Rewriting the Script for Ex-Inmates

Chip Warren

Julio Marcial was years deep into work on juvenile-justice issues in 2011 when a colleague urged him to meet a Hollywood hotshot who was helping people locked up young in California’s densely populated detention centers.

An internet search ensued. Scott Budnick wasn’t hard to find.

“I saw that he was an executive producer for the Hangover [movie] franchise and I just said, ‘Oh. Great. Another white guy from entertainment trying to placate black and brown kids in the prison system,’ " Mr. Marcial recalls.

A lunch followed, but Mr. Marcial, a program director at the California Wellness Foundation, remained underwhelmed. He had experienced incarceration in his own family and was loath to see the issue glamorized. It wasn’t until he spent a Saturday with Mr. Budnick at a juvenile detention center in Sylmar, Calif., where the movie producer had volunteered for years that Mr. Marcial knew this was no pet project.

The program director describes the inmates as young people society is “extremely mad at or scared of.” But watching Mr. Budnick with them was striking: “What I saw was family. I saw kinship.”

Mr. Budnick was by then already hurtling down a path from movie shoots and red-carpet premieres to prison yards and policy battles. In 2013 he would leave his show-business job to found the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, which connects people once locked up with mental-health, education, employment, and housing services while also organizing and equipping them to speak publicly about injustices in the correctional system.

The nonprofit, sometimes referred to as ARC, now has a budget of $4.6 million and a staff of 23. The 40-year-old Mr. Budnick and his team have played an important advocacy role in a string of legislative victories. Most recently, Californians overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative that, among other things, gives judges, not prosecutors, authority to decide if cases involving underage defendants should be moved to adult courts.

That a producer of raunchy comedies should become a credible spokesman on issues of incarceration and recidivism in a state with an inmate count of 129,000 — down from 147,000 five years earlier — is as fitting as it is improbable, say those who know Mr. Budnick’s work. He is a professional storyteller, after all. And while it’s his personal narrative that opens some doors, his genius has been keeping the stories of the young people he serves at the fore.

“I think he has been arguably the most productive and effective policy voice for justice reform in California that the state has seen in recent years,” says Robert Ross, head of the California Endowment, one of ARC’s first and biggest supporters with $580,000 in grants.

Keeping in Touch

Mr. Budnick didn’t plan to spend his life navigating guard towers and chain-link fences. He fell in love with moviemaking while studying at Emory University in Atlanta. (His favorite, he says, is the 1986 film Stand By Me.) After graduating in 1999 he headed to Southern California and landed a production-assistant gig with director Todd Phillips. He worked furiously. Two years later, Mr. Phillips asked him to head up his Green Hat Films production company at Warner Bros.

There, Mr. Budnick would go on to help make a string of movies, including the three Hangover films produced and directed by Mr. Phillips, which collectively grossed more than $1.4 billion worldwide.

In 2003, a fellow producer named Matthew Mizel invited Mr. Budnick to attend a writing class at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar. Mr. Budnick had just wrapped up work on the Will Ferrell comedy Old School. He figured the class, put on by the nonprofit group InsideOut Writers, would be an interesting way to spend a Saturday morning.

He was struck by the stories of the young inmates. There was a 15-year-old who had received three life sentences for a crime in which he had never touched the weapon. There was a 17-year-old who looked far younger and was about to be moved to an adult facility. Many had been ravaged by abuse and neglect.

The producer began visiting the facility weekly to lead the creative-writing class. Usually there was a theme or a prompt, such as, What would you do if you weren’t afraid to fail? Some of the inmates wrote at an elementary-school level. Mr. Budnick didn’t worry much about grammar or spelling.

He did worry about the kids. InsideOut Writers had a longstanding policy — for liability reasons, volunteers weren’t supposed to stay in touch with the juveniles once they were moved to adult prisons or released. A few volunteers busted that rule, and Mr. Budnick become increasingly involved in helping former students. He would eventually start traveling up and down California to visit inmates in the state’s 33 prisons. He also became a staunch advocate of prison education programs — one of the few ways, he says, for inmates to ready themselves for release from a system seemingly designed to produce failure. (For much of the last decade, California had a three-year recidivism rate of more than 60 percent, meaning roughly that for every three people released, two were back behind bars within three years, according to state statistics.)

He began to build relationships with key mentors, including Javier Stauring, who led the Office of Restorative Justice for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles for 22 years, and Elizabeth Calvin, an attorney with Human Rights Watch and an expert on the foster-care and juvenile-justice systems.

All the while Mr. Budnick was reading scripts, building production schedules, and assembling talent in his role at Green Hat. He had purchased a home in the Hollywood Hills.

“It never stopped,” he says. “Literally, it was like a text from a huge film producer, and then a text from someone that just got out of prison. My texts were bizarre.”

‘The Light Bulb Went Off’

In 2009, Mr. Budnick was on the set of The Hangover in Las Vegas when he started receiving dozens of collect calls from inmates. Then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was slashing $300 million from the prisons budget, including about $2 million for a college program.

Mr. Budnick hustled to arrange a 20-minute conference call between the majority leader of the state Senate and five of Mr. Budnick’s former students, who explained, one by one, how they had earned college credits while incarcerated and gone on, upon release, to college and jobs.

