Jamie Dimon, Who Is Definitely Not Running For President, Unveils Newest Criminal Justice Reform Plan

JPMorgan CEO and avowed-but-winking non-presidential candidate Jamie Dimon has a surprisingly robust publicly-announced platform for someone not seeking public office. The not-46-President-of-the-United-States is against tariffs, wants to tax people like himself to help pay better schools (like certain actual presidential candidates), is sounding all the right notes about income inequality and thinks zero interest rates are a bad idea. But perhaps his strongest policy is on the carcereal state (he is, after all, nominally a Democrat): Having already all but pledged to abolish private prisons, Dimon has unveiled a new plan to reduce recidivism (and win over some new voters in Florida to go with the ones he moved to Texas).

JPMorgan today is announcing several major steps to encourage second-chance hiring for those with criminal records. The bank is officially “banning the box”—removing all questions about criminal records from its job applications. It will steer more than $7 million toward organizations that provide job- and life-skills training to the formerly incarcerated. The bank is also launching a new “policy center,” a think tank of sorts that will design and advocate for regulatory changes around certain economic issues. Its first agenda item: reforming rules that effectively bar former felons from employment, in finance and elsewhere….

Those campaigns, he said, had exposed more of the bank’s leaders to the challenges faced by “returning citizens” with felonies on their records. “They can’t get jobs, they can’t rent a home,” Dimon said. “Socially, they’re on the margins.”