There's a double standard in this country when it comes to an employee with a criminal record.
If you're Michael Nobody who robbed the grocery store and spent time in jail for it, you'll have a hell of a time finding a job when you get out.
If you're Michael Vick who bankrolled an illegal dog-fighting ring, you'll end up with a plum job and millions of dollars in our pocket.
I'm not saying the Philadelphia Eagles should not have signed Vick for a two-year deal. Why not? He says he learned his lesson and wants to make amends. I love dogs just as much as the next guy, but in the scheme of crimes NFL players commit this one was pretty tame.
What I'm pointing out is a huge problem in this country -- we're not big on giving ex-cons an employment chance, unless of course they're Michael Vick or Martha Stewart.
The little guys get their resumes thrown in the trash if an HR manager finds out they have a record.
At a time when riots are exploding in over-crowded prisons in California, we all should be thinking about why that's happening.
Part of the reason is the high recidivism rate. About 700,000 people are released from prisons every year, and about two-thirds of those are expected to be back in prison within three years, according to the Department of Justice.
Why do they end up back in jail? Often times it's because they can't get a job and get their lives back on track.
Vocational and job-training programs that were once a major part of the prison system have been decimated by cutbacks.
A recent piece on National Public Radio on California's infamous Folsom State Prison paints a disturbing picture:
...all across this prison are signs of what this place once was -- when administrators came from New York and Texas to find out how Folsom kept its violence so low and its inmates from coming back.
There's the deserted shop where inmates used to train to be butchers; it was closed when the prison couldn't afford to remove the asbestos.
And hovering above the prison is China Hill, a now-barren field where inmates once trained to become landscapers. The prison can't afford to pay the teacher.
A program called the Second Chance Act, a bipartisan bill President Bush signed into law in May 2008 authorizing $165 million annually for a host of initiatives to curb recidivism, including money to train ex-offenders for jobs, was supposed to help restart such initiatives.
Clearly the initiative has yet to trickle into the California prison system, and given the recession it's unclear how much will really be spent to help retrain the prison population.
In an eerie coincidence, a prison inmate at Corcoran Prison in California, Jeff Perrotte wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Los Angeles Daily News last month titled: "California prisons fail to rehabilitate the inmates who need it most."
Prison officials tell you, Joe Public, that inmates are being rehabilitated so you will be safer when they return to your communities, that these men will have the skills to remain drug-free and find jobs. Wrong.
While there are limited programs available to help men change the direction of their lives, the backlog is so long that men returning to the free world often never make it in time.
And once they do get out, few employers and employees will be willing to work with excons.
I wrote about this issue last year in my MSNBC.com column:
There are generally few if any employment protections for ex-felons, says Dianna Johnston, with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "Some courts have ruled that an employer that has a broad practice of excluding people from all jobs because they have had an arrest or conviction has a disparate impact on African-Americans," she explains. "A similar impact may apply to Hispanics."
But, for the most part, a hiring manager can legally toss your application in the trash bin if you've been incarcerated, and they do.
Devah Pager, an associate professor at Princeton University, has studied discrimination against ex-offenders and is currently doing field experiments looking at this issue. "I hire young men to pose as job applicants, applying to real entry-level jobs in Milwaukee and New York, to see how employers respond to their race and criminal background," she says. "Having a record reduces a job applicant's chances of getting a call back by half, [and] more if the applicant is black."
But not if you're Michael Vick.
Maybe we can all take a lesson from the Eagles for being so understanding.
"I'm a believer that as long as people go through the right process, they deserve a second chance," Eagles coach Andy Reid said. "Michael has done that. I've followed his progress. He's proven he's on the right track."
To be fair, there's more motivating Reid than the common good. He's probably hoping society take the forgive-and-forget approach for his own two sons. Reid's sons Britt and Garrett both served jail terms on drug charges.