Megan McArdle was kind enough to indulge me and do a post on ex-cons and the job market. I wanted to get the perspective of someone who wasn't like me (self-professed pinko, commie) and yet who I respected. Furthermore, I've really enjoyed the comments on Section 8, so I figured it'd be good to look at some other social issues. Anyway, I enjoyed her formulation of the problem. Also here are some of the solutions:
1) Reduce the number of crimes to things like assault, so that poor kids have as few opportunities as possible to make those sorts of permanent mistakes.
2) Less prison. Prison is awful for us as well as the prisoners. I'm not saying we shouldn't punish kids who rob liquor stores, but we could try to think of ways that don't involve shoving them into a metal box with a lot of other criminals. Here's where Mark Kleiman's ideas have a lot of merit--use intensive monitoring instead of warehousing. There's a lot of garbage that needs picking up on the streets of American cities; this is one example of something that would be a better use of low-level criminal time then staring at bars.
3) Tax breaks for hiring ex-felons, say for the first two years of employment. It will cost us more money up front, but less money if the felons stay out of prison--prison is extremely expensive, not only in the direct cost, but also because it makes criminals about as socially and economically unproductive as possible. Add a bonus for anyone who gets a sizeable promotion/raise, or skills training. Yes, this will be in part a boondoggle. So are prison building projects ardently supported by the prison guard's unions.
4) Small bonuses for the criminals themselves (or perhaps a reduction in monitoring) for things like getting their GED or staying clean for a year.
This is not perfect; the poor, and the criminals, we will probably always have with us. But it would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
Pretty good list, say I. But I wonder how much of our approach to crime is--dare I say--cultural...
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Great topic.
Quite agree with #1. It seems too often that petty BS causes imprisonment and serious dagger-in-the-back of society gets a hand slap.
#2 only works if imprisonment is a real *and guaranteed* escalation for those who will not comply with less restrictive punishment. Once a convict knows the cell is option off the table, there will be no compliance.
The rub with #3 is that in a society with less than full employment, especially at professions on the lower-end of compensation, this is a slap in the face of the fellow who *didn't* walk their life into the prison toilet.
Same rub with #4 as #3. What I'd really think might be effective is an opportunity to remove the cursed 'A' from their forehead. Providing a clear cut means to expunge their record with whatever arbitrary hurdles are deemed appropriate seems like a great idea to reward convicts without (relatively) punishing non-convicts who exhibit the same "good" societal behaviors. Most (not all) crimes that have people behind bars are truly forgivable in my opinion.
My day job is as the publicity manager at the University of Chicago Press, and last fall we published a book by sociologist Devah Pager, Marked, that offers another angle on this question: Pager conducted studies in Miwaukee on the job market for former prisoners, and, short version, she learned that a white man with a prison record had a better shot at getting a call-back and at landing a job than a black man with a clean record.
I don't think typepad will let me past in a link, but if you're interested, you can get more info at book's page at the U of C Press site.
Levi:
A quick question: Does Pager offer any conclusions, supported by the data, to explain why this disparity in hiring ex-cons exists?
Lance,
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm going to guess that racism may play a part in this.
I hate to try to summarize her argument, which is complicated and backed up by a lot of data, but from what I understand she finds that the extremely high incarceration rate among African American men, combined with media portrayals, has created something close to a default assumption of untrustworthiness or criminality on the part of an employer when confronted with a black applicant.
Again, I'm wildly summarizing, and I hope I'm not accidentally mischaracterizing Ms. Pager's findings.
Levi:
Much appreciate that summary. It is not enough to report data. The conclusions drawn must be well reasoned, and all relevant factors accounted for. Does Pager happen to mention if any black employers hold this same false assumption? Is this a multi-racial problem?
Given the kinds of undesirable traits found in some criminals McArdle lists (thieving, uneducated, impulsive, drug addicted, mentally ill) I am surprised that the military did not make the list of solutions. If Mr. Coates thinks his veteran father scared him straight then he has a good idea of the kind of fear a good Drill Sergeant inspires.
I served six years in the military during a time in my life when I couldn’t quite tell which way was up. I’m all in favor of any incentive we can give to youth to spend at least two years in the military. Even factoring in the casualty rate in Iraq, the odds of turning someone’s life around must look better than prison (a living death). Military service is not a cure-all, but it I think it deserves a spot on the list of options. It is far and away a better option than prison for those with a few “stupid mistakes.”
"dare I say, cultural?"
Not much of a dare. Here goes one:
It is beyond a doubt that our prison culture has its origins in the post Civil War era of an end to slavery. A simple example like Angola prison in Louisiana shows that (plantation to prison in one easy step). If you prefer more rigorous and studious material, then you should read any of Angela Davis' work on the prison/industrial complex.
I said pretty good list, but in fact it is a great list. What it needs is actual human effort to progress from concept to reality. Our current system is not just unsustainable it is inherently one that dehumanizes both the people jailed and their jailers, us.
Or perhaps you think Abu Ghraib was just a few "bad actors"?
"...and yet who I respected."
???
Whaa?? McArdle is horrible. Bad writer. Bad politics (really, does it get worse than pseudo-libertarian Republican?).
I agree with Ed. Respect Megan McArdle? I don't read her regularly, but when I do she's saying something stupid. Frex, she wrote a piece about the controversy over the magnitude of the death toll in Iraq for the Atlantic a few months ago and botched it. I don't mean that I know the true death toll--I mean she botched the facts about the various studies she was describing, portraying the first John Hopkins study (published in 2004) as being totally out of line with the recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine when in reality they were in close agreement for the time period common to both. And she botched this in an ideologically predictable way--she knows that the John Hopkins studies are "bad" to the people on the right, so she "knew" that the first one had to be wrong.