Hard time can mean good jobs for inmates.

• Position: Industry Trend or Event

Considering North Carolina's 4% unemployment rate and the number of prison inmates released each year-- 23,088 in 2000, two-thirds of whom are black -- James Johnson says black ex-cons represent an untapped labor resource. Johnson. a management professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School, oversaw a national survey of 4,000 employers' hiring practices. Director of the Urban investment Strategies Center at the Kenan institute of Private Enterprise, he also teaches inmates.

BNC: Why is the black male inmate of particular interest in the labor market?

Johnson: Most are prime working age, and many are incarcerated for petty drug offenses. But under determinant-sentencing programs, they've also been incarcerated for a long time -- a decade usually -- so they don't have skills to compete in the new economy. We're going to be releasing 865,000 inmates a year nationwide by 2005. The majority doesn't take advantage of training, so they're coming out with few, if any, skills.

Those that take advantage -- what kind of training are they getting?

Everything from construction and brick masonry to computers is offered. These guys are getting GEDs and college degrees and education in between, but you have to earn access to many of the programs. In the course I'm teaching now, the median age is probably 28 or 29, and 15% to 25% have had some training while incarcerated.

But didn't many of these people get in trouble because they weren't interested in education to start with -- dropouts?

That's partially true, but when you look at those in for petty drug offenses, they span the educational spectrum. Those dealing drugs were most likely unattached or only weakly anchored to the labor market. A substantial percentage of young African-American men in the 1980s in inner-city communities where there was a 50% jobless rate couldn't get a hold in the labor market. We've had a couple of guys in class with two or three years of college. Some were even working their way through college that way.

So you're saying that inmates are good trainable labor?

They are. If you're selling drugs, you're an entrepreneur. You've got skills -- you're resourceful, adaptable. Our training program tries to provide a road map for them in terms of intangibles. The 4,000 employers we interviewed said they look for hard skills and factors such as years of school, standardized test scores and experience. But increasingly in the information and...