The Record

TAM-RIM.1-03 · The Reimagined, Cluster 1: The Human Work · The Approximate Mind

Marcus does not use the word mistake. He robbed a gas station when he was twenty-two. No weapon. The statute did not require one. He was sentenced to six years, served four, and was released into a world that had decided, in his absence, that four years was not enough.

He is thirty-three. He has a GED, a forklift certification, and a mother in Akron whose couch he slept on for five months after release. He has a sister who will not speak to him. He does not blame her for this. He has a laminated copy of his forklift certification in a folder at his mother’s house because he does not want it to get damaged. He has been told by three different reentry counselors that his skills are marketable. He has applied for forty-seven jobs in three years. He has received four interviews and zero offers.

The forty-seven applications went into systems. The systems returned silence.

How the Door Closed

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In 2010, Marcus’s uncle Reggie got out of Mansfield after five years for aggravated assault. Within six weeks, Reggie had a job at a cement company. A man named Dale, who ran the operation, asked Reggie one question: “Can you lift fifty pounds and show up on time?” Reggie could. Reggie did, for eleven years, until his back gave out and he went on disability. He calls those eleven years the best of his life, which tells you something about the years that preceded them.

Dale made a judgment call. He looked at a person and decided the person was worth the risk. Dale did not consult a database. Dale did not run a background check. Dale needed a body that could work and Reggie was a body that could work and that was the end of the analysis.

Dale retired in 2019. The cement company now uses an applicant tracking system. Marcus applied. The system processed his application in under four seconds. It weighed his felony conviction against the company’s risk threshold, which is set by the legal department based on liability modeling, and it rejected him before any human at the company knew his name.

The algorithm did not discriminate against Marcus. It processed him. The processing and the discrimination are the same thing, but the second word implies a person who could be persuaded and the first implies a system that cannot.

Marcus understands this. He does not waste energy on anger about it. Anger is expensive and he cannot afford expensive things.

The Bottom Rung

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The jobs Marcus would have gotten are the jobs nobody else wanted. Night shifts. Loading docks. Warehouse floors in August with no air conditioning. Cleanup crews. The bottom of the labor market, where the work was hard and the pay was low and the dignity was minimal but the door was open.

The door was open because the bottom needed bodies. Needed them badly enough that a felony was a cost the employer could calculate and absorb. The calculation was not compassion. It was math: the cost of an empty position versus the cost of a risky hire. When labor was scarce at the bottom, the math favored Marcus.

AI changes the math. The warehouse has robots. The loading dock runs with three people instead of eight. The night shift is a skeleton crew monitoring automated systems. The bottom of the labor market is shrinking, and it is shrinking precisely where it was widest, in the unskilled, physical, show-up-and-work jobs that were the economy’s back door for people the front door had locked out.

The front door is algorithmic. The back door is disappearing. Marcus is standing outside a building that is running out of entrances.

What a Record Means Now

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Ban the Box was supposed to help. Delay the background check until after the interview, give the person a chance to be a person before the record makes them a category. In some places it worked. In others, research found that employers who could not check records early began screening by proxy, using zip codes and employment gaps and names to guess who might have a record, which meant the policy designed to reduce discrimination increased it for people who looked like they might have one but did not.

Marcus has heard of Ban the Box. He has a specific opinion about it, which is that it delays the rejection by one step without changing the outcome. The step costs him bus fare to the interview and a clean shirt he keeps in a plastic bag in his closet for the purpose. He has worn the shirt to four interviews. It is starting to pill at the collar.

He works at a carwash now. Cash. Roughly $400 a week when the weather holds. No benefits, no path, no future that he can see from where he is standing. The carwash does not check records because the carwash does not check anything. It is the last economy, the one that exists below the systems, where transactions happen in cash and relationships happen in person and nobody asks questions because nobody wants answers.

Marcus is not a victim in the way the discourse prefers its victims. He committed a crime. He served time. He came out and found that the stated price, four years, was the down payment on a longer sentence the system never mentioned. He does not feel sorry for himself. He feels tired, which is different, and less useful to anyone’s narrative.

The Loopholes

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I wonder whether the most honest thing this essay can say is that the old economy’s mercy was accidental.

Nobody designed the entry points for people with records. They were loopholes. Gaps in the system where human judgment, or human indifference, or human labor demand, created openings that formal policy never intended. Dale did not hire Reggie because the system worked. He hired Reggie because the system had a hole in it and Dale was standing at the hole and Reggie walked through.

AI closes loopholes. That is, in a literal sense, what optimization does: it finds the places where the system deviates from its stated rules and it eliminates the deviation. Every deviation eliminated is an efficiency gained. Every efficiency gained is a loophole closed. Every loophole closed is a person who used to fit through and no longer can.

The people who fit through the loopholes were disproportionately the people the system was designed to exclude. The loopholes were not justice. They were the system’s imperfection functioning as mercy, and mercy is not a feature that optimization preserves.

Marcus can lift fifty pounds. He can show up on time. In a different economy, that was enough. In this one, it is not a sentence that reaches any system capable of hearing it.

This is the third essay in The Reimagined, Cluster 1: The Human Work. It examines what happens when algorithmic hiring and the shrinking bottom of the labor market close the informal entry points that allowed people with criminal records to rejoin the economy.

References

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Pager, Devah. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Agan, Amanda, and Sonja Starr. “Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 133, no. 1, 2018, pp. 191-235.

Western, Bruce. Punishment and Inequality in America. Russell Sage Foundation, 2006.

Travis, Jeremy. But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. Urban Institute Press, 2005.