FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“How do you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they’re not for ‘people like us.’ … Devah Pager uses a simple technique to show how mass incarceration has undone the small amount of racial progress achieved in the 1960s and ‘70s.”
Nation

Now Available in Paperback
Marked
Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration

Devah Pager

Marked gives us our first real glimpse into the tremendous difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Devah Pager matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her applicants were attractive, articulate, and capable—yet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds.

Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price: those with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work, Pager contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place.

“Pager shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job.… Both informative and convincing.” —Library Journal

Devah Pager is associate professor of sociology at Princeton University.

 

Devah Pager is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Lindsay Dawson at (773) 702-1964 or ldawson@press.uchicago.edu

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