America needs more workers at a time when more Americans — especially ex-offenders — need to work. How can the two imperatives be better synchronized?

Two Wall Street Journal writers argued in 2023 that more people can be “funneled” into the labor force, in part, by “tapping underutilized labor pools such as people with disabilities and the formerly incarcerated.” Regarding the latter, consider how people with criminal records, whose unemployment rate in recent years has ranged between 30 percent and 60 percent, might help fill that breach.

This is a good spot to state the obvious: Studies on the association between nonwork and crime have never been lacking.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Manufacturing Institute put it this way: “We exist in an economy that competes on tale

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