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Lawful re-entry: in Brooklyn, a novel program is reducing recidivism and finding ex-offenders decent jobs. The real surprise is who''s running it: a social worker hired by the district attorney''s office.

Article Excerpt
ON AN AVERAGE DAY IN 2000, MORE THAN 10 PERCENT of all black American men in their 20s were either in prison or in jail. Most of them had very little schooling. About one in three black male high-school dropouts were behind bars. A black man reaching his early 30s was nearly twice as likely to have a prison record than to hold a bachelor's degree. And young black men with no college education were more than twice as likely to have been to prison than to have served in the military.

The ubiquity of incarceration among young black men, which I studied with sociologist Becky Pettit, is striking. Today, incredibly, around 60 percent of black male high school dropouts now in their mid 30s have prison records. Prison time averages 28 months, so for black men with low levels of education, imprisonment for two years or more has indeed become commonplace. One longtime advocate of prisoners' rights, Angela Davis, observed at a forum in New Orleans earlier this year, "In the black community, almost everybody has a connection with prisoners in one way or another. It's been a theme of out lives."

Few other events separate the lives of blacks and whites like incarceration. Black men are seven to eight times more likely to go to prison or jail than white men. (Because 93 percent of all prison and jail inmates are men, the penal system has a more direct effect on their life chances than women's.) This large racial disparity far exceeds modest black-white differences in marriage rates, schooling and employment. Given these facts, the prison boom is perhaps the most important development in American race relations in the last three decades.

The penal system casts a long shadow over poor and minority communities, in part because incarceration affects ex-inmates well after they are released. Research shows that spending time in prison reduces the wages of ex-inmates by 10 percent to 15 percent. The reasons are myriad. Men coming out of prison typically find only temporary or casual jobs that offer few opportunities for promotion or building skills. They may be lured away from honest jobs by the promise of easy cash from selling drugs or committing other crimes. Ex-inmates also talk about the...