WHEN A DISSERTATION MAKES A DIFFERENCE

For Devah Pager, a young sociologist from Honolulu, "kulia i ka nu'u" - "to
strive for the summit" - means to do research that can influence policy, a
realistic quest for her if the last few years are any indication.

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she studied the
difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process,
came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a
felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean.

Ms. Pager's study won the American Sociological Association's award for the
best dissertation of the year in August, prompting a Wall Street Journal
columnist to write about it. Howard Dean repeated her main finding in stump
speeches and interviews throughout his glory days as the front-runner.

Then, addressing the overall problem convicted felons have re-entering the
job market, President Bush announced in the State of the Union message a
$300 million program to provide mentoring and help them get work. Jim
Towey, the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives, said that Ms. Pager's study was one of the many sources of
information that helped shape the administration's four-year plan.

Ms. Pager, 32, is thrilled to see the issue receive national attention.
More than half a million inmates will leave penal institutions this year,
and "the Administration is finally recognizing that the problems created by
our incarceration policies can no longer be ignored," she said. Even if the
promised amount is trivial, she said, the gesture is important symbolically.

Conversation with Ms. Pager flows easily. Over a plate of pancakes, she
brushes aside a crush of thick loose auburn curls to punctuate less serious
points with flashes of the wide, arresting smile her colleagues say is
emblematic. She is known for her good nature and charismatic style, but it
is her research that has made her one of the most promising young
sociologists around.

Initially Ms. Pager's interest was race, stirred by her move from Hawaii to
Los Angeles to attend the University of California. "I was struck by the
level of separation between racial groups on campus, throughout the city,"
she said. "Race seemed to define space. Hawaii, by contrast, has the
highest rate of intermarriage in the country. Growing up, every other
person, it seemed, was hapa, or half, the term used to describe someone
multiracial or mixed." She added, "When you grow up with that being normal,
everything else seems strange - and wrong."

She completed a master's degree at Stanford University and a second
master's at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, her father's
native country. He is a professor of computer science. Her mother, a
pediatrician, was born in Australia, making Ms. Pager something of a hapa
herself, a Jewish one. A one-year visiting professorship at the University
of Hawaii took Ms. Pager's parents to Honolulu from London before she was
born. They never left.

"Hawaii is an amazing place to grow up," Ms. Pager said. "It's got a
small-town community feeling, despite the fact that Honolulu is a city of
about a million people."

Though her family is "solidly upper middle class," she said, her parents
obliged her and her two older brothers to work to pay part of their college
expenses. "I resented it initially," she said, "but in fact it ended up
being a great way for me to get involved in things I wouldn't have been
involved with otherwise."

The interest in released prisoners arose while she was studying for her
doctorate in Madison, Wis. She organized a karaoke night for the sociology
department ("I'm a diva," she wrote in an e-mail message, playing off the
pronunciation of her given name. "I love to sing."), and she volunteered
for an organization that provides services and shelter to homeless men.
There she met many black men with prison records. "It was a nice break to
get out and do some direct service," she said. She spent time with the men,
distributed their mail and made herself available "as a resource, to allow
them to unload." Those who had served jail time often talked about how it
complicated the job search. "That was one of the first things that clued me
into what an immutable barrier it was standing in their way," she said.

At about this time Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project reported
that in seven states felony convictions had permanently disenfranchised one
in four African-American men. An innovative but difficult research plan
began to take shape.

Both of her main advisers, Robert M. Hauser and Erik Olin Wright, tried to
dissuade her, gently suggesting how hard it is for graduate students to
obtain financial support, manage complicated field work and end up with
meaningful results.

"She was undaunted," Mr. Wright said. "Her pluckiness is part of what makes
her successful. She knew she could do it."

To isolate the effect of a criminal record on the job search, Ms. Pager
sent pairs of young, well-groomed, well-spoken college men with identical
resumes to apply for 350 advertised entry-level jobs in Milwaukee. The only
difference was that one said he had served an 18-month prison sentence for
cocaine possession. Two teams were black, two white.

A telephone survey of the same employers followed. For her black testers,
the callback rate was 5 percent if they had a criminal record and 14
percent if they did not. For whites, it was 17 percent with a criminal
record and 34 percent without.

"I expected there to be an effect of race, but I did not expect it to swamp
the results as it did," Ms. Pager said. "It really was a surprise."

Jeff Manza, a colleague at Northwestern University, where she teaches,
said, "Devah's work demonstrates in a new and convincing way the extent to
which the 'second chance' that Bush talks about runs headlong into the
realities of race and the fear of crime and criminals."

Similarly, Reginald Wilkinson, Ohio's top corrections official and the
president of the Association of State Correctional Administrators, was
impressed by her findings and methodology. "In my estimation, we can't
eliminate the race question when we're talking about re-entry," he said. "I
think what Professor Pager has done is raise consciousness about this."

More reserved was James J. Heckman of the University of Chicago, a Nobel
laureate in economics. In a telephone interview, he said Ms. Pager's
findings were important but not surprising. Mr. Heckman, who has written
extensive critiques of similarly designed studies, said that she had
created "a very clean study" of the impact of a criminal record on job
seekers in general, but that he did not buy the race findings.

"I believe there is serious reason for caution here," he said. "The
comparison across the black and white pairs is just not strong because it's
not an experimental design and the samples are just too small."

Ms. Pager is replicating her research on a grander scale with one of the
field's leading experts, Bruce Western of Princeton University, where she
will join the sociology faculty this fall.

The new study is another chance to further document the effects of race and
imprisonment, another chance at "kulia i ka nu'u."