This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 15th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

For potentially millions of Americans, their employment prospects are permanently damaged by a felony conviction

and in many cases merely for an arrest and that has big implications for labor

markets and economic prosperity more broadly. Scott Linsicum is author of the criminal

justice chapter of the new Cato book Empowering the new American worker. We spoke

earlier this month. I think this is maybe the most notable chapter in this book in part because we don't tend to think of criminal justice policy one way or another as being pro-worker or anti-worker. So explain why this

chapter is in the book. Yeah, I think exactly for the reason you said that we really don't think of criminal justice policy in terms of how it affects our labor market.

Most of your criminal justice discussion is either going to be,

you know, tough on crime stuff

or on some of the moral moral and ethical issues

with over criminalization and the rest. But rarely do we think about how a criminal record or even an arrest

record can affect labor market outcomes and can affect the lives of millions of American workers.

And that is effectively a tease for the research cited here in.

You know, what we look at in the chapter is first we start out with just the basic facts.

There has been a dramatic increase over the last few decades in the number of Americans with a criminal record.

To give you an idea of just how many we're talking, Over 19 million Americans as of 2010 had a felony record.

And then you add tens of millions more who have misdemeanor records or arrest records like we said and the people who are actually acquitted but were arrested.

So you start with the basic fact that a lot of Americans have criminal records

today compared to past generations and that's for all sorts of reasons you know we

at Cato like to talk about over criminalization, you know,

when everything is a crime, it's pretty easy to get busted for stuff.

...