Blas’ Too-Good Idea
There’s a decent idea buried in the “Jails to Jobs” plan that Mayor de Blasio unveiled last week — buried about six feet under.
The program, which is to kick off by year’s end, will offer an eight-week minimum-wage job to every convict who leaves a city jail after completing a sentence — no matter his or her record or suitability for employment.
Providing ex-cons with jobs, argues the mayor, can cut the odds they’ll return to crime — and prison. He points to research showing that “shortterm transitional employment” can cut recidivism rates by 22 percent by leading to long-term employment.
Set aside the fairness question — that is, why aren’t needy New Yorkers who’ve never done time going to get this help? After all, if it works, the mayor will surely be happy to expand the program.
More: Successfully steering those caught up in the criminal world toward honest lives of self-sufficiency would be worth the $10 million a year that de Blasio plans to spend.
And not just because it would carve out a better path for ex-cons: The payoff would also include lower crime rates and prison costs. Everyone wins.
If it works. Trouble is, it’s a big “if.” And the chances that an equality-obsessed, big-government progressive like de Blasio can pull it off seem slim. To be kind.
Start with the “entitlement” problem: Giving jobs sends all the wrong signals. Enrollees should have to earn them — or at least apply.
More, de Blasio assumes that many won’t be suited for a job. So he’ll offer “re-entry services,” such as job training, as a key part of the program both during inmates’ time behind bars and after they’re freed. Some ex-cons will be paid for job training in lieu of work. That’s where the big trouble starts. Since 1984, America Works has found jobs for more than a half-million hard-to-place workers, including many ex-cons.
But what President Peter Cove and CEO Lee Bowes note is that a job is a job — not a training program, mentoring service, peer counseling or any of the other near-useless features the mayor intends to include.
Only working at — and holding down — an actual job, with actual workplace demands, regularly ends lives of dependency, poverty and crime.
It’s impossible to imagine Team de Blasio running a program that holds the new workers — or the social workers overseeing them — to such accountability. Do they lose the job if they don’t show up?
Yes, the mayor has stumbled on a potentially good idea. But to make it work, he’d have to abandon too many of his other ways of thinking.