Have you noticed any patterns in the media coverage of Baltimore? Learn more about how media practices contribute to racial perceptions of crime:sent.pr/1CnF0Gt

Editorial Section NY Times – 4/27/15

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

An analysis in The Times — “1.5 Million Missing Black Men” — showed that more than one in every six black men in the 24-to-54 age group has disappeared from civic life, mainly because they died young or are locked away in prison. This means that there are only 83 black men living outside of jail for every 100 black women — in striking contrast to the white population, where men and women are about equal in numbers.

This astounding shortfall in black men translates into lower marriage rates, more out-of-wedlock births, a greater risk of poverty for families and, by extension, less stable communities. The missing men should be a source of concern to political leaders and policy makers everywhere.

While the 1.5 million number is startling, it actually understates the severity of the crisis that has befallen African-American men since the collapse of the manufacturing and industrial centers, which was quickly followed by the “war on drugs” and mass imprisonment, which drove up the national prison population more than sevenfold beginning in the 1970s.

In addition to the “missing,” millions more are shut out of society, or are functionally missing, because of the shrinking labor market for low-skilled workers, racial discrimination or sanctions that prevent millions who have criminal convictions from getting all kinds of jobs. At the same time, the surge in imprisonment has further stigmatized blackness itself, so that black men and boys who have never been near a jail now have to fight the presumption of criminality in many aspects of day-to-day life — in encounters with police, in schools, on the streets and on the job.

The data on missing African-American men is not particularly new. Every census for the last 50 years has shown the phenomenon.

In earlier decades, premature death played a larger role than it does today. But since the 1980s, the rising number of black men who were spared premature death was more than offset by the growing number shipped off to prison, many for nonviolent drug offenses. The path to that catastrophe was paved by what the sociologist William Julius Wilson described as “the disappearance of work,” which devastated formerly coherent neighborhoods.

As deindustrialization got underway, earnings declined, neighborhoods grew poorer and businesses moved to the suburbs, beyond the reach of inner city residents. As Mr. Wilson wrote in his 1996 book, “When Work Disappears,” for the first time in the 20th century, most adults in many poor inner-city neighborhoods were not working.

Joblessness became the norm, creating a “nonworking class,” that lived in segregated areas where most residents could not find jobs or had given up looking. In Chicago, where, Mr. Wilson carried out his research, employers wrote off the poor by not advertising in places where they could see the ads. The situation was so grave in 1996 that he recommended the resurrection of a Works Progress Administration-like strategy, under which the government would provide public employment to every American over 18 who wanted it.

The stigmatization of blackness presents an enormous obstacle, even to small boys. Last year, for example, the Department of Education reported that black children were far more likely to be suspended from school — even from preschool — than white children. Federal cases also show higher rates of public school suspensions for minority students than for white students for identical behavior, suggesting that racial discrimination against black males starts very early in life.

The sociologist Devah Pager, a Harvard professor who has meticulously researched the effect of race on hiring policies, has also shown that stereotypes have a powerful effect on job possibilities. In one widely cited study, she sent carefully selected test applicants with equivalent résumés to apply for low-level jobs with hundreds of employers. Ms. Pager found that criminal convictions for black men seeking employment were virtually impossible to overcome in many contexts, partly because convictions reinforced powerful, longstanding stereotypes.

The stigma of a criminal record was less damaging for white testers. In fact, those who said that they were just out of prison were as likely to be called back for a second interview as black men who had no criminal history at all. “Being black in America today is just about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding a job,” she wrote in her book, “Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration.”

In recent months, the many grievous cases of unarmed black men and boys who were shot dead by the police — now routinely captured on video — show how the presumption of criminality, poverty and social isolation threatens lives every day in all corners of this country.

By MATT APUZZO and JENNIFER STEINHAUERAPRIL 23, 2015 : New York Times

WASHINGTON — Loretta E. Lynch, who was confirmed Thursday as attorney general, will meet with local police officers nationwide this summer as she tries to strike a new tone for the Justice Department amid a roiling controversy over the use of lethal force, aides said.

Ms. Lynch, who will be the first black woman to hold the post, will replaceEric H. Holder Jr., an ally of President Obama who has been the administration’s most outspoken voice on issues of race relations and civil rights. His tenure made him a hero among many on the left but recently earned him scorn from some police groups who said he was too quick to criticize officers amid a spate of high-profile episodes of black men dying at the hands of white officers.

