Police massacre casts ugly glare on ex-felon desperation

A general consensus is that it was a deadly mix of panic, rage, and frustration that caused Lovelle Mixon to snap. His shocking murderous rampage left four Oakland police officers dead and a city and police agencies in deep soul search abut what went so terribly wrong. Though Mixon’s killing spree is a horrible aberration, his plight as an unemployed, ex-felon isn’t. There are tens of thousands like him on America’s streets.

In 2007, the National Institute of Justice found that 60 percent of ex-felon offenders remain unemployed a year after their release. Other studies have shown that upwards of thirty percent of felon releases live in homeless shelters because of their inability to find housing; and those are the lucky ones. Many camp out on the streets.

A significant number of them suffer from drug, alcohol and mental health challenges, and lack education or any marketable skills. More than seventy percent of all U.S. prisoners are literate at only the two lowest grade levels. Nearly 60 percent of violent felons are repeat offenders. They are a menace to themselves and as the nation saw with Mixon, to others. In some cases, they can be set off by any real or perceived slight, insult or simply lash out from bitter rage. Mixon was one, and he made four Oakland police officers victims and left a terrible trail of grieving and distraught families and a shell-shocked city and police department.

The answer to the Mixons isn’t easy and simple. The need is strike a fine and delicate balance between public safety and ex-felon rehabilitation. A big obstacle to making ex-felons law abiding, productive citizens is still the inability of many ex-felons to find jobs. City officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, New York and Atlanta have been repeatedly challenged to take action to end employer discrimination against ex-felons. The demand has been to restrict what employers can and can’t ask on job applications.

In a revealing study in 2003 and duplicated again several years later, Northwestern University professor Devah Pager hired groups of African-American and white young men with identical resumes and experience to pose as job applicants. Some were told to say they had a drug felony. The study found that when they checked the felony conviction box on applications, it reduced the white applicants’ chance of an interview by 50 percent. For Black applicants, their chance of landing the job was reduced by two-thirds.

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