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Scholarship focusing on barriers to the employment of ex-prisoners has paid little attention to the linkages between mass incarceration and the structural conditions of low wage labor. In contrast, this article considers how decisions to hire ex-prisoners occur in the context of a highly segregated labor market. The research is based upon interviews with employers who are willing to hire persons exiting prisons. These employers were queried about their motivations for hiring, perceptions of their employees with criminal records, and their beliefs about fairness and justice. The interviews show that a strong motivating factor for hiring was finding a "good worker to do a bad job", but also that decisions were influenced by employers' common sense norms derived from surviving at the bottom of the economy. Despite the willingness of employers to offer "second chances" and make small allowances, these factors were insufficient to counteract the obstacles to sustainable employment.

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This review examines the relationship between social science research and domestic violence activism. It explores how the feminist conception of domestic violence, as formulated early in the movement, has had a resounding influence on the development of both theory and practice. The review demonstrates how social science research has often followed uncritically the path set out by anti-domestic violence activists. It provides an examination of how studies of the efficacy of legal sanctions fail to raise questions about the consequences of these interventions into private lives. The review also considers how the feminist conception of domestic violence has led to unresolved scholarly debates about the frequency and attributes of women's violence as compared to men's. In addition, it shows that the failure of feminism's explanatory framework to guide theory and practice has contributed to the triumph of a gender-neutral understanding of the problem and its reformulation as intimate partner violence. Consequently, the field has seen the growth of applied social science that has adopted a gender-neutral framework and relied upon the mechanisms of universal screening and risk management to address domestic violence. Finally, the value of ethnographic approaches are considered, particularly in regard to their potential to open the field to broader issues about social control, local culture, and inequality and their relation to the persistence of domestic violence as a social problem.