Young African-American men find it very difficult to enter working life after incarceration. High unemployment makes it that much worse.

How about an unemployment rate of more than 29 percent?

It doesn’t seem possible, even in this era of economic turmoil. It doesn’t seem possible when government officials tell us that the unemployment rate is about 9.8 percent.

We always knew that there were many more unemployed than we were told by those who keep track of such things. It took decades for them to level with us. Former New York Governor David Patterson declared publicly in the past year that the unemployment rate is more like 17 percent.

That higher rate took into account all of the people who were actually unemployed and collecting jobless benefits, all of the people whose benefits had run out and were continuing to seek employment, all of those who had been discouraged and were no longer seeking work, all those who had retired because there were no other options to paying the rent or putting food on the table.

Those who could see the effects of unemployment on the people around us - family, friends and neighbors - knew instinctively that the unemployment rate was about double what the government was telling us.

At the beginning of 2011, however, we are being told that the real, effective rate of unemployment is 29.78 percent. That number comes from the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio.

John Russo, co-director of the center, notes as a complicating factor that there has been a large increase in discouraged workers and those who are taking Social Security before they reach full retirement age, even though the benefits are decreased.

He cites such categories of workers as: marginally attached or discouraged (not in the labor force, but want and are available for work, have looked for work in the past 12 months, but not in the past four weeks), underemployed (want full-time work but it’s not available or the current employer has reduced the hours), excess disability (excluded from the labor force because of sick leave or early retirement), government programs (subsidized employment or low-wage qualifying for earned income tax credits), prison or jail populations (not in the labor force because of incarceration), and military service (in which there is a mix of both enlisted and mercenaries, with the latter’s numbers growing).

However it is viewed, this picture of the actual condition of the working lives of Americans presents a discouraging chronicle of downward mobility for those who work for a pay check.

What is worse, however, is the condition of the working lives of black men, a significant percentage of whom are in the grip of what has been termed by Michelle Alexander to be “The New Jim Crow,” the title of her recently-published book. In it, she documents a new, legal system of control of black Americans by the erasure of any connotation of racial animus, so that the disenfranchisement of millions of black men is done on the basis of their having been convicted of a felony, not on the basis of their race.

The new system, she points out, even passes muster by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has ruled that, in the absence of outright prejudicial racial expressions, by voice or in law, there is no discrimination in carrying out the law throughout the entire process, either in enforcement or in prosecution.

A significant proportion of African-American men are in “the system,” especially since the passage of laws that were enacted nearly 30 years ago, when the “War on Drugs” began. Significantly, the penalties for various kinds of drugs were different in the different communities. And, the decisions about what laws to enforce and in what communities they should be enforced was left up to the discretion of police and prosecutors.

Alexander points out that white Americans violate the drug laws - selling or using - at about the same rates as people of color, enforcement and prosecution are so lop-sided that American prisons and jails are filled with African-American and Latino inmates.

It is what happens when these prisoners are released and they:

These are conditions that make it difficult, if not impossible, under the best of conditions in a good job market, to start fresh and have the possibility of a new life. But these are not optimal conditions. There are five job applicants for every job and people with few skills and little education are at the end of the line.

When you factor in the conditions of the rate of incarceration of African-Americans - including the de facto second-class citizenship that a felony conviction brings - it becomes clear that the obstacles to achieving a satisfying life are extremely difficult.

As Alexander pointed out in “The New Jim Crow,” the incarceration rate of black American boys and men far outstrips their numbers in the population. For example, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2007), the “rate for black males was 4,618 per 100,000. Hispanic males were incarcerated at a rate of 1,747 per 100,000.” Black men were six times as likely to be held in custody than white men.

There was a time when people who lived in cities could find work in any number of manufacturing plants, large and small, but as the economy changed to service and retail businesses, the commute became reversed and the suburbs were the places to find the low-wage jobs that usually are the only ones available to those returning to poor neighborhoods from prison or jail terms.

Manufacturing jobs are not going to be returning any time soon and that makes it much more difficult for young men who have served their sentences to find a way back to their families and friends without reverting to the old habits and ways that brought them trouble in the first place.

Alexander points out in her book, subtitled, “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” that the intent may be somewhat different, but in this age of the “drug war,” the effect is the same as the old Jim Crow: keeping African-Americans (especially young men) in their place, separate and unequal. She does acknowledge the progress that has been made, but the numbers speak for themselves.

The “War on Drugs” has failed and has become just another war on people. Employment at wages that allow parents to support a family is the key to healthy minority communities, with education, health care, and all of the prerequisites of a good civic life.

Unless politicians at every level of government stop talking and start working toward bringing back well-paying manufacturing and industrial jobs, America can look forward to more of what we have seen: high unemployment rates, deteriorating communities, high crime rates, more home foreclosures, and continually increasing personal debt.

For young African-American and Latino men, their place in the hierarchy of American life will continue as it is as long as they are criminalized by drug laws, drug enforcement policies, and drug prosecution policies. So, even if the politicians can fix this broken economy and they can create 15 million new, well-paying jobs, they’d better find a way to solve the problem of “The New Jim Crow,” as described so accurately by Michelle Alexander.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.