Being convicted of a crime can certainly have lifelong ramifications that don’t necessarily involve life behind bars without parole. It can mean a lifetime of unemployment.
Minneapolis-raised Kissy Mason witnessed this firsthand in her own family. “People in my family were being locked up, and then they were locked out of a right to live, a right to employment,” she told Nur Lalji of Yes! Magazine.
Seventy percent of people released from prison commit another crime within three years, and part of this recidivism rate is due in part to how difficult it is for them to find a job.
Mason was determined to make better choices for herself than those being made by her family members. But in 2006, she was involved in a domestic argument that escalated, leading to a felony conviction. Although she never went to jail — she served probation instead — whenever she filled out an application for employment, she had to check the ubiquitous box indicating that she was a convicted felon. This status also disqualified her for low-income Section 8 housing.
Instead of lamenting the situation, Mason worked to change it. She joined the campaign to “ban the box,” which was started by All of Us or None (a group founded by formerly incarcerated people that had difficulty finding work) in 2003. Since then, 12 states have removed this question from job applications. Employers can still conduct criminal background checks, but by the time they get that far in the hiring process, they’ve usually had a chance to study the applicant’s other qualifications.
Mason’s home state, Minnesota, enacted legislation banning the box in January 2014. Because of the initiative, one of the state’s major corporations, Target, has stopped using the check-off box on job applications not just in its Minnesota stores— but throughout the country.
“Sometimes people bar you from jobs forever because of one incident, and I don’t think that’s fair,” Mason told Lalji. “People should be given another chance. It shouldn’t be one time and you’re out.”
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Tag: long-term unemployment
What Can We Learn From Sweden About Long-Term Unemployment?
From New York to Oregon, politicians and voters have been engaging in discussions about raising the minimum wage as a way to fight the growing inequality in the United States. But policy makers in Sweden have a new idea that they say could be much more effective in putting a dent in income inequality.
The European country went through a financial crisis that left the country with high rates of long-term unemployment — a problem that continues to plague the U.S., too. In the early 2000s, according to CNN Money, the U.S. had a pretty low rate of long-term unemployment. But since the financial crisis, more than 35 percent of unemployed Americans have been unemployed for six months or more. Long-term unemployment is a vicious cycle: Employers are less likely to hire someone who has been out of work for more than six months, making it’s harder and harder for someone who is unemployed to get a job.
To combat long-term unemployment, Sweden tried six social programs and found one that really works. It’s called a wage subsidy program, and it’s pretty straightforward: The government pays part of a worker’s wages, giving companies an incentive to hire workers that were previously unemployed.
In Sweden, the government paid half of a worker’s wages for the first six months of a job. This meant that companies who were hiring unemployed people didn’t have to take on a huge risk — they could get a six month trial period for half the cost.
This idea has actually been batted around in the United States before, as an alternative both to raising the minimum wage and to reforming the earned income tax credit. Politically, however, wage subsidy programs have some obstacles to overcome. Democrats are committed to raising the minimum wage, and this type of program might appear to be a sort of welfare program for the unemployed.
But Sweden is the home of a number of excellent ideas, including IKEA, Absolut Vodka, and Pippi Longstocking. With that kind of track record, maybe the U.S. should give wage subsidy programs a try.