The senator and his policy director were inspired by the stories. The $2 million was restored.

“That is when the light bulb went off,” Mr. Budnick says.

He made his first trip to the state legislature in 2010. (With him was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, Robert Downey Jr., who served time in connection with drug offenses in the late 1990s and early 2000s and would become a major donor to Mr. Budnick’s nonprofit.)

At the time, Mr. Budnick says, there were a few people in California working hard on criminal-justice reform and recidivism. But there were major gaps in advocacy, including for his area of focus: the prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration of those who commit crimes as children. Mr. Budnick knew former juvenile inmates who had been released, started businesses, joined unions, and raised families. Success stories needed to reach the ears of lawmakers who might vote for reforms like new sentencing hearings for those convicted as minors, he thought.

“I knew we weren’t going to be able to get that type of politically difficult reform without getting the moderate Democrats who are fairly conservative and some of the Republicans on board,” he says.

Another gap? Supportive housing. Mr. Budnick saw young people released from correctional facilities with nowhere to go but right back into the same unstable households and troubled neighborhoods where they grew up. They entreated him for alternatives. He had few answers.

A Couple of Red Bulls

By 2012, Mr. Budnick and a half-dozen other volunteers were working directly with some 80 formerly incarcerated individuals, trying to help with school, work, housing, and mental-health services. He also arranged for ex-inmates to speak at conferences and with lawmakers. His efforts attracted attention. That year he won the governor’s California Volunteer of the Year award.

“He was one of the few individuals who were trying to increase capacity of those who had been impacted by prisons to engage in local and state policy reform,” said Mr. Marcial of the California Wellness Foundation.

That grant maker awarded Mr. Budnick $10,000 to create a fellowship program for formerly incarcerated people. Soon thereafter, Mr. Marcial and nonprofit lawyer Kent Seton helped guide Mr. Budnick through the process of registering the Anti-Recidivism Coalition as a 501(c)(3).

Mr. Marcial also introduced the newly minted nonprofit executive to Dr. Ross of the California Endowment. Mr. Budnick invited the physician and foundation head to visit with inmates at Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles. Dr. Ross was moved by what he heard, and impressed with Mr. Budnick’s energy and enthusiasm. “Imagine someone who is a Hollywood producer who has just had a couple of Red Bulls and a Diet Coke,” says Dr. Ross.

(In part because of its relationship with Mr. Budnick, in 2015 the California Endowment stopped asking job candidates if they have criminal records and hired its first formerly incarcerated staff member.)

In addition to ARC’s $580,000 in grants from the California Endowment, it has received a total of $1.2 million from the California Wellness Foundation since 2012, Mr. Marcial says. Other supporters have included the Annenberg, Conrad Hilton, Ford and Rosenberg foundations.

Building on Success

There are 21 ARC employees working in an office in downtown Los Angeles, and one each in Sacramento and California’s Central Valley. More than 300 former inmates are involved with the organization. Mr. Budnick spends about 75 percent of his time fundraising for and managing ARC, where his current annual salary is $180,000.

The group’s portfolio now includes a housing partnership with two Southern California community colleges that has created 50-plus beds for individuals newly released from prison, and a 12-week job-training program. The latter, a collaboration with the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and Los Angeles Trade Technical College, outfits former inmates with construction skills and places them in union jobs that start at $15 an hour.

Rusty Hicks, president of the federation, the city’s biggest workers’ organization, describes Mr. Budnick as a passionate, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer type of guy. That “occasionally can be frustrating for some who aren’t used to dealing with those types of personalities,” Mr. Hicks says, “but I see it as a great asset for those he serves each and every day.”

Mr. Budnick hasn’t abandoned Hollywood entirely. Many industry professionals — including two Oscar-nominated actors, Mr. Downey and Jake Gyllenhaal — serve on ARC’s board of directors and advisory board. And Mr. Budnick is working to raise $300 million to launch a new production house, Good Films, which he says will tell stories focused on social-justice issues.

Al Seib/Los Angeles Times/ Getty Images

“The sad part about it is I’m finding it easier to raise $300 million for a film company than $4.6 million for the nonprofit,” he says.

In recent years formerly incarcerated ARC members have helped drum up votes for laws on issues like parole eligibility for people convicted of crimes they committed as children and keeping young inmates out of the state prisons’ dangerous maximum-security yards. The work has effected thousands of lives. There have been other kinds of victories: In 2014, a member ran, albeit unsuccessfully, for the California State Assembly.

Mr. Budnick says his current policy to-do list includes reforming the cash-bail system and getting juveniles a chance to have their criminal records expunged once they complete parole and demonstrate other progress.

He is proud of his success as a Hollywood producer. But the work on which he concentrates today is vastly more important, Mr. Budnick says. He continues to make it a priority to escort public officials, donors, and others to meet with inmates in correctional facilities, and to facilitate meetings with formerly incarcerated individuals.

“The people who run nonprofits and fundraise well and get their mission out well are the ones who are able to tell that story well,” he says. “So that is something I really wanted to focus on — not only telling the story of ARC and my experience but letting our members tell their stories.”

When he walks into the ARC offices in Los Angeles on any given day there are two dozen members bustling about. Not infrequently he welcomes someone on their first day of freedom after years in prison.

“I am a thousand times happier doing what I’m doing now.”