The New Scarlet Letter? Negotiating the U.S. Labor Market with a Criminal Record.

• Author: Benson, Bruce L.
• Position: Book review

The New Scarlet Letter? Negotiating the U.S. Labor Market with a Criminal Record

By Steven Raphael

Kalamazoo, Mich.: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2014.

Pp. viii, 105. $14.99 paperback.

In The New Scarlett Letter, Steven Raphael points to a very significant and growing problem in the United States: the country's dramatic prison boom over the past three or four decades means that vast and increasing numbers of largely unemployable people are released from prison every year. The numbers he provides to illustrate the magnitude of the problem are startling. Close to 700,000 prisoners were released in 2011, for instance, and roughly 2.3 million more were in prisons and jails at the time, the vast majority of whom have since been or soon will be released and then replaced. Raphael cites a Bureau of Justice Statistics study reporting that 2.6 percent of all adult white males, 7.7 percent of Hispanic adult males, and 16.6 percent of African American adult males had state and/or federal prison records in 2001. In addition, the study predicts that if current trends continue, 5.9 percent of the white males born in 2001 will go to prison during their lifetimes, along with 17.7 percent of Hispanic and 32.2 percent of African American males born that year. Furthermore, drawing from a study using data from 2008 to 2011, Raphael compares the U.S. incarceration rate of 743 people in prisons and jails per 100,000 in population to the rate of 113 per 100,000 for Canada, 200 for Mexico, from 59 in Finland to 159 in Spain for the fifteen original European Union countries, and the median rate of 113 across all countries. The U.S. prison population averaged about 110 per 100,000 between 1925 and 1975 before it began rising, reaching 500 in 2006.

The possibilities for these released prisoners to successfully obtain employment are depressingly low. Laws prohibiting employment of criminals are applicable to many jobs, but, more importantly, employers can be held liable through tort law for their employees' actions, so hiring people with criminal records raises their insurance costs if they can even get insurance (insurance companies often classify employees with criminal records as "nonbondable"). Add the general concerns about employee theft and other crimes committed against the employer and customers, and it is not surprising that a substantial majority of employers will not consider employing someone with a criminal record. Many of the people...