I'm very heartened by the quantity--and quality of responses addressing the original post. When I launched my new company, 70 Million Jobs, on Hacker News, it emerged as one of the platform's most commented-upon posts.
In the intervening three years since, my team and I have served on the front lines of the efforts to help the 70 million Americans--1 in 3 adults--with a record land a job.
First, the facts: there's a ~75% chance that after release from jail or prison, an individual will be rearrested. Nearly all of these people will be unemployed at time of arrest.
Contrariwise, those that do manage to land a job almost never recidivate, and in fact, go on to lead satisfying, productive lives.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, these folks do incredibly well on the job: a SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) report found that 80% of hiring managers believe that when hiring someone with a record, "the quality of hire is as good as if not better than when hiring someone with no record."
While many companies hang on to age-old myths relating to on-the-job behavior of this population (they'll be trouble makers, they'll commit crimes on the job, they'll be violent, they'll disrupt our workforce), the data suggest the very opposite. In fact, because they generally have so few opportunities, they tend to work harder with a better attitude than co-workers, because they know another job is not necessarily available.
I continue to find it shocking that companies that pride themselves on making data-driven decisions have in place hiring matrices that hearken back to another time when attitudes--and crimes--were very different. Most HR professionals have no idea why existing parameters are what they are.
It behooves us as a society to rethink our approach to criminal justice in general and reentry, specifically:
1. Almost everyone incarcerated will be released eventually. If they can't find a reasonable job, they can't buy food, care for their families and put a roof over their heads. What would you do under such circumstances.
2. The economic cost of reincarceration is estimated at more that $100 billion annually.
3. The social cost of recidivism is inestimable: lives are ruined, families are torn apart, communities are decimated, new victims are created, cops are shot, etc.
4. An intelligent plan to get folks working would directly correlate to reduced recidivism. The net cost would drop dramatically enough so as to fund the homeless crisis.
People with sophisticated skills--live programmers--have it much easier than the rank-in-file incarcerated population, who often have little education and less job experience.
Rarely are important social issues so cut and dry: Get people jobs and things get much better. Rarer still are issues that Republicans and Democrats can agree upon.
This is an imminently fixable problem.