Three days before Thanksgiving, and while most families are rearranging their households to make room for guest and family members during the holiday season, the Robinson’s will be setting one less plate at the dinner table. Last year, Charlie Robinson III was sentenced to Trenton State Correctional Facility for four years for attempted arm robbery. This will be the first holiday season spent without him.

Barriers Facing Parents With Criminal Records

While serving time in prison, family and friends will have to play a major role in the life of his seven-year old daughter. Having a parent incarcerated can have a devastating and lasting effect on the child as well as the parent-child relationship. Many parents who are sent to prison, whether short term or for a long period, will face the danger of losing his or her children forever. Some will even lose their parental rights before their release. To protect their parental rights, incarcerated parents must work consistently, and against difficult barriers, both while in prison and afterwards.

The possibility of losing a child is just one of the many barriers facing parents with criminal records. If a parent who has been incarcerated works successfully with the criminal justice system in protecting his or her parental rights, the next obstacle is how to provide for this child. Just like any other parent, parents with a criminal record, need jobs to support their families and to reintegrate into society. However, ex-offenders’ criminal records typically create an employment barrier for the rest of their lives.

Discrimination

Criminal records result in legal prohibitions against employment in certain areas of work. Some states may even establish a lifetime bar on employment, whereas, others may restrict employment for a limited number of years. Even in professions in which criminal records are not the subjects of regulation, ex-offenders are still discriminated against by employers. Employers can easily obtain criminal records on job applicants, and ex-offenders have great difficulty finding work, even many years after completing their sentences. Research commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, and carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions, and carried out by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), finds that employers tend to reject people with a criminal record for the following reasons:

People with a criminal record are seen, generally as “undesirable,” outside the employers’ experience and alien; To show moral disapproval; Concern that they (the recruiter) would be held responsible for recruiting a person with a criminal record who then offended at work. This consequent widespread and indiscriminate rejection is likely to result in the rejection of people with criminal records who would be a risk and so, probably reduces the likelihood of crime at work. This may be true, however, it will also result in the rejection of applicants who pose little or no risk of offending at work, reducing the pool of applicants from which employers may choose and raising unemployment amongst people with a criminal record.

Trends in Incarceration

Charlie Robinson III, a 30-year old black male, represents the many young black males who have been or are incarcerated that will face these barriers, this is not an isolated event. Over the past three decades, the number of prison inmates in the United States has increased by more than 600%, leaving it the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. During this time, incarceration has changed from a punishment reserved primarily for the most heinous offenders to one extended to a much greater range of crimes and a much larger segment of the population. Recent trends in crime policy have led to the imposition of harsher sentences for a wider range of offenses, thus casting an ever-widening net of penal intervention.

While the recent “tough on crime” policies may be effective in getting criminals off the streets, little provision has been made for when they get back out. Of the nearly 2 million individuals currently incarcerated, roughly 95% will be released, with more than half a million being released each year. According to one estimate, there are currently over 12 million ex-felons in the United States, representing roughly 8% of the working-age population. Of those recently released, nearly two-thirds will be charged with new crimes and over 40% will return to prison within three years.

1(Bureau of Justice Statistics 2000).

Effects on the Black Community

The expansion of the prison population has been particularly consequential for blacks. The incarceration rate for young black men in the year 2000 was nearly 10% compared to just over 1% for white men in the same age group. Young black men today have a 28% likelihood of incarceration during their lifetime a figure that rises above 50% among young black high school dropouts. These vast numbers of inmates translate into a large and increasing population of black ex-offenders returning to communities and searching for work.

The barriers these men face in reaching economic self-sufficiency are compounded by the stigma of minority status and criminal record. The consequences of such trends for widening racial disparities are potentially profound.

Research on racial criminal record stereotypes tells us that Americans hold strong and persistent negative stereotypes about blacks, with one of the most readily invoked contemporary stereotypes relating to perceptions of violent and criminal disposition. With this perception, employers view all blacks as potential criminals, actual confirmation of criminal involvement then will provide only redundant information, while evidence against it will be discounted.

In this case, the outcomes for all blacks should be worse, with less differentiation between those with criminal records and those without. On the other hand, the effect of a criminal record may be worse for blacks if employers, already wary of black applicants are most hesitant when it comes to taking risk on blacks with proven criminal history.

As a result, African-Americans continue to suffer from lower rates of employment relative to whites.

Why should you employ former convicts?

Contrary to popular belief, employing former prisoners has as many benefits for organizations and society as it does for the individual. A report released by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), Employers and Offenders, called on businesses to take a closer look at the advantages of employing former prisoners. Not only do they represent a valuable talent pool, says the report, but gaining stable work is also the most important factor in preventing ex-offenders from re-offending, a problem that currently costs the state $11 billion a year.

“Employment has a major part to play in reducing re-offending,” says CIPD diversity adviser Dianah Worman. “Both the ex-offender and society are losing out because of current attitudes.”

