Reduce Black Unemployment: Find Jobs for Thousands of New Ex-Cons Released Each Year

From TheRoot.com:

In an ideal America, our president would have told us [last] Tuesday night about his plan not only for fixing the jobs crisis but also for making it so that the crisis wasn't twice as bad for black people (15.8 percent unemployment versus 8.5 percent for whites).

But this isn't an ideal America, and he didn't. But then, who thought he would? The good news is that there is a way to make serious headway with the black unemployment problem, and it's getting more attention by the year.

The problem is that it doesn't sound very sexy in terms of name. "Prisoner re-entry programs" sounds pretty dull compared with "black agenda" and such. But much of the disproportion in black unemployment is because of how hard it is for ex-cons to get or keep work -- when, as we all know, a grievous disproportion of ex-cons are black.

Newark, N.J., is an example of what feeds into the kind of statistic that we dream of Obama addressing in a speech. Each year about 1,500 unmarried, semiliterate drug addicts with no job skills come home from prison to Newark.

Am I stereotyping them? Well, OK, there is a certain diversity among them. Ten percent are not men. A smaller percentage are not black. There are those among them who read above the sixth-grade level. About one in five does not have a drug-addiction problem, and about one in 20 had some vocational training behind bars.
Three years after they get home, one in three will not have been arrested again, and two out of three will not be back behind bars. Now, extend this picture to all of America's big cities. About 650,000 ex-cons in total return home yearly.

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10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

10. Don't Commit Crimes
Seems pretty obvious, but those who are locked up (and are actually guilty) didn't seem to get the memo that crime does not pay.

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10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

10. Don't Commit Crimes
Seems pretty obvious, but those who are locked up (and are actually guilty) didn't seem to get the memo that crime does not pay.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

9. Get a Good Lawyer
Far too many people, particularly minorities, wind up in the clink because they didn't have adequate defense. The court system's public defenders are underfunded, understaffed and overburdened. Get a lawyer. He or she will might be able to get you off the hook. That's all some people need to get on the straight and narrow.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

8. Support Businesses That Build Rural Economies
With much of America's farmland disappearing, rural areas are becoming desperate for places to employ their idle populations. Politicians from those areas lobby for funding to build state prisons, so that their people are employed. In many states, although inmates cannot vote, they are counted as part of the population, thereby justifying more funds for those areas. When farms, mills and plants in small rural communities subsist, there is no need to build prisons to replace them.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

7. Support Drug Rehab Centers
Drug addiction is not a crime, it's an illness that is treatable, thank God. For the amount of money spent on trying, housing, feeding and providing health care for people locked up due to drugs, a small fraction of that money could be spent rehabilitating drug addicts so that they could permanently get the monkey off their backs, thereby destroying the market for dope.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

6. Don't Elect 'Tough on Crime' Politicians
Instead, vote for candidates who campaign on crime prevention, community counseling and youth intervention. Most important, support politicians who advocate increased funding for public education. Preventive measures can reduce both.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

5. Discipline Your Kids
Child abuse is very bad. Don't hurt 'em. But applaud mothers who knock the hell out of their kid in public for smarting off at the supermarket. Courthouses have lines around the block of young people whose parents thought it was cute for them to act like little ghetto birds when they were 4. But now at age 18, when you are taking out a second mortgage on your home to pay legal bills, that cute crap doesn't work. Big secret: Judges hate cute.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

4. Get Out, Stay Out
One of the main points a Pew Research Center report on this issues brings up is the number of recidivists -- or people who keep going back. They make up a large number of people who are incarcerated in this country. In fact, if it weren't for them, the 1 in 100 stat wouldn't be nearly as high.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

3. Crackdown on Rogue Gun Dealers
Remember the D.C. sniper? Well, between 1997 and 2001, guns sold by the clown who supplied him were involved in 52 crimes, including homicides, kidnappings and assaults. Still open to this day, the dealer also can't account for 238 guns or say whether they were stolen, lost or sold, or if their buyers had to undergo felony background checks. These chumps keep in close contact with the supportive gun lobby to make sure gun laws remain weak.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

2. Threaten Your Children
This relates to #5, and is very important. You know about the ratio of high school dropouts in jail to educated people who are not in jail. Okay, just to drive the point home, the National Educational Association says 75 percent of all people in America who are state prison inmates are high school dropouts. This means if your child quits before he or she graduates high school, there's a one-in-three chance you'll get a 3 a.m. call saying: "Mama, I'm in jail, I need you to come get me." What you do from there is up to you, but I'd leave their little butts locked up.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

1. Quit Getting High
More than half of the people imprisoned in this country are doing time because of drug offenses. Ronald Reagan's "War on Drugs" was moronic rhetoric at best, designed to galvanize conservative white politicians who hate black people and their religious right constituents. And we can certainly see the merits of legalization as alternative. But piggybacking off #7, the fact of the matter is dope creates an illicit economy of marketers, investors, speculators and has a very large consumer group. That consumer group drives the whole thing.

10 Ways to Reduce Incarceration

Yet, thankfully, it is a myth that nobody will hire one. The ex-con needs people who know where to send him -- say, an organization like Newark's Offender Aid and Restoration of Essex County (OAR), specializing in connecting ex-offenders with work. Get this: Finding people work is the least of their challenges. The White Rose Linen Supply Co. has been especially open to hiring ex-cons, while others get work as handymen, janitors, warehouse workers and truck drivers and in sanitation and customer service.

The immediate task at hand for an ex-offender is becoming able to work. Ex-cons often don't have a Social Security number -- and forget about a birth certificate. As soon as an ex-offender comes in, OAR gets him those documents, plus a driver's license, if he qualifies. Nine in 10 clients need detoxification or rehabilitation.

The job part is then easy. Each week, OAR holds employment-counseling meetings, during which it drills clients on making eye contact, sitting up straight and asking questions, and then sends them off with three job leads.

Read more about how to reduce black unemployment on TheRoot.com.