Ms. Lynch, the daughter of a North Carolina civil rights leader and a child of the segregated South, shares many of Mr. Holder’s liberal views but has signaled that she plans a different approach, particularly in the nationwide debate over police tactics. While Mr. Holder recently completed a tour of minority communities to discuss policing, Ms. Lynch’s aides said that improving police morale and finding common ground between law enforcement and minority communities would be among her top priorities.

“Loretta’s confirmation ensures that we are better positioned to keep our communities safe, keep our nation secure, and ensure that every American experiences justice under the law,” Mr. Obama said. Ms. Lynch is expected to be sworn in Monday, according to the Justice Department.

Thursday’s vote came after weeks of a fractious debate, with Democrats increasingly incensed by the delay, which was longer than that for all but two other nominees for attorney general: Edwin Meese III, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, and A. Mitchell Palmer, who was selected by President Woodrow Wilson, according to the Congressional Research Service. Though no senators questioned her qualifications, some Republicans opposed her because she defended Mr. Obama’s executive actions to give legal status to millions of immigrants.

Exclusive Video: Violence Inside Rikers
BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN The New Yorker Magazine.

May, 2010, Kalief Browder, a sixteen-year-old high-school sophomore, was arrested in the Bronx for allegedly stealing a backpack. He insisted that he was innocent, but he was taken to Rikers Island, New York City’s four-hundred-acre jail complex. Browder spent the next three years at Rikers, awaiting trial while his case was repeatedly delayed by the courts. In May, 2013, the case against him was dismissed. (Last fall, I wrote about Browder for the magazine.) This week, The New Yorker obtained two ​surveillance-camera video clips that depict the dual horrors of Browder’s years in jail: abuse by a guard and by fellow-inmates.

September 23, 2012: Inside the Bing

Browder spent a total of about two years in solitary confinement, including nine months leading up to the incident shown in the video above, which took place inside Rikers’s Central Punitive Segregation Unit, better known as the Bing. On this day, a guard came to Browder’s cell door to escort him to the showers. As the footage shows, Browder put his hands through a slot in the door to be cuffed. The guard opened the door and began leading him down the tier. In the video, Browder appears to speak to the guard, who then threw him to the ground.

Browder recently saw this footage for the first time. “I just felt him tighten a grip around my arm,” he recalled, referring to the guard. “In my head, I was wondering why he tightened it so tight, like he never usually does, and that’s when he swung me and kept trying to slam me.” Browder says that, when a captain arrived, the guard explained that Browder had tried to run. “I was on the floor going crazy: ‘He’s lying! I didn’t do nothing!’ ”

Browder said that he was punished for this incident with extra days in solitary confinement. Usually, an inmate is taken to an administrative hearing before he is given extra time in solitary. “If I would’ve went to Bing court,” he said, “I would’ve told them to look at the camera, and they would’ve seen I didn’t do anything. After that happened, to be honest, I was scared to come out of my cell to get in the shower again, because I felt, if I come out of my cell and he slams me again, then I’m going to get more box days.”

A Department of Correction “injury to inmate” report says that Browder was “involved in a use of force” with “D.O.C. staff” that day, and that he suffered a facial contusion. A report from Browder’s subsequent visit to a medical clinic gives two explanations for the contusion: one is an “alleged attack by staff” and the other is “hitting his face into the shower wall,” which Browder says did not happen. When told that a guard had slammed Browder to the floor, a D.O.C. spokesperson sent a written statement: “DOC takes such allegations seriously, and we are looking into this claim, which occurred prior to Commissioner [Joseph] Ponte’s arrival at the department.”

October 20, 2010: At the jail for teen-age boys

Last year, the office of Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, released a report denouncing the horrific conditions in the adolescent jail on Rikers, describing it as a place that “seems more inspired by Lord of the Flies than any legitimate philosophy of humane detention.” Browder experienced this firsthand during the many months he was held there.

In the fall of 2010, Browder, who was seventeen years old at the time, found himself assigned to a housing unit that was ruled by a gang. He was not a member of the gang, and on October 20, 2010, he recalls, a gang leader spit in his face. He decided that he needed to retaliate. If he had not, he said, it would have “meant they could keep spitting in my face. I wasn’t going to have that.”

