A prison sentence should not mean a sentence to a lifetime of unemployment and poverty.
It's no wonder that a sky-high proportion of people who go to prison once in America go back, sometimes repeatedly. No wonder, because people coming out of prison have few options for building law-abiding lives. Their chances of getting jobs and all the things that go with jobs are shattered—we're talking about unemployment rates of 60 percent or more. And in a country that imprisons as many people as the United States does, and with such massive racial disparities, a huge number of people, especially black men, find themselves without options for changing their lives. Annie-Rose Strasser reports on a movement to change that, reducing job discrimination against former prisoners simply by making
one little change to employment applications.
The change in question is just removing a box that asks job applicants if they've been arrested or convicted of a crime, a box that immediately takes many applicants out of the running for even low-wage jobs. The movement to ban the box is gaining steam and having an impact:
In Minneapolis, where a ban the box ordinance passed in 2007, the percentage of people with criminal records who were able to find work went from 6 percent to 60. [...]
In total, 10 states have banned the box, and half of them did it last year. They’re joined by 56 local jurisdictions, by the count of the National Law Employment Project (NELP).
It should be obvious, but being able to get a job makes recidivism less likely, keeping people out of prison. That saves the public money, yes, but equally importantly, it allows people to recover from early mistakes and live reasonable lives. Right now, the effects of discrimination against ex-prisoners fall disproportionately on black men, so reducing discrimination against ex-prisoners is an important way to chip away at racial gaps in unemployment and wages.