The Ex-Offenders Job Fair held in Wellston last week and sponsored by many community groups and businesses drew overwhelming numbers of people willing to overcome problems in their past and work toward a more productive future. Every individual and business that participated in this event, including prominent local employers such as Schnuck Markets Inc. and the Savvis Center, deserves to be commended for their efforts and encouraged to continue in their belief that a mistake in someone’s past should not condemn that person’s future.
It is especially crucial to the outlook of the black community that businesses continue in this trend of giving ex-offenders a second chance to prove themselves. This is not merely because African Americans are disproportionately represented in our inmate population, and often discriminated against by the police. It is also because the culture of Black America’s poorest neighborhoods steers many of its brightest youth – and in particular its brightest young men – into lives of street crime.
Street crime is big business in our cities. In certain urban neighborhoods – in St. Louis, they are black neighborhoods – street crime amounts to the biggest and at times nearly the only locally owned and operated business. The young men who advance in these dangerous and damaging lines of business are not, in the main, unintelligent. They may be misguided and short-sighted, but they must be sharp and savvy to succeed as street criminals. Their fleet intelligence, humbled by time behind bars and then directed into the legitimate economy, can lead to productivity and even greatness. The rise of Malcolm Little from cat burglar to the spellbinding orator and motivator of black men that was Malcolm X is only the most famous of many examples of this paradigm.
Back in 1975, the Young Lawyers Association of the St. Louis Bar Association studied the criminal justice system, and in particular the needs of ex-offenders, and found that employed ex-offenders were 66 percent less likely to return to prison. This study led in 1977 to the establishment of Employment Connection, now a United Way agency and a sponsor of last week’s job fair.
The public safety benefits of reducing crime by employing ex-offenders is matched by powerful economic dividends when one recalls that it costs taxpayers approximately $11,000 per year to incarcerate one person. According to the Missouri Department of Corrections, $44 billion was spent on incarceration in the U.S. in 2001. It’s not cheap to keep people in – or return them to – prison.
We all benefit when employees and resource providers target ex-offenders as future employees – even those who style themselves as “tough on crime.” According to the U.S. Probation Office in the Eastern District of Missouri, one of the organizers of the job fair, more than 70 percent of ex-offenders who commit crimes are unemployed or underemployed. If one truly wishes to eradicate crime, rather than people who have committed crimes, then finding meaningful employment for ex-offenders should be very high on any list of priorities.