That night, at 10:55 P.M., shortly before the guards were about to lock the inmates in their cells, Browder punched the teen-ager who had spit at him. Four surveillance cameras recorded this incident and its aftermath: a drawn-out beatdown of Browder by about ten other teen-age inmates. The Department of Correction’s official paperwork characterizes this incident as “a multiple inmate fight.”

by Amadou Diallo

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series on prison profiteering schemes that provide inmate services at a high cost to a population that is disproportionately poor. Part one looks at money-transfer fees and the growing popularity of jail and prison-issued “release cards.”

The phone call Grace Bauer received from her son Corey, an inmate in Maryland’s Roxbury state prison, was one of desperation. An incident with other inmates the previous day made him fear that his life was in danger. “I had to call the prison and ask for help,” she recalled. Because her communication with Corey is limited to scheduled phone calls, Bauer could do nothing but wait anxiously to find out if her son was OK. “I went 24 hours without knowing if the prison took steps to keep him safe,” she said.

Even in the age of Facebook and Snapchat, most prisons and jails still rely on the telephone as the primary method of contact between inmates and their families. That’s begun to change, however, with a growing number of facilities adopting more immediate means of communication such as email from handheld devices, providing a way for inmates to stay in touch more regularly with family members. It’s a shift that Bauer, a longtime advocate for juvenile justice reform, welcomes. “If [Corey] had access to email I may have known right away that he had been moved to protective custody rather than having to go to bed worried to death,” she said.

For Chris Grewe, CEO of APDS (America Prison Data Systems), which provides prison-specific tablet computers to correctional facilities, email is just the tip of iceberg when it comes to bringing technology to those who are incarcerated. “We’re looking to provide education, rehabilitation and vocational training,” he said. “We’ve got Khan Academy [lectures] and other kinds of really robust educational materials. We replace recreational reading libraries, which are typically just a handful of donated books, with access to tens of thousands of titles in multiple languages.”

Proponents of email and mobile devices in correctional facilities believe this kind of technology has the potential, if deployed wisely, to drive down recidivism rates. A 2013 study by the RAND Corporation found that inmates who participated in educational programming were 43% less likely to return to prison than those who did not. A 2012 report by the Vera Institute of Justice reinforced previous research by detailing how regular contact with family members can reduce the risk of inmates becoming re-incarcerated once they’re released.

Bauer sees these and other benefits in her work as head of Justice for Families, an advocacy group for families with an incarcerated loved one. While it pains her that families have to pay for email services, she said “those that have access to it have been really happy with it.” Speaking of a mother who’s able to send pictures to her son, Bauer said the woman felt more strongly “like her son was still a part of the family.”

“We have this incredible opportunity,” said Brian Hill, co-founder of Jail Education Solutions, another provider of tablet-based educational software. Referring to the lack of meaningful resources currently available to inmates, he noted, “[They] are a captive audience with all the time in the world and right now we’re just showing them daytime television. Our focus is how do we take the technology that’s coming into this space and use it to make significant changes in people’s lives.”

“We have a disproportionately poor population in America’s jails. So now I’m going to tie their ability to learn and be educated to whether or not they have money to pay for it? That seems disingenuous.”

Robert L. Green

Montgomery Co. Dept. of Correction

Stronger family ties, educational opportunities and reductions in recidivism all go hand in hand with managing daily operations inside a county jail, said Robert L. Green, acting director of the Montgomery County Dept. of Correction and Rehabilitation. He’s begun a tablet program in his facility using hardware and software purchased from APDS. “If inmates are in their housing area doing something productive with their life,” he said, “something that interests them, there’s going to be less violence, I assure you.”

For those who see buying tablets for inmates as a luxury expense Green points to the educational resources they provide. “One teacher coming into a jail costs $50,000-$60,000 in salary and benefits,” he said. “If you can buy 15-20 tablets for $30,000 and circulate them among a large number of inmates, you tell me where the value is.”

As a 31-year corrections department veteran, Green is also quick to point out the cost of not educating inmates. “In local jails 94% of all of the people we touch are going back into our communities. How do you want them back? The value to society of extending the educational experience in every element that we can is huge,” he said.

Companies like those run by Grewe and Hill, with their exclusive focus on education and rehabilitation, are relying on economies of scale and the power of disruption to make a profit while bringing down the cost of technology and communication services. At scale, tablets can be provided at very low cost to facilities. Inmates pay no fees for the content. And there’s no technical barrier to someday replacing expensive telephone calls with much cheaper tablet-based broadband phone service.