Ignoring people with criminal convictions is now a luxury many companies cannot afford. According to CIPD, 20% of the UK’s working population is listed on the Home Office Offenders Index at a time when 85% of employers report difficulties in recruiting people with certain skills and experience. The message is clear, with the right training and a more proactive stance from employers, ex-offenders can play an active role in the workforce.

Employment solution specialist, Phil Letts, believes ex-offenders tend to be model employees, as they are so keen to repay the faith an employer has shown them. Lett works for New Life, a recruitment agency specializing in helping ex-offenders get back to work. He understands that many employers will have reservations about taking on someone with a criminal record, but says a knee-jerk refusal to even consider an ex-offender is nothing short of ill-informed prejudice.

“Most criminal records come from a bit of pushing and shoving outside a pub when people were young. HR professionals are very unlikely to find themselves sitting opposite an ex-murderer,” he says. Lett points to further CIPD research that shows only 6% of employers have reported problems after employing an ex-offender.

Policy Recommendations

With all the barriers one with a criminal record will face, the question is how to address these obstacles. The most important ways to tackle this problem would be to:

Improve skills and qualifications;Tackle non-employment problems, such as housing and drug abuse; Reduce employer discrimination. Recent research in Britain suggest that offenders and ex-offenders, particularly ex-prisoners, need general rather than job specific skills. This is both because offenders and ex-offenders are more likely to be deficient in basic skills, but also because of a demand for the basic skills such as literacy, reliability and good motivation.

Parents returning to the community after being incarcerated will be unable to regain custody of their children if they cannot find appropriate housing. The lack of stable housing makes it that much more difficult for parents to gain employment. Yet many parents with a criminal record are unable to rent an apartment , or are even faced with being evicted, often without consideration of mitigating circumstances.

Public Housing Authorities should be required to evaluate evictions and admissions on a case-by-case basis, to look to mitigating circumstances, and to fully weigh the consequences of a loss of subsidized housing for the family. The Public Housing Authority should also implement the “best interest of the child,” standard when determining whether to grant admission to an ex-offender or to evict families based on previous criminal activity.

Treating Substance Abuse and Mental Health Problems:

Most people (70-80%) coming home from prison or jail have histories of drug or alcohol dependence. It is estimated that as many as 84% were under the influence of drugs/alcohol at the time of the offense. As well, an increasing number of offenders have mental health problems. There should be a smoother transition from prison to reentry, where these individuals spend the second part of their prison term in rehabilitation centers, instead of being thrown back into society. Without treatment, relapse is likely.

Two main approaches may be taken to reduce employer discrimination: improving employers’ practices so that criminal record is only taken into account in relation to job performance; and reducing employers’ ability to discriminate.

Reducing discrimination: Improving employers’ practices

The aim would be to increase the extent to which employers consider criminal record in relation to ability to do the job, the risk of re-offending at work and its consequences only. The following would be helpful for this:

Increased knowledge about the prevalence of offending and of convictions; Increased knowledge about the nature of offences and patterns of offending, so that employers do not over react to certain offences and individuals; and Information on risks of re-offending. However, the extent to which these changes in employers’ attitudes and behavior could be engineered is likely to be small. Criminal record is not an important aspect of selection for many jobs and extending equality of opportunity to people with a criminal record is not high on employers’ agenda. It is unlikely that many employers would invest adequate time and energy to change their behavior. Moreover, without this investment, the more that employers are made aware of criminal record, the more likely they seem to be to discriminate. Indeed, the introduction of Equal Opportunities Policies relating to offenders does not appear to be helpful, perhaps because such policies make recruiters more aware of offending.

Reducing discrimination: Reducing the ability to discriminate

The other approach is to reduce the ability to discriminate, by reducing access to criminal record information. The following would be helpful:Revision of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act to reduce rehabilitation periods; and Increased information on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act for people with criminal records to ensure awareness of the implications of the Act for their own record.

In revising the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, the criteria for revised rehabilitation periods should be a consideration of the likelihood of re-offending at work, which might result in some offences being immediately spent. The escalation in rehabilitation periods since the Act should be taken into consideration. Consideration might be given to whether sentence (or sentence alone) is the appropriate basis for the rehabilitation period.

Conclusion

As discussed throughout this paper, there are many barriers to be faced after being incarcerated, in particularly in the black community. Many of these obstacles are the result of policies intended to reduce crime and enhance community security. Yet, in part, they have done nothing more than perpetuate the vicious cycle of the decline of the black community.

Although these recommendations may seem practical, the act of fulfilling them is the real test. In the case of Charlie Robinson III, his parents’ are not leaving it up to the criminal justice system to dictate his future. They have recently opened up a clothing store and put it in his name. The thought behind this was to secure employment for their son, since they know his criminal record will only add to employment discrimination he will face upon leaving prison. And this is just a demonstration of what is lacking from the black community as a whole, unity and self-empowerment.

“This year, some 600,000 inmates will be released from prison back into society. We know from long experience that if they can’t find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit crime and return to prison….America is the land of second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.”

- President George W. Bush

January 2004, State of the Union