When I was a newly-minted Probation Officer in 1982 with the New York City Department of Probation in the Bronx, one of my first probationers was a middle-aged man who was convicted of Criminal Possession of a Firearm that he used to threaten his estranged wife with.
As a result of the arrest and conviction for felony possession of a weapon, this probationer lost his employment as an NYC Bus Driver and was sentenced to Felony Probation.
At that time, I was two-thirds in completion of a Masters in Psychology. A friend of mine at that time had also gotten me interested in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). As the probationer wanted to get back with his wife, I thought maybe I could use some Marital Counseling skills I learned in Graduate school and from the AAMFT materials I obtained.
At this point, my supervisor came by and asked me what my plan was for working with this probationer. I explained to him my intent was to engage this probationer with my Marital Counseling skills. My supervisor on the other hand felt the probationer needed immediate employment.
I came to realize my superior was correct, and for the remaining 26 years I spent at the New York City Probation Department, I found that one of the most critical tasks of both Probation and Parole Officers was to act as referrers to employment, and if not that, vocational training and/or GED classes.
One of the employment programs that assisted NYC probationers was the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) in Manhattan, New York. Peter Finn of Abt Associates in 1998 published his findings of the evaluations he made on three Offender Employment programs in Texas, Chicago, and NYC.
Between 1992 and 1996, CEO placed 766 ex-Offenders in permanent jobs, and after three months, 60 percent of those participating in CEO-referred jobs were still working. CEO and the other two programs in the Abt study also provided counseling to the ex-Offenders for issues of substance abuse, housing, and child care. What was discovered in these 3 programs, was that recidivism decreased as the ex-Offenders maintained employment.
In Canada, Sociologist Stephen W. Baron reviewed the Criminal Behavior of 400 Canadian street youth and noticed that when these young persons were not employed, there was a rise in their committing property crime and drug sales.
Psychologically, Baron felt that the bouts of unemployment these youth experienced, caused anger in these youth when rebuffed from employment, and that anger led them towards committing violent crimes.
One thing I noticed in my early years as a NYC Probation Officer in the early 1980s, is that many of my unskilled probationers found employment in factories in the greater New York metropolitan area. One factory in New Jersey provided a van to take them from the Bronx where they resided to their NJ factory and following their shift, took them back home.
As the 1980s became the 1990s, many factory jobs disappeared due to the change in government and business policies in the United States.
Washington University economist Murray Weidenbaum has researched the reasons corporations and companies have decided to outsource their labor force to overseas markets.
As corporations and companies find they can lower their production costs overseas, and see their US competitors doing the same, the race to the bottom occurs, and fewer jobs become available to the United States’ low-skilled and even skilled workers.
The other reason these business entities decided to outsource, is truthfully, the United States has had the highest drop-out rate among industrialized nations, and the US has fallen from third to 17th among nations in their share of 18-24 year-olds with STEM degrees, according to Weidenbaum.
To reverse this trend, the US government needs to force US manufacturers back to the US and hire US residents.
To stem this tide of outsourcing, two Pepperdine scholars, Jeffrey Schieberl and Marshall Nickles, found in 2014 that it is going to primarily take three American entities seriously convening to bring back jobs to America. Those groups are Labor, represented by Unions like the ALF-CIO and the United States Executive departments such as the US Department of Labor and the US Treasury, and CEO’s of America’s corporations and companies.
The back story on how the United States over the years went from expanded employment, including availability in unskilled jobs, to decreasing US employment and increasing outsourcing can be found by looking at the end of World War II in 1945 up to the 1980s.
During that time, the US labor market was robust.
Then, with the commencement of the Reagan administration (1980 to 1988), and furthered by the George W Bush administration (2000 to 2008), with their deregulation of corporations, Schieberl and Nickles concluded the economic consequences of the above were outsourcing and a decreased labor market.
It was also the globalization of computer technology that appeared in the 1990s that encouraged US corporations and companies to lower their costs in manufacturing and expand their businesses to a global market.
During the current era, where increases in street crime in major urban centers are a concern nationally, we must all work together to encourage both the Corporations and Companies we purchase goods and services from, along with encouraging our elected US Senators and Representatives to bring outsourced jobs back to the United States, and maybe then we can save some of the most vulnerable populations.
Paul Entes is an adjunct professor teaching Sociology and Psychology at St John’s University and is a retired New York City probation officer with a career spanning more than 25 years. Entes can be reached via email at entesp @ stjohns . edu