These goals run counter to the fee-based approach of the major players in the field such as JPay, Keefe Group, GTL and ATG. JPay has been a pioneer in the field, providing email service since 2006 and handheld devices since 2010 with more than 50,000 tablets in circulation across 11 states, according to a company spokesperson. This is in addition to its longer-standing and lucrative inmate money transfer business which in 2013 — fueled by high fees charged to family members — brought in $50 million in revenue, the Center for Public Integrity reported. The company recently announced it will become a subsidiary of Securus Technologies, one of the nation’s largest prison telephone vendors.

A review of vendor contracts and customer pricing across several states shows a continuation of this high-margin business model both by JPay and its competitors as they’ve expanded into software and hardware services.

Families of inmates in state and local facilities are being charged between $.25 and $.50 to send an email. Attaching a photo to the email typically doubles that cost. Inmates must also pay to send emails, with additional fees if they want a printout of an email or photo they’ve received. MP3 players and tablets are sold at prices ranging from $40 for a small capacity music player to $200 for a tablet that is several generations behind comparable consumer models. MP3 downloads are sold for almost $2 per song. “The prices are ridiculous compared to what you would pay on the street,” said Adryann Glenn, a former inmate who now mentors those returning home from prison.

A contributing factor to these high prices is that vendors pay a cut of the revenue generated by the email fees, handheld device sales and media downloads back to the state DOC or jail agency. These “commissions,” essentially legalized kickbacks, can be as high as $.05 per email and $12 per tablet. In other cases vendors simply pay a fixed percentage of the total fees they collect each quarter. These financial incentives have obvious appeal to corrections agencies faced with growing inmate populations and dwindling resources. “We deliver on our promise to increase your revenue by providing inmates’ families and friends with flexible payment options,” assures a pitch on one company’s site.

The problem, critics say, is that this revenue is being made off of those who can least afford it.

“I think we charge inmates enough already for stuff inside jails,” said Green. “We have a disproportionately poor population in America’s jails. So now I’m going to tie their ability to learn and be educated to whether or not they have money to pay for it? That seems disingenuous.”

“At the end of the day it’s not the inmate paying the cost, it’s the inmate’s family,” he added.

Grewe agrees. “It’s inherently unfair to charge an 83-year-old grandmother in Brooklyn to talk to her grandson,” he said. “We should be paying her … because the more often she stays in touch with him the less likely he is to screw up when we let him out.”

by Amadou Diallo

Unlike consumer debit cards, prison-issued cards are unregulated and subject to exorbitant fees.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series on prison profiteering schemes that provide inmate services at a high cost to a population that is disproportionately poor.

In 2013 Gregg Cavaluzzi walked out of federal prison with nothing more than the clothes he wore going in five years earlier and a Chase-branded debit card holding what remained of money sent by family members and the meager pay he’d earned working in the prison library.

“They simply gave me the debit card and said ‘Your money’s on it,’” he recalled.

But when he used the card to pay for a celebratory meal at Wendy’s, Cavaluzzi noticed that his balance was lower than he expected. “I called Chase and they said there’s an administrative fee and a fee every time you use it at an ATM,” he said. As Cavaluzzi would soon discover, those were just two of several fees attached to his card. “There were fees for transferring the money to a bank and closing the account. There was even an inactivity fee if you didn’t use the card for 90 days. I left prison with $120. Because of the fees I was only able to use about $70 of it.”

Correctional facilities across the country are increasingly sending former inmates home with their funds returned on pre-paid debit cards, known in the industry as release cards. In addition to adoption by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 17 state prison agencies reported using them in a 2014 survey commissioned by the New Jersey Department of Corrections. Prison reform advocates such as Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative say that their use is even more widespread among the nation’s nearly 3,300 jails. With almost 12 million people admitted to county and city jails each year, these local facilities provide a steady source of cardholders subject to high fees. “The money is in the recidivism not rehabilitation,” said Cavaluzzi.

The use of these cards is expanding into jobs programs for current inmates. In 2014 the Alabama DOC began using debit cards with high ATM fees to pay inmates at a small number of its work-release facilities and plans to roll out the program statewide by July.

