By Kenneth J. Cooper

So far this year three states have passed laws to help ex-offenders land jobs. But because the changes in anti-discrimination statutes impact the back end of incarceration, they don’t wring any of the rampant racial unfairness out of the criminal justice system.

The laws in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Mexico prohibit public employers from asking about the criminal history of jobseekers on initial applications. Massachusetts has gone a step further and slapped the ban on private employers as well.

Of course, employers in those states can still inquire about “priors,” arrests and convictions, when they interview the strongest candidates for openings. Studies have shown, however, that ex-offenders stand a much better chance of getting hired if they reach that stage, when they can explain their past problems with the law in person.

If the new laws to “ban the box,” the catchy slogan coined by advocates, have their intended effect, former lawbreakers won’t be the only beneficiaries. State residents would benefit from enhanced public safety and reduced expenditures for incarceration. Studies have consistently shown that ex-offenders who find jobs are less likely to commit more crimes and return to prison or jail.

Nationally, the recidivism rate approaches 70 percent. The three states with the new laws appear already to have achieved lower rates—40 percent in Massachusetts, 47 percent in New Mexico and 56 percent in Connecticut—although those figures from different studies may not be directly comparable to each other or the national rate.

About 40 percent of the nation’s prison population of 2 million is African American. Between 600,000 and 700,000 inmates are released every year across the country. Their employment prospects are not good, particularly for young black men, according to a study done in Milwaukee earlier this decade.

In that study, Devah Pager, now a Princeton University sociologist, sent college-age white men and black men with similar qualifications out to apply for entry-level jobs, rotating which posed as former offenders. When the black applications tagged themselves with a criminal record, they received less than a third as many callbacks than white applicants playing the same role did. Employers’ perception of young black men as crime-prone was found to be so strong than when the black applicants indicated they had no criminal record, they received no more callbacks than white applicants who did.

Wisconsin does not have a “ban the box” law, but it does have a statute that provides relatively strong protection for ex-offenders against blanket job discrimination. Pager has noted the apparent persistence of discrimination despite the law’s intent.

The legislative movement to prohibit employers from initially asking about criminal histories and automatically screening out ex-offenders is gaining momentum.

Back in 1998, Hawaii imposed the first ban. The law was so uncontroversial in that diverse, liberal state that final passage at the close of a legislative session did not rate its own headline in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. It took a while for the idea to penetrate the mainland.

About six years ago, ex-offenders formed an organization in Oakland, Calif. called All of Us or None, which adopted banning the box as one of its nationwide initiatives.

Minnesota responded with passage of a law in 2009. Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Mexico bring the number of states with ban-the-box laws to five. Similar legislation is pending in Nebraska, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Hawaii is the only state with long enough experience with the law to measure its impact on the employment and recidivism of ex-offenders. Curiously, such a study has not been done, according to the National Employment Law Project. Hawaii’s ban, as in Massachusetts, applies to public and private employers, unless other state or federal laws require such background checks. They are the only states where the law is so broad.

About two dozen cities or counties have imposed a ban on their own governments, including Baltimore, Memphis and San Francisco. Minneapolis did in 2006, three years before Minnesota passed a state law. An evaluation of the city’s policy found that hiring of applicants whose background checks revealed a potential problem rose to 60 percent, way up from less than 6 percent previously.

So banning the box should improve the employment prospects of newly-released inmates in the three states that have just adopted the law, reducing the damage to chances to live lawfully productive lives after what is often a single, youthful mistake that involves drugs but no violence.

But the nation and each of its 50 states, working together with community organizations, need to do much more keep youths, particularly young black men from getting entangled in the criminal justice system in the first place and to treat more fairly those who do by offering appropriate alternatives to incarceration and abandoning false, unspoken assumptions about their supposed inherent criminality.

Kenneth J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a freelancer based in Boston. He also edits the Trotter Review at the University of Massachusetts Boston.