Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration | Devah Pager

Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration | Devah Pager | Prison employee

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Marked: Race, Crim...

	Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration Devah Pager University Of Chicago Press, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Nearly every job application asks it: have you ever been convicted of a crime? For the hundreds of thousands of young men leaving American prisons each year?a number that has exploded in recent decades with the growth of the prison system?their answer to that question may determine whether they can find work and begin rebuilding their lives.

The product of an innovative field experiment, Marked gives us our first real glimpse into the tremendous difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Devah Pager matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her applicants were attractive, articulate, and capable?yet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds. Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price for the widespread assumptions about black criminality that underlie our era of mass incarceration: black applicants with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work, Pager contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place.

Drawing much-needed attention to a problem that will continue to grow in coming years, Marked will ignite important debates over incarceration, discrimination, and the failures of our criminal justice system.

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Timely scholarship

If this depressing book cannot convince people that racism is alive and well in America today, I don't know what could. Dr. Pager reports on an empirical research project in which teams of well-put-together white and black college students went job-hunting in and around Milwaukee, with one member of each team "marked" as an ex-convict. What she found is astonishing. Black job applicants WITHOUT drug convictions fared no better than white ex-cons WITH convictions; with "two strikes" against them, black men with a drug conviction had almost no chance of getting a call-back from a prospective employer. This problem was especially pronounced in the suburbs, which are gaining an increasing proportion of jobs despite the fact that many job-seekers remain in the cities. Dr. Pager also includes informative and well-written chapters on the state of mass incarceration in the United States today, as well as the massive and growing problem of prisoner reentry. With more than 600,000 people pouring out of prisons each year, Dr. Pager's book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the public policy aspects of the reentry problem. This is yet another excellent entry into the recent crop of books cataloging the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment. (See my Amazon list on "Prison World" for more.)

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Prison employee

This book is loaded with useful information for the student of corrections, criminology and/or sociology. While this is a book rich with very well done research, Pager's honest admission that low sample numbers in her research, (which need to be expanded on to bolster confidence in results), might undermine the message to some policy makers.

Also, while Pager recommends a few ideas, the book seems to offer more in the way of what is going on and not as much about what to do about it. However, in my opinion, the paucity of solutions contributes to this as an objective piece of research.

The bottom line is that this is a very relevant and important book that should start a dialogue.

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