The U.S. unemployment rate is hovering near lows unseen since the 1960s. A few months ago, there were roughly two job openings for every unemployed person in the country. Many standard economic models suggest that almost everyone who wants a job has a job.
Yet the broad group of Americans with records of
imprisonment or arrests — a population disproportionately male and Black — have
remarkably high jobless rates, reported The New York Times. Over 60 percent of those leaving prison are unemployed a
year later, seeking work but not finding it.
That harsh reality has endured even as the social
upheaval after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 gave a boost to a
“second-chance hiring” movement in corporate America aimed at hiring candidates
with criminal records. And the gap exists even as unemployment for minority
groups overall is near record lows.
Many states have “ban the box” laws barring initial
job applications from asking if candidates have a criminal history. But a
prison record can block progress after interviews or background checks —
especially for convictions more serious than nonviolent drug offenses, which
have undergone a more sympathetic
public reappraisal in recent years.
For economic policymakers, a persistent demand for
labor paired with a persistent lack of work for many former prisoners presents
an awkward conundrum: A wide swath of
citizens have re-entered society — after a quadrupling of the U.S. incarceration rate over 40
years — but the nation’s economic engine is not sure what to with them.
“These are people that are trying to compete in the
legal labor market,” said Shawn D. Bushway, an economist and criminologist at
the RAND Corporation, who estimates that 64 percent of unemployed men have been
arrested and that 46 percent have been convicted. “You can’t say, ‘Well, these
people are just lazy’ or ‘These people really don’t really want to work.’”
In a research paper, Mr. Bushway and his co-authors
found that when former prisoners do land a job, “they earn significantly less
than their counterparts without criminal history records, making the middle
class ever less reachable for unemployed men” in this cohort.
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