Unlike consumer debit cards, prison-issued cards are completely unregulated when it comes to the fees that can be charged. The result is high transaction and maintenance fees that bear little relation to the actual costs of the services provided.

Banking giant JPMorgan Chase is the exclusive release-card vendor in federal prisons. At state and local facilities these cards are provided by a handful of smaller vendors such as JPay, Keefe Group, Numi Financial and Rapid Financial Solutions. A review of bids and contracts in several states and counties found ATM withdrawal fees of nearly $3 per transaction. A simple balance inquiry typically incurs a charge of $1.50. Account maintenance fees, deducted even if no transactions are made, can be as much as $2.50 per week. Cardholders who opt to transfer their balances to a bank account can be charged closing fees of $30. These cards are designed to generate income for the private vendors that furnish them.

That income is crucial because it allows vendors to offer the debit card service at no charge to correctional facilities while eliminating those facilities’ cash management expenses. The cost of issuing and managing the cards is paid for solely by the exorbitant fees former inmates must pay, fees that quickly deplete their already meager balances.

‘I left prison with $120. Because of the fees I was only able to use about $70 of it.’
Gregg Cavaluzzi
formerly incarcerated
JPay, a Florida-based pioneer of financial services for inmates, currently has release card contracts with 15 state corrections agencies, according to a company spokesperson. The company recently announced it will become a subsidiary of Securus Technologies, one of the nation’s largest prison telephone vendors. Despite the high charges, JPay CEO Ryan Shapiro has asserted that release cards are actually not very profitable because the user fees go mostly to middlemen. “[The cards are] not really a revenue-generating or a money-making business for us,” he told the Center for Public Integrity last year.

Offering release cards as part of a full-service portfolio, however, helps JPay win and maintain contracts for its lucrative money transfer business. In a 2013 bid proposal the company claimed to operate money transfers for 25 state DOC agencies and 60 county jails, serving a combined population of more than 1.4 million inmates. These contracts brought JPay $50 million in revenue, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

That revenue comes exclusively from the fees charged to family members who are being forced to use electronic money transfers when sending funds to loved ones who are incarcerated. Rates vary with the amount sent but a review of fee schedules in multiple states found charges of more than 30 percent on small transfers.

These fees are an additional hardship on families and loved ones, many of whom struggle just to make ends meet. Julie Donald sends money regularly to a close friend in Arizona’s Eyman state prison. The amount she can afford to send varies. “Lately because I’ve been hurting on money I’ve been sending him only $25,” she said. “And it’s been a $5 fee just to do that. I don’t have a lot of money. If you keep adding [the fees] up it’s a lot.” Asked how she manages to send money on a tight budget, Donald replied, “I just don’t pay some bills.”

Dottie Smith’s sister has been in Arizona’s Perryville prison for 15 years. “We just sent her money today,” she said. “We sent $45 and they charged us $6.45. My mom and I do a ton of these money transfers. We alternate and send her money every other week. My mom works an extra job just so she can have money to send.”

On top of the money transfer fees Dottie and her mother are charged, she says the DOC automatically deducts a 1 percent fee from her sister’s inmate fund for every deposit, a deduction she says was never disclosed to the family. “We wouldn’t have known about this fee unless she told us,” Smith said.

A spokesperson for the Arizona DOC confirmed the account deductions via an email, stating the money goes into a building-renewal fund for repairs and routine maintenance throughout all DOC facilities, as does a $25 background check fee that’s been charged to first-time visitors of inmates since 2011. “Prison is a racket,” Delonda McInelly, a former Perryville inmate said bluntly. “It really is a profitable business. The families are being treated like criminals and it’s not fair.”

Money orders have been eliminated altogether as an option for sending funds at some facilities. At those that still allow the service, family members and former inmates say money orders must now be mailed to the vendors, not the facilities where the inmates are held.

Rosemary Collins has a son in Alabama’s St. Clair state prison. The money transfer vendor Keefe Group is based in St. Louis. “For a money order I have to mail it to Missouri,” she said. “I’m in Alabama. It takes about two weeks for it to get to my son’s account. That’s the slow boat to China.”

Adryann Glenn saw JPay’s services arrive in the Virginia DOC just two months before he was released from state prison. “People used to send a money order directly to the institution and it took 2-3 days to get into your account. After JPay [started] it took 7-14 days before the money got credited,” he said. The reason was obvious to Glenn: “JPay doesn’t really want your money order. They want you to use the money transfer.”

