FOR MANY, A PRISON RECORD POSES MAJOR OBSTACLE TO ADVANCEMENT

In central Milwaukee and across the country, there's a growing barrier to
income mobility that has little to do with the decline of manufacturing: a
criminal record. Tougher sentencing laws and more drug arrests have
produced a skyrocketing prison population and a soaring number of job
seekers burdened with a prison record.

Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western has found that 60% of black
high-school dropouts in their early 30s nationally had a prison record in
1999, up from 17% in 1979. On average, a prison record reduces one's annual
income by 40%, he says.

Milwaukee native William Jones had run-ins with gangs in high school,
joined the Marines and spent four years in prison in the early 1990s for
involuntary manslaughter. Released in 1996 and required to remain in
Indiana as a condition of his parole, he eventually got a job at TruGreen
ChemLawn in South Bend selling lawn-care services. "I started to see myself
in customer service. This was where I had natural skills. I enjoyed going
to work," he says. Between salary and commission, he made $13 an hour.

In 2002, after his parole ended, he returned to his hometown and applied
for work at TruGreen ChemLawn in Milwaukee, disclosing his prison record.
He was told the company didn't hire felons, he recalls. "I said, 'Well,
your company hired me in South Bend. I worked there for three or four
years.' " The reply: He should consider himself "lucky."

Steve Bono, a spokesman for TruGreen's parent, ServiceMaster Co. in Downers
Grove, Ill., confirms that TruGreen generally does not hire an applicant
with a felony conviction. Mr. Bono says he doesn't know why Mr. Jones got
hired in Indiana.

Wisconsin and many other states forbid discrimination on the basis of a
prison record unless the crime is specific to the job in question. But it's
clearly a factor. Sociologist Devah Pager, now at Princeton, conducted an
experiment in which college students posed as job applicants at Milwaukee
employers. White students reporting no criminal record got called back for
an interview or job offer 34% of the time but only 17% of those who said
they did jail time for cocaine got called. Among blacks, the gap was wider:
14% without a criminal record were called back, but only 5% of those with a
record.

Since returning to Milwaukee, Mr. Jones has delivered liquor to local bars,
worked as a deckhand on a ferry and washed dishes. He was rejected for a
job installing cable television and high-speed Internet because the
installation company said its main client, Time Warner Cable, doesn't
permit contractors to send felons into its subscribers' homes. Time Warner
confirms that.

He recently landed an $8.70-an-hour job at the night shift at Wal-Mart, a
few blocks from his home in northwest Milwaukee. Between shifts at
Wal-Mart, he takes college courses in transportation logistics. He had
explored courses in radiology, which involves taking and reading X-rays,
but worried his record would be a problem. A Wisconsin law bars people with
many types of felony convictions from working in health care.

Mr. Jones wants his son and daughter to avoid his mistakes. He and his wife
scraped together enough money to send their daughter, now 17, to private
school for a while but the cost forced them to return her to public school.
"I know she'll be fine," he says. "She's an honor-roll student. She wants
to be an attorney."

But his 15-year-old son has been arrested twice for armed robbery and is in
a correctional institution for juveniles. He worries his son could face the
same barriers he did. "It's going to be hard out there, that's what I'm
trying to tell him. It's devastating to have someone tell you: 'We can't
hire felons.' "