The reforms the White House announced on Monday – meant to help certain formerly incarcerated citizens convicted of felonies find jobs after they have completed their sentences – range from the helpful to the useless to the distracting.
The most hyped among them, Barack Obama’s planned executive order to “ban the box”, is a feel-good half measure which likely will accomplish little. Following the lead of various states and companies, the proposal will forbid the federal government from asking those convicted of nonviolent felonies to check a box on their job application disclosing their sentence. It will, instead, “delay inquiries into criminal history until later in the hiring process”.
Obama has said that if employers have “a chance to at least meet you” and can hear about “your life, what you’ve done, maybe they give you a chance”. To think that this delay is likely to actually help Americans leaving prison – particularly black Americans – find gainful employment is silly, bordering on delusional. And it reflects small thinking at a time when radical approaches are needed to deal with the crisis of mass incarceration.
There are more than 2 million people behind bars in the US right now. When California, the nation’s biggest state, is just one of 11 states to spend more on prison than on college, we have a big problem. The problem is even bigger when one in nine black children has had a parent in prison.
And while we have to start reforms somewhere, “ban the box” is too small a step.
For one, it doesn’t go far enough: employers should ignore a criminal background completely, not just in the initial application process. Is it too radical of an idea to say, hey, once someone has served their time and finished their sentence, their debt to society has been paid and it shouldn’t haunt them anymore?
Also, this failure to do away with disclosure completely will have racist effects. As MSNBC’s Ari Melber points out: “Research shows the existence of a criminal record can reduce an employer’s interest in applicant by about 50%,” but “that when white and black applicants both have records, employers are far less likely to call back a black applicant than a white one”. Given how disproportionately black the US prison population is, and how black unemployment is consistently twice that of white unemployment for a variety of unfair reasons, “ban the box” will be more likely to discriminate against them, yet again, than to offer any relief to those most likely to be incarcerated.
At the same time, “ban the box” doesn’t work in the other direction either, for those who want to break the stigma of incarceration. The formerly incarcerated shouldn’t have to make invisible a part of their life once they’ve done their time to have access to employment. Having to do so is not unlike being asked to hide one’s religion for the right to work – it’s insulting to tell them to be in the closet about their conviction; yet that is what “ban the box” demands. It’s also impractical: how is a former inmate supposed to explain a 10-year gap on a resume?
Besides failing both to help break the stigma of serving time and to, well, employ former prisoners, “ban the box” also forestalls more radical questions we could be asking in terms of society’s obligation to citizens once they have paid the debt we have demanded of them.
What about reparations for former prisoners – especially black prisoners, considering how the plantation to prison pipeline is so obvious?
What about affirmative action for the mass incarcerated once they’re released?
What about guaranteed work for those released from prison, especially for those who have earned money for their prison by performing in a dangerous rodeo or “21st century slaves” who have earned tidy profits for corporations by working for mere cents an hour?
The Black Lives Matter movement – and a public consciousness which has been waking up to our mass incarceration epidemic over the past few years, reflected in the popularity of books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow – have pushed politicians running for president on the left and right to embrace “ban the box”. But this just reflects an alliterative catchphrase that’s fun to repeat, not informed endorsement of a reform that will make lasting change. Committed prison reform activists hail ban the box as a good or at worst benign starting point, but politicians can support it as something of an empty endpoint gesture.
There are items in Obama’s proposal which do show promise for prison reform, such as support for job training, a pilot Pell Grant program to fund prison education and, most importantly, “making new Permanent Supportive Housing available for the reentry population.” But we need prison abolition – a feminist approach to greatly reducing or even eliminating the nation’s prison population, as opposed to merely tinkering with or adding services to our carceral state – and delaying the revelation of a conviction is certainly not that.
We need to find concrete ways of guaranteeing housing, healthcare and jobs to those stigmatized after they’ve paid their debt to society – and we need to not lock up so many people (especially black and brown ones) in the first place.
