In a basement supply room at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, William Glover-Bey gathered a radio, dust mop and gloves. It was 11 p.m., and he was preparing for the overnight shift, cleaning floors in the emergency department.Glover-Bey, 59, was coming up on a year in the job. He’s trained as a drug addiction counselor, but he had been out of work for two years before landing here.“When I got here, it was amazing how many people seemed to be angry,” he said. “I'm excited about working.”Glover-Bey said he’s happy to be making just under $12 an hour cleaning floors, because when he was younger, he spent more than 15 years in prison, mostly for selling drugs. He’s one of 174 people hired by the hospital last year as part of a program to bring in ex-offenders.“My mindset is, because I've been to jail and I've worked and done long jail hauls for $6 a month, do you think I can't do this here for whatever they pay us a day?” he said. “No, this is easy.”Hopkins wants to create opportunities for more people like Glover-Bey through a broader initiative called HopkinsLocal, announced last fall. The goal is to award more construction and purchasing contracts to local women and minority-owned businesses, and to have 40 percent of new hires for certain entry-level jobs come from neighborhoods with high unemployment and poverty.“The 40 percent target has focused on those neighborhoods, by ZIP code, within the city that we regard as most distressed,” said Ronald Daniels, president of the university. Under a new screening process, applicants from those ZIP codes get a guaranteed look. If they’re qualified, their resumes will be passed on to hiring managers. The targeted jobs include "everything from entry-level technicians to people working in custodial services and catering,” Daniels said.The program was in the works long before Freddie Gray, a young black man, died in police custody a year ago. The protests and violence that followed exposed the deep racial and economic ine...