The permanence of this underclass has been reinforced by a lack of “economic optimism” even in times of great financial prosperity for the balance of the country. The economic boom years of the 1990s largely passed unnoticed in communities of color. Job growth generally has occurred in the suburbs and in sectors of the economy that require levels of education beyond that possessed by many urban minority workers, because of the economic and racial changes in the population of urban areas in the last few decades.73 This has led to the existence of an environment of concentrated poverty and racial, social, cultural, and political isolation.74 This concentration of poverty results in negative policy decisions.75 When we consider the already monumental obstacles associated with race, along with the profound burdens that society then adds to the status of the formerly incarcerated, what results is a permanent stigma that affixes itself to an entire generation of people of color. The net effect has been that communities of color in many areas of this country have been sentenced to generational poverty and can expect continued isolation for the foreseeable future.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a new national focus on terrorism, paired with very little political dissent, encouraged a justice policy that virtually endorsed the unrelenting assault on civil liberties, especially in communities of color. In a society already struggling with stereotypes involving race and crime,76 attaching this incredible stigma to a large portion of the population by way of collateral consequences of felony conviction may push us toward the brink of developing a “permanent underclass.”77
The next section takes a closer look at how we form stereotypes and allow them to govern our perceptions and choices. The impact of stereotypes is palpable in our approach to reentry.
B. Stigma
A criminal conviction by itself creates significant obstacles to finding legal employment by interrupting employment, limiting the development of job skills, and discouraging potential employers from hiring those with a criminal history.78 It also undermines the social connections necessary to maintain stable job opportunities.79 When ex-offenders return from prison they often lack the education and skills needed to compete in the labor market, and the stigma of criminal conviction makes employers extra wary of hiring them. Where an occupational license is required, ex-offenders are often legally barred from obtaining jobs.
Where the particular job that an ex-offender seeks is not one that requires a license, the ex-offender frequently finds that employers will not interview, let alone hire, someone who has been convicted of a crime. Many employers fear those convicted of crimes or believe that ex-offenders will not be reliable employees. Other employers are concerned about hiring applicants with a known criminal past because of the risk of negligent hiring liability for insurers and other employees. The labels attached to ex-offender status as well as the negative connotations often result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that ex-offenders cannot successfully reintegrate into society.80
Ex-offenders of color carry a particularly strong stigma as they attempt to become contributing members of their communities. Some researchers have suggested that the damage of ex-offender stigma permanently impairs the earning capacity of people of color.81 The stigma begins early, and teenagers who are incarcerated have very little chance of obtaining a steady employment pattern in life.82 The stigma of exconvict status also significantly affects families of ex-offenders.83 In addition to the damage a criminal conviction inflicts on the individual and the family,84 researchers have also concluded that removing large numbers of residents who engage in both legal work and crime constitutes a significant loss to local economies.85 When we pause to consider this country’s economic boom in the 1980s and ‘90s, we rarely notice the number of young men of color who dropped out of the economy and into prison or onto the unemployment rolls.86
Most would concede that addressing issues of stigma is essential to planning for prisoner reentry. However, the extent to which the stigma of a criminal conviction, race, and bias interact makes this a particularly onerous task. A recent study sent matched pairs of young Black and White men to apply for entry-level job openings; a criminal record had a greater adverse impact on Black applicants than White applicants. Even more disturbing and quite telling of the problem’s intractability, White applicants with criminal records were more likely to receive callbacks from employers than Blacks with no criminal history.87
The stigma of race and its relationship to crime may provide us with significant insights into how we should think about reentry. In my own work I have described the ways in which race and suspicion intersect, particularly in the context of Fourth Amendment protections against police searches and detentions of suspects.88
Social scientists and cognitive psychologists have studied the manner in which people make sense of themselves and others. This process of categorization enables us to organize and make decisions about information with less time and effort than we would require confronting behavior and events anew each time. It is the process of grouping of information into smaller, more manageable bits of information that achieves the efficiency of human cognitive organization.89 Categories become a set of characteristics treated as if they were, for the purposes at hand, similar or capable of being substituted for each other.
Clustering information into categories leads inevitably to some prejudgment based upon our perceptions of those groupings. Stereotypes have been defined as the “general inclination to place a person in categories according to some easily and quickly identifiable characteristic such as age, sex, ethnic membership, nationality, or occupation, and then to attribute to him qualities believed to be typical of members of that category.”90 Schemas are best described as the preconceptions that define category members.91 A schema is a piece of knowledge that represents an “averaging” of specific items or events.92
The research of cognitive psychologists suggests that negative stereotypes about other races and ethnicities can develop early in our lives and become deeply rooted in our minds.93 The interrelationship among self-identity, social identity, and racial beliefs is so complex that a person’s beliefs about different races, once developed, are highly resistant to change. Of course, stereotypes about groups tend not be any more accurate than any other type of generalization94 because they represent oversimplification of complexities.95 But we tend to rely on them and, at times, to be prejudiced by them in making complex discretionary decisions.
Not all categories lead to intractable stereotypes. Some categories are held tentatively and the individual remains open to information that is inconsistent with the stereotypical category. Nonetheless, in most instances, categories stubbornly resist change.96 Moreover, in the case of racial and ethnic stereotyping, “people tend to hold to prejudgments even in the face of much contradictory evidence.”97 Cognitive psychologists further explain that learning processes are facilitated by the development of schemas—mental constructs that facilitate the processing of new, unfamiliar stimuli by comparing them to familiar ones and drawing conclusions about the new based on what the person knows about the familiar.98 All of this creates certain strong perceptions about race and behavior.
Individuals tend to make judgments about people using their learned categories as contexts for making such judgments. These judgments are often interpreted to coincide with the prevailing schema.99 When a criminal conviction is added, the tendency to stereotype becomes