfied pushing for change from within adland?”I really believe businesses need to be at the forefront of this,” Prashar replies. ”We should not be in business with the prison industry ... but we must be in the business of dismantling it. I would ask the advertising industry to take a pledge not to collaborate with the companies that comprise the prison industrial complex.”He concludes: ”We must remember that formerly incarcerated people are not a separate population; they are members of our society. We need to make sure no sentence is a life sentence in or out of prison.”

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