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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

> while the people currently in American prisons might not be model workers, most of them could easily be gainfully employed on the outside.

A point easily refuted

PDF - https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/59416/...

https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/30/news/economy/former-inmates...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/business/out-of-trouble-b...

Even if the excons are model, PERFECT employees, the conviction could prevent them from getting a job.

Even if they have the greatest work ethic in the world, they might have gone into prison at 18 due to mandatory minimum sentences, came out at 23 with no skills and no money for education (or housing as a base of operations).

And, often the case, the system has fucked them, and they have no desire to participate in the system that fucked them.

I appreciate the author making such clear and well-stated points, that makes it easy to use to simple facts to refute his/her argument.

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> Even if the excons are model, PERFECT employees, the conviction could prevent them from getting a job. I appreciate the author making such clear and well-stated points, that makes it easy to use to simple facts to refute his/her argument.

It's pretty clear in context that this isn't actually what they're talking about at all.

Caplan is responding to Quiggin's claim that mass incarceration has a measurable effect of targeting people who would otherwise have been unemployed if they had never been arrested and incarcerated in the first place. He's not literally arguing that releasing those people from prison overnight would result in them getting a job.

It is no surprise that ex-cons have a high unemployment rate compared to the average member of society.

A full refutation of his argument would give an analysis of the number of ex-cons, their unemployment rate, the hypothetical unemployment rate based on the assumption that the US's current prison stock were diminished to that of Europe, and demonstration that US unemployment numbers would be higher than Europe's in this case.

You have made the motions of charitably interpreting the author's argument without actually doing so.

Your own source:

"Researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School who followed 122 men and women who had been released from the state prison in Massachusetts found that six months to a year after their release, just over half of the group had found a job."

That means he's actually right by a narrow margin. Most ("just over half") former inmates did find a job.

This source reports an unemployment rate of only 25%:

http://www.esrcheck.com/wordpress/2018/07/16/report-finds-on...

> I appreciate the author making such clear and well-stated points, that makes it easy to use to simple facts to refute his/her argument.

You didn't refute anything. Of course a conviction is career poison and one can write long-winded articles on the injustice of it. Still, the statistics say: Most ex-convicts can find a job.

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