>
>CB: Are you sure that most criminals have not been exposed to same before
>going to prison ? Most criminals are from the working class or middle strata
>and have done some work in their day, no ?
>
>
>[WS:] I would like to see some reliable figures supporting this. What I see
>in Baltimore is certainly a very different picture - those who end up in
>jail seldom if ever work and live mainly by preying on- or sponging off
>those who do.
Here's something. I would like to see some reliable figures supporting what you are saying.
>In directly considering the connection between
>crime and work, researchers often assess
>both activities by measuring participation
>(rather than extent of involvement). In these analyses,
>most of those who committed crime also worked
>(Freeman 1999a, Grogger 1998). This
>continues to be true: in the 1997 National
>Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 85–90 percent of young
>men and young women who received some earnings from crime were also employed,
>approximately the same percentage as among those
>who received no income from crime
>(author’s calculations). This contributes to the
>evidence that crime and work are not exclusive, as
>was also found in Reuter, MacCoun and Murphy’s
>(1990) in-depth study of drug dealers.
U R B A N I N S T I T U T E R E E N T R Y R O U N D T A B L E Employment Dimensions of Reentry: Understanding the Nexus between Prisoner Reentry and Work May 19–20, 2003 New York University Law School
Crime, Work, and Reentry Anne Piehl Harvard University
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/410856_Piehl.pdf