The vendors aren’t the only ones making a profit from these fees. It’s common practice for these companies to send a cut of the collected fees directly to the prison agencies and jails. These “commissions,” essentially legalized kickbacks, make money transfers and other fee-generating services a reliable profit engine for the corrections agencies themselves.

“These companies compete not by offering the best product to the people who use them,” said Carl Takei of the ACLU, “but by offering the biggest commission to [the agencies] that sign the contracts.”

Under JPay’s contract with the Florida DOC the agency receives a fixed commission of $2.50 for every money transfer. JPay’s agreement with the Indiana DOC actually stipulates a minimum of $100,000 in guaranteed annual commission payments to the prison agency. This is essentially found money for corrections departments that are often faced with staffing shortages and budget cuts in a country with the world’s highest incarceration rate. “But,” notes Takei, “if we’re incarcerating so many people that the prisons … are unable to finance that incarceration without funding it on the backs of prisoners’ families then there’s something wrong with the system.”

Spencer S. Hsu, of the Washington Post:

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

Click here for complete story.

Barring ex-felons from employment affronts their civil rights, the Sentencing Project’s Nicole Porter tells Salon

Apple likes to present itself as on the cutting edge of not only business and technology but culture, too. Which is one of the reasons why there was more shock and outrage than usual when people found out that one of the rules the company had made for construction workers building their new corporate campus was ineligibility for anyone who’d been convicted of a felony within the previous seven years. With criminal justice reform becoming an increasingly large focus of American politics — especially among the progressive, cosmopolitan and young people who are seen as the archetypal Apple users — the rule felt not only unnecessarily cruel, but also retrograde.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Nicole Porter, the director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, about Apple’s now-reversed policy and others like it. Our conversation can be found below, and has been edited for clarity and length.

When you see stories like the recent one involving Apple and construction workers — stories about people who’ve been convicted being barred from employment or other services — what does it bring to mind most immediately? 

My sense is that things are complicated in terms of the causes that lead to policies and practices from employers and other officials trying to limit or control access to certain efforts, in this case employment. Specifically with regards to employment, there are too many people competing for jobs and there aren’t enough jobs available to the large number of people seeking employment. My sense that the underlying problems driving that over time is that people posting job openings and managing the number of applicants are trying to limit the applicants they receive. One way to do that, given the stigma associated with prior convictions, is to have automatic bans or exclusions for people with prior felony convictions. That’s one problem driving this issue.

In addition to that, there’s obviously the problem of mass incarceration — not just people who are incarcerated but the large number of people who have been subjected to criminal justice enforcement and who have obtained criminal records. Given the change in criminalization policies over the last 30 to 40 years, criminal records can marginalize and isolate people from job opportunities and other areas of civic life automatically, without any regards to the individual’s circumstances that may have brought them into contact with the criminal justice system to begin with. Because of these automatic bans in employment and in other areas of civic life — housing bans in the private and public markets, public benefit bans federally and in states — the large number of people brought under criminal justice supervision can be automatically excluded without any individualized conversation.

Is there a way of knowing how common these sorts of up-front denials are?

I think, anecdotally, there are many reports of people being excluded automatically from employment opportunities and there has been a lot of activism trying to address that as a social policy problem over the years. I don’t know that I can tell you how widespread it is, but I know that in response to the problem there has been an animation of activism and quite a bit of a grass-roots conversation about employment opportunities for people with prior felony convictions and the fact that many individuals with prior criminal justice contact are automatically excluded from employment options. The widely-known activism is under the campaign Ban the Box, which has been initiated in several states and a number of states have adopted policies eliminating questions of prior criminal justice involvement on state employment applications.

I think that recognizing that people are more than the worst thing they ever did and that employment is a way to prevent people from returning to criminal offending and recognizing that people can move on from their prior criminal history, that sort of fits into an overall American cultural perspective that people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and be self-reliant and, at the very least, have employment so that they can support themselves and their families. It’s a reform effort that appeals across ideological lines, so many of the campaigns are supported by progressives and people with prior felony convictions who approach it from a civil rights perspective, but then you also have conservatives who are supportive of these policies because they fit into an idea about self-reliance and self-supporting.

