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mythology: At the bottom or even the middle ranks of the industry, drug
dealing is a minimum-wage affair. For many inner-city men, what prevents
gainful employment is not simply the absence of motivation to get off the
streets but the absence of a job history or any marketable skills-and,
increasingly, the stigma of a prison record.
Ask Mac, who has made it part of his mission to provide young men in his
neighborhood a second chance. Ninety-five percent of his male employees are
ex-felons, including one of his best cooks, who has been in and out of prison
for the past twenty years for various drug offenses and one count of armed
robbery. Mac starts them out at eight dollars an hour and tops them out at
fifteen dollars an hour. He has no shortage of applicants. MacÆs the first one
to admit that some of the guys come in with issues-they arenÆt used to getting
to work on time, and a lot of them arenÆt used to taking orders from a
supervisor-and his turnover can be high. But by not accepting excuses from the
young men he employs (ôI tell them I got a business to run, and if they donÆt
want the job I got other folks who doö), he finds that most are quick to
adapt. Over time they become accustomed to the rhythms of ordinary life:
sticking to schedules, working as part of a team, carrying their weight. They
start talking about getting their GEDs, maybe enrolling in the local community
college.
They begin to aspire to something better.
It would be nice if there were thousands of Macs out there, and if the
market alone could generate opportunities for all the inner-city men who need
them. But most employers arenÆt willing to take a chance on ex-felons, and
those who are willing are often prevented from doing so. In Illinois, for
example, ex-felons are prohibited from working not only in schools, nursing
homes, and hospitals-restrictions that sensibly reflect our unwillingness to
compromise the safety of our children or aging parents-but some are also
prohibited from working as barbers and nail technicians.
Government could kick-start a transformation of circumstances for these men
by working with private-sector contractors to hire and train ex-felons on
projects that can benefit the community as a whole: insulating homes and
offices to make them energy-efficient, perhaps, or laying the broadband lines
needed to thrust entire communities into the Internet age. Such programs would
cost money, of course-although, given the annual cost of incarcerating an
inmate, any drop in recidivism would help the program pay for itself. Not all
of the hard-core unemployed would prefer entry-level jobs to life on the
streets, and no program to help ex-felons will eliminate the need to lock up
hardened criminals, those whose habits of violence are too deeply entrenched.
Still, we can assume that with lawful work available for young men now in
the drug trade, crime in many communities would drop; that as a consequence
more employers would locate businesses in these neighborhoods and a
self-sustaining economy would begin to take root; and that over the course of
ten or fifteen years norms would begin to change, young men and women would
begin to imagine a future for themselves, marriage rates would rise, and
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children would have a more stable world in which to grow up.
What would that be worth to all of us-an America in which crime has fallen,
more children are cared for, cities are reborn, and the biases, fear, and
discord that black poverty feeds are slowly drained away? Would it be worth
what weÆve spent in the past year in Iraq? Would it be worth relinquishing
demands for estate tax repeal? ItÆs hard to quantify the benefits of such
changes-precisely because the benefits would be immeasurable.
IF THE PROBLEMS of inner-city poverty arise from our failure to face up to
an often tragic past, the challenges of immigration spark fears of an
uncertain future. The demographics of America are changing inexorably and at
lightning speed, and the claims of new immigrants wonÆt fit neatly into the
black-and-white paradigm of discrimination and resistance and guilt and
recrimination. Indeed, even black and white newcomers-from Ghana and Ukraine,
Somalia and Romania-arrive on these shores unburdened by the racial dynamics
of an earlier era.
During the campaign, I would see firsthand the faces of this new America-in
the Indian markets along Devon Avenue, in the sparkling new mosque in the
southwest suburbs, in an Armenian wedding and a Filipino ball, in the meetings
of the Korean American Leadership Council and the Nigerian Engineers
Association. Everywhere I went, I found immigrants anchoring themselves to
whatever housing and work they could find, washing dishes or driving cabs or [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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