Re: Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?
On Sep 10, 2007, at 6:14 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
So if you believe that there are no jobs available, how do you explain the undocumented immigration to the US in search of jobs? It
stands to reason that there must be jobs available, if people abroad are taking considerable risk and cost to come here to work, no? So it follows
that these jobs are also available to the domestic population, which
demonstrates that structural joblessness is an unlikely culprit of high
incarceration rate of the US population.
Employers much prefer to hire Latino immigrants rather than black
Americans. There’s a fairly large literature on this. Check out Devah
Pager’s 2003 experiment [quoting from a later paper http://www.econ.brown.edu/econ/events/pager&western1.pdf]: “Fielding teams
of black and teams of white job applicants, she found that blacks
without criminal records has roughly equal outcomes to whites with
felony convictions. That the magnitude of the effect of being black
is roughly equivalent to that of being a convicted felon underscores
the significance of race in the eyes of Milwaukee employers.” The
later Pager paper, done with Bruce Western, fielded teams of white,
Latino, and black job applicants with identical resumes. Results: “[C]
lear evidence for a racial hierarchy in which white and Latino job
applicants are significantly preferred by New York employers relative
to equally qualified blacks.” This is as pure a test of
discrimination as you can find, since the employers were judging
people with identical qualifications.
Doug