On Nov 15, 2007, at 10:46 PM, bhandari at berkeley.edu wrote:
> Thanks for alerting us to Devah Pager's findings about the miserable
> treatment of ex cons. It seems like she has done some actually
> empirically
> rich objective work which is neither a numerical nor wordy
> elaboration of
> the obvious. I look forward to reading her book and listening to the
> interview, which I am sure is a true contribution (like Pager's
> book) to
> social enlightenment. Hope that does not sound hyperbolic.
Pager's most sensational finding is that, in applying for low-wage jobs, a white applicant with a criminal record (having done 18 months on a drug charge) is about as likely to get a callback as a black applicant with no criminal record. Their resumes were otherwise identical.
She opens the book by recalling that in the late 1960s/early 1970s it was thought that prison was a fading punishment for crime. Aside from a little blip in the 1930s, incarceration rates had been steady for the entire 20th century, and were projected to start falling. A couple of years later, Nixon declared war on crime, and the prison boom was underway.
Doug