Politically it’s more than odd for me to cite Henry Ford on anything, but the fact that I can agree with a proto-fascist, anti-Semite Know-Nothing on at least a couple things, says that there was — at least at one point — hope for America. Take as an example what Ford said in My Life and Work, his 1922 autobiography:
[W]e do not take a man on his past history we do not him because of his past history I never met a man who was thoroughly bad. There is always some good in him — if he gets a chance. That is the reason we do not care in the least about a man’s antecedents — we do not a man’s history we hire the man. If he has been in jail, that is no reason to say that he will be in jail again. I think. on the contrary, he is, if given a chance, very to make a special effort to keep out of jail. Our office does not bar a man for anything he has done — he is equally acceptable whether he has in Sing Sing or at Harvard and we do not even inquire from which place he has graduated. All that he needs the desire to work. If he does not desire to work it very unlikely that he will apply for a position….
Henry Ford, My Life and Work
If you are trying to find a job in your Life After Prison, you would do well to come across the relatively rare employer who subscribe’s to Ford’s thesis. The was Banning The Box before The Box had been invented. Old Henry also had this to say:
[A] man in jail ought to be able to support his family or, if he has no family, he should be able to accumulate a sum of money sufficient to put him on his feet when he gets out of jail. I am not advocating convict labour or the farming out of men practically as slaves. Such a plan is too detestable for words. We have greatly overdone the prison business anyway; we begin at the wrong end.
Henry Ford, My Life and Work
Imagine! A prison wage that could support anyone, let alone a family? This, in the 21st century is as unheard of in the United States as it is in China. I made $0.115 an hour in prison, and I, like most former felons, struggle to find a $11.50 an hour a job outside it. And yet we are told that we have to have a work ethic, as if people didn’t that before, a conviction being the emblem of congenital loafing. When it comes to prison, we start with all kinds of self-defeating and self-fulfilling assumptions. 99 years ago, Ford had some things just right. I say that because I penned this limerick before I had even read the Ford book:
If you want me to value my work, Let us see where some money might lurk. For at 10 cents an hour, I think that my power Is that of a slave of a jerk.