King Day job fair could be biggest yet
Dan Rodricks
The Baltimore Sun
January 15, 2006

I need to give out some props to the 25 companies and programs and nearly 100 men and women who have agreed to volunteer their time for tomorrow's job fair at the St. Frances Community Center on East Chase Street. This is the fourth year for this King Day event, which brings together prospective employers and men and women in the hunt for jobs, particularly those who've had a tough time because of their criminal records. Ralph Moore, the chief organizer, says this will be the biggest fair the center has staged. Going into the weekend, 135 people had called to enroll in the daylong program.

Calling all mentors

And I send more props to all the men - among them bankers, lawyers, federal workers, and one parking lot attendant - who contacted me in the past week, offering to serve as mentors to some of the hundreds of ex-offenders and recovering addicts who asked The Sun for help in getting out of the drug-and-crime cycle and back to work. Gentlemen, thanks, and I'll be in touch. There's room for more on this bus. Call 410-332-6166.

Costs of war

An article titled "Iraq Sticker Shock" on Salon.com looks at the long-term direct and hidden costs of the U.S. war in Iraq. It points to a recent study by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, former Clinton administration official and a critic of the war, estimating that its cost could reach a staggering, jaw-dropping, most-Americans-have-no-clue $2 trillion. And Stiglitz, on the faculty of Columbia University, says he and his associate in the research, Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes, took the "conservative approach" in making estimates. One cost noted in the study: The more than 3,200 veterans of the Iraq invasion who have suffered brain or head injuries - they will require $600,000 to $5 million each in lifetime care.

Country in crisis?

Another Columbia faculty member appeared at Friday's forum on ex-offender re-entry at New Shiloh Baptist Church and delivered a different set of most-Americans-have-no-clue numbers, though his were based on established statistics, not estimates. Where Stiglitz presented a forecast on the cost of the war in Iraq, you might say John Jeffries presented the results of the war on drugs.

Jeffries, a Baltimore native who is considered a national expert on the effect of incarceration on families, reported that between 1925 and 1970, the number of men and women incarcerated in the United States averaged about 200,000 per year. Since 1971, the incarceration numbers have risen steadily and significantly. By 2004, we had 2.4 million behind bars. (U.S. Census Bureau figures show that the nation's population in 1948, about the midpoint of the first range Jeffries noted, was just under 150 million. We will reach 300 million this fall, according to a story in Friday's New York Times.)

By far, Jeffries said, we lead the planet in total and per capita incarceration. "The next closest" in per capita incarceration, he said, "is a country that used to be part of the Soviet Union whose name I won't even try to pronounce."

There are an additional 5 million people in the United States on some form of parole or probation, Jeffries said. The boom in incarceration parallels the growth in the abuse of illegal narcotics and increased law enforcement efforts against the possession and distribution of those drugs. The war on drugs was initiated during the Reagan administration and escalated during First Bush. (Today, the majority of inmates in federal prisons are there for drug-related crimes, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.)

Of all those in prison today, Jeffries noted, about 800,000 are parents to some 2 million children under the age of 18. And one more fact, pertinent to the topic of offender re-entry and the need for a more rehabilitative approach to corrections: Ninety-five percent of all inmates in the United States eventually get out of prison - and about half of those end up back inside within three years.

A success story

One of the success stories presented at Friday's forum at New Shiloh was that of Raymond Vaughn, a 31-year-old former drug dealer who got out of that life after a stint in a corrections-system boot camp. He has since finished his high school education and enrolled in Coppin State University. Vaughn got a boost from the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, one of the few Baltimore organizations that help ex-offenders find job training and employment.

Still, there were some bumps along the way.

Vaughn had to give up drinking - "I used to drink everything on the top shelf because that stuff on the bottom shelf just looked nasty" - and he had to get his Maryland driver's license - "When I finally got it, I made copies of it [for his counselors at the center], and they were handing it out like it was fliers to a party" - and save his money for some wheels - "I went and bought me an old-man's car."

Now Vaughn drives a Caddy, has an office-cleaning business, and he's in his sophomore year at Coppin. Most important, he says, he can look his son in the eye and give a straight answer when the boy asks what his daddy does for a living.

Words to live by

Today I close with words to the wise, one profound, one for fun.

From a man at the New Shiloh forum who said he had climbed out of the drug world to the working world: "We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give."

And you'll want to note this one, from Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, next time you go to the movies: "Mr. Pibb plus Red Vines equals crazy delicious!"