Jobs fight crime better than jails - need to expand employment opportunities to reduce crime - Symposium - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 8, 1994 | by Samuel L. Myers, Jr.

Not only are efforts to unblock barriers to inner-city employment and economic opportunities a good way to fight crime, they may be the only cost-effective policies available in the long run as well.

Structural shifts in employment, declines in the economic base of cities and widening gulfs between suburban job markets and inner-city workers all contribute to blocked opportunities, creating incentives to illegal activity. Recent research reveals how lucrative illegal opportunities can be. Richard Freeman, in a National Bureau of Economic Research report, cites a comparison between the relative illegal income in 1980 and 1989 among inner-city youth: Two-kids could earn more money in crime than work, up from 50 percent in 1980. As legal opportunities are blocked, illegal prospects become more attractive.

Other research shows how such economic crimes as drug dealing are best curbed by improving legitimate earnings opportunities. Better wages and improved employment will reduce crime. My own study of self-reported, preprison drug dealing among felons incarcerated in California, Michigan and Texas concludes that drug dealing is very responsive to expected legal earnings. The effect is much larger among blacks than among whites. Among the most at-risk group of all - young, inner-city black males - good wages can mean the difference between law-abiding behavior and a career in drug dealing. Numerous other studies, using data on inner-city youth, similarly find a strong connection between blocked opportunities and participation in illegal activities.

Not everyone buys the "blocked opportunity" thesis, of course. The most widely known argument against it comes from Peter Reuter and other researchers at the Rand Corp. who examined drug dealing in Washington. The study, titled "Money from Crime: Economics of Drug Dealing " was released in July 1990. What startled people most was the finding that 75 percent of those selling drugs reported having legal earnings, with an average monthly legal wage of $800. From this, many have concluded that it is not just the hard-core, inner-city ghettodweller who is attracted to crime. Even the middle-class employee is tempted to sell drugs. By extension, then, improving employment or raising wages for the "underclass" will do little to stem the rise in crime.

Ignored in the rush to reject the blocked-opportunity thesis is the nature of the Rand sample, which consisted of 186 males on probation. In Washington, first-time offenders with steady employment accused of such nonviolent crimes as simple drug sales routinely are granted probation, if only to avert further prison overcrowding. Not surprisingly, these 186 offenders reported higher-than-expected employment and earnings.

The many studies over the years that have failed to find a connection between employment opportunities and crime share one common flaw: They fail to account properly for the interaction between race and the criminal justice system. And so, when employment strategies for reducing crime are abandoned, we mistakenly believe the only other options available are crime-control strategies.

Unfortunately, prior efforts to toughen the laws have had adverse impacts on criminal justice. For example, in Minnesota, new drug sanctions have caused widening racial gaps in punishment. Judge Pamela Alexander, a Clinton federal court nominee, wrote in a landmark decision that the Minnesota sentencing guidelines that meted out harsher punishment for sale of crack cocaine than for the sale of powdered cocaine effectively discriminated against blacks. Virtually all arrests for crack sales were for black offenders; powdered cocaine arrests involved proportionately fewer African-Americans. Indeed, the director of the Minnesota sentencing commission, reacting to reports that Minnesota has the highest racial disproportionality ratio in the nation, remarked that child sexual abuse - a largely white crime - effectively results in less harsh punishment than armed robbery - a disproportionately black crime. Thus, one can infer that the crimes black people commit result in harsher punishment than those crimes committed by white people.

The effect has been to create within our prisons recruitment pools for gang warfare and further street violence. The dramatic growth in street-level crime is in no small consequence related to the subculture created by the explosion of prison populations. In 1970, when fewer than 200,000 people were incarcerated nationwide, there was but a trickle of previously imprisoned people into the larger society. Now with more than a million persons incarcerated and not enough prison capacity to house them all, more and more people in the general population are exposed directly or indirectly to this heinous and alien subculture called prison. There is little evidence that incarceration or imprisonment reduces criminal behavior among offenders. If anything, prison is similar to a college for crime. If you aren't a crook before you go to prison, you certainly will be one when you get out. And this free college education in criminal pursuits can, and will, cost the rest of us dearly in the future.