LIFE ON THE OUTSIDE The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett. By Jennifer Gonnerman. 356 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.
The United States is transforming itself into a nation of ex-convicts. This country imprisons people at 14 times the rate of Japan, eight times the rate of France and six times the rate of Canada. The American prison system disgorges 600,000 angry, unskilled people each year -- more than the populations of Boston, Milwaukee or Washington. ''Thirteen million people have been convicted of a felony and spent some time locked up,'' Jennifer Gonnerman writes in ''Life on the Outside.'' ''That's almost 7 percent of U.S. adult residents. If all of these people were placed on an island together, that island would have a population larger than many countries, including Sweden, Bolivia, Senegal, Greece or Somalia.''
Ex-cons are marooned in the poor inner-city neighborhoods where legitimate jobs do not exist and the enterprises that led them to prison in the first place are ever present. These men and women are further cut off from the mainstream by sanctions that are largely invisible to those of us who have never been to prison. They are commonly denied the right to vote, parental rights, drivers' licenses, student loans and residency in public housing -- the only housing that marginal, jobless people can afford. The most severe sanctions are reserved for former drug offenders, who have been treated worse than murderers since the start of the so-called war on drugs. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996, for example, imposed a lifetime ban on food stamp and welfare eligibility for people convicted of even a single drug felony. The states can opt out of the prohibition, but where it remains intact it cannot be lifted even for ex-prisoners who live model, crime-free lives. . . .
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/books/review/21STAPLET.html> *****
***** To isolate the effect of a criminal record on the job search, Ms. [Devah] Pager sent pairs of young, well-groomed, well-spoken college men with identical résumés to apply for 350 advertised entry-level jobs in Milwaukee. The only difference was that one said he had served an 18-month prison sentence for cocaine possession. Two teams were black, two white.
A telephone survey of the same employers followed. For her black testers, the callback rate was 5 percent if they had a criminal record and 14 percent if they did not. For whites, it was 17 percent with a criminal record and 34 percent without.
(Brooke Kroeger, "When a Dissertation Makes a Difference," _New York Times_, March 20, 2004, <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/arts/20DEVA.html>) *****
Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," June 2002: <http://www.sase.org/conf2002/papers/g013.pager.pdf>. -- Yoshie
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