Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration

Pager opens Chapter 6 with notes from one of her field experiments, providing a welcome respite from the preceding statistically-dense chapters. She describes an encounter between a restaurant manager and Jerome, one of her Black auditors. Jerome, the only Black person in the restaurant, was reluctantly given an application form after being lectured by the manager about his drug conviction: “‘You can’t be screwing up like this at your age. A kid like you can ruin his whole life like this’” (100). The manager then dismissed Jerome without giving him a chance to explain, saying he’d call Jerome back if there was an open position. Pager found that Black testers with criminal records were routinely thwarted by disapproving employers. These auditors had two strikes against them: race and criminality. Chapter 6 examines how the impact of race and criminal background fluctuated depending on three factors: 1) degree of personal contact, 2) job location, and 3) job type.

Two Strikes and You’re Out

Pager argues that the combination of race and a criminal record generates strong negative reactions from employers. Knowledge of criminality activated negative racial stereotypes and weakened incentives to give testers the benefit of the doubt. By contrast, white testers lacked the stereotypical profile of criminals, which made employers more likely to overlook their convictions.