FreeCap Financial

To date, FreeCap has researched and rated 100 companies on how they positively and/or negatively impact the criminal justice system. More specifically, we have assessed their prison risk mitigation efforts in their supply chain and their hiring practices. Through this grant, we will have the capacity to replicate this research for 3,000 more companies. Since our research process is currently done manually, rating companies is time and labor-intensive. With additional funding, we will be able to automate our process through machine learning and data analytics, allowing us to rapidly scale our work. We will be able to build a web-based platform, for which we already have a prototype, to widely disseminate our research.  

Taken together, we will be able to provide unprecedented transparency to the ways companies impact justice-involved people during and post-incarceration. By engaging with our research on our web-based platform, investors can align their finances with their values. As a result, our work at scale will move money out of companies that profit off prison labor and discriminate against formerly incarcerated individuals and into companies that create a more just society. Simultaneously, companies will improve their behavior as shareholders’ social values affect their performance. 

Growing up in rural Florida, some of the smartest people I know went to prison instead of college, including my younger brother. I spent over a decade studying the prison-industrial complex, trying to find a way to understand how and why so many people I cared about were pipelined into the prison system to realize that corporations profit off the exploitation of people every day. This led me to a career in impact investing, where I developed MicroVest’s social impact measurement framework for assessing impact in its investment portfolio. Working deeply in that industry showed me that if people utterly understood that they could direct their investments to companies that provided opportunity, rather than feed injustice, they would. FreeCap offers that solution. 

FreeCap is a research company that provides socially responsible investing data and reports to investors. We expose social justice risks to the investment community, and at scale, we can shape company behavior, encouraging them to think more about the social impacts of their behaviors. Our long-term vision is to have the scale of Bloomberg in the financial research industry while specializing in social justice issues. 

Our first database is focused on the criminal justice system. With it, we are on a mission to defund the prison-industrial complex. There are 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., representing over 20% of the global incarcerated population. This crisis disproportionately impacts Black and Brown communities, and the prison industrial complex exacerbates the problem. Companies routinely lobby for policies that lead to higher incarceration rates to secure vending contracts with correction departments, access cheap (or unpaid) prison labor, and maintain monopolies on telephones services. As a result, the prison-industrial complex is one of the leading causes of mass incarceration, costing U.S. taxpayers and families of incarcerated loved ones $182B+ annually. Further, the discrimination formerly incarcerated workers experience leads to unfairly high unemployment rates and increases the likelihood of recidivism. 

We’ve collected data on prison labor, fair chance hiring, and CSR practices from a wide variety of sources and translated it into investible insights for financial advisors, asset managers, and institutional investors so they can more easily align their portfolios with their clients’ values. By exposing "prison-risk" to the investment community, our approach at scale can successfully defund the prison industrial complex. As money moves to better companies, others will shift their behavior, enabling a more just society.

Our approach uniquely identifies mass incarceration as a market problem that necessitates a capital market, data-driven solution. We are one the only ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) data providers with a racial equity lens and the only provider built specifically to combat injustice in the criminal “justice” system. Throughout my time in the impact investing industry, I continually met people who wanted to invest in racial equity but were not close enough to the problem to solve it. Similarly, there are many nonprofit organizations leading necessary advocacy, legal, and community organizing initiatives to reform our broken justice system, but few focus on the profit incentives tied to mass incarceration in the US, and even fewer work directly with the investment community to solve this problem. 

Moreover, traditional Wall Street financial data providers who are learning about ‘racial justice’ for the first time are not equipped to create the solution that our team of social justice advocates has made. Similarly, I am one of the few people in the impact investing industry with a personal connection to the problem we are solving. My lived experience, impact investing expertise, and business development skills help FreeCap remain rooted in the communities it seeks to empower while leveraging capital markets for social change.

The primary impact FreeCap has made thus far has been through public awareness campaigns about the prevalence of prison labor and prison vendors in most investors' portfolios. Alongside it, we have made substantial progress in our research database. To date, FreeCap has had the opportunity to engage with thousands of individuals and raise awareness of the issue of mass incarceration and our work. I have spoken at SOCAP, the largest impact investing conference in the United States, Stanford University's Very Impactful People (VIP) series, Vassar College, Tufts University, Georgetown University, and Yale University. Our research lens has been published across prominent news outlets, including MarketWatch. We have also advised divestment campaigns at universities across the US, including Notre Dame and Georgetown University, and through our University Guide on how to create financial and social justice returns. 

Further, this summer, we plan to publish a comprehensive report that provides an overview of the current landscape on company criminal justice ‘footprint.’ In it, we will share insights surrounding the largest 100 companies in the US, thus beginning a larger conversation about company practices and the investment community’s role in leveraging its power to create structural change.