In regards to employment, while we don’t know exactly how widespread the bans are, clearly there is significant anecdotal evidence to suggest that people self-select out of seeking employment in the public and also in the private employment sphere because of applications that ask for prior criminal history. It’s not even if you’ve been convicted or incarcerated; sometimes applications include questions about arrest for any prior contact, so activism has worked to address that in particular and there has been some success.

Do we know for sure that people who can’t get a foothold in the labor market fall back into the criminal justice system? It makes intuitive sense; but do we know for sure?

The best study to know the number of people impacted comes out of the University of Minnesota by a professor named Christopher Uggen, and his number is that there are 19 million people living in this country with a prior conviction. That includes people who are incarcerated but also people living in the community either under supervision or who have completed their sentence. You also have a number put out by the National Employment Law Project who estimate the number of people with a criminal record, which is obviously larger than the number of people with an actual conviction. They estimate that there are 65 million people in the country living with a criminal record and that those people experience marginalization when they seek employment.

Now, there have been studies to show that recidivism is higher for people without employment and other social supports after they have spent time in prison. The best studies that are out there on this are from the Urban Institute, which … found that recidivism rates were lower for people who had employment who had housing, and who were able to maintain familial ties post-incarceration. If folks reentering the community have employment and housing and all the things a person needs in order to be functional and to support themselves, they’re less likely to return to prison, and that research certainly drives policy and frames approaches for advocates and practitioners to think about the social supports needed to provide guidance in terms of how funding should be prioritized to reduce returns to prison.

Why should we see this as a civil rights issue rather than a labor or employment issue?

I think that for people who experience the marginalization and the stigmatization of having a prior record, they express that their civil rights have been violated and compromised. In addition to employment, there are other civil sanctions.

That part of the conversation fits into the overall narrative around criminal justice policy and the enforcement of policy in certain neighborhoods over others and how criminal justice enforcement, particularly under the War on Drugs and other policies that exacerbate racial disparity, sort of align, if not intersect, with historical conversations around civil rights and structural issues that contribute to racial inequality for certain communities — particularly the African American and Latino communities. There are severe racial disparities in the criminal justice system and those disparities bear out throughout the system from arrest to sentencing to post-incarceration experiences, particularly with regard to collateral consequences, in employment and in other areas too.

Is this a problem that’ll be solved more through policy changes? Or will a change in the culture be the more important change? 

I think it’s both/and, not either/or. It’s recognizing that there are deep structural issues that we need to address and then trying to identify incremental changes that can move the conversation forward and help change people’s lives in the meantime. I think what gets lost in policy conversations, particularly when you’re addressing social issues like deep inequality and mass incarceration, is that behind each statistic is a person. Sure, the culture needs to change, but laws need to change too.

I think that’s one of the guiding principles for the Ban the Box legislation that’s been successful in some states and helped to animate grassroots conversations in others. Removing the box from applications creates a conversation with officials and also business employers about the best way to address hiring practices given the large number of people living in the country criminal records and prior felony convictions. It also, hopefully, leads people to initiate and organize grassroots campaigns to address the underlying structural problems that lead employers to want to limit the number of applicants they get in the first place.

To deal with that, there are conversations that need to happen not just with people working on this issue but also social scientists, labor organizers, people in the business community, to address the scale of unemployment in this country.

We talk a lot more about criminal justice reform than we used to. But sometimes we forget that a change in the conversation is just the first step. Do you feel the shift in how much the chattering class talks about criminal justice reform has impacted conditions on the ground? Or not yet?

I think it’s complicated. Obviously, the chattering class and the media can help contribute to a narrative that filters up to lawmakers and people who have a role in making policy and changing policy, and that can help contribute to a space for reform around mass incarceration and around the consequences of mass incarceration. And yet, what we are reminded of everyday because of the research we do and the numbers we look at is that the United States still has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Our culture of incarceration is significantly different than it is in other Western societies, and so the fact that even post-sentence people with prior convictions are marginalized from employment opportunities is significant and reinforces the idea that underlying structural issues that need to be addressed. It’s great that the chattering class is talking about mass incarceration more, and we’re cautiously optimistic that that will contribute to shifting dynamics that will allow lawmakers to feel comfortable in changing policy and understanding the harm done by the laws and practices that have contributed to mass incarceration over the last 30 to 40 years.

I also think it continues to challenge all of us; there’s a lot more work to do and we need to continue to push to change the culture and the consciousness around what is appropriate in terms of public safety in this country.

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith.