“Taxpayers spend $1.8 billion annually on the Job Corps, which pays runaway teens and adult criminals to live together in dormitories to get ‘job training.’ The program is a cesspool of crime where 500 people were raped and teens are brutalized but contractors profit, new data shows,” reports Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire.
Rosiak explains:
The Department of Labor’s Job Corps operates 131 facilities…gathering people from the margins of society and housing them in cinderblock dormitories where they fight, rape, and sell drugs to each other…More than 500 sexual assaults have been reported at Job Corps facilities in the last three years, including a male student climbing through a female student’s window and raping her as she slept….Inner-city 24-year-olds are housed with vulnerable 16-year-old dropouts, who are exploited by predators. Last year, a 16-year-old girl who identified as a transgender boy, and whom the Job Corps apparently enabled to be separated from her parents, was assigned to room with a 23-year-old man [who] allegedly intimidated his “roommate” into performing oral sex on him before pinning her to the bed and raping her.
Then there were 4,600 reported violent assaults….over the past three years…those numbers likely significantly understate the reality, since a tolerance for criminal behavior is endemic to the culture and only the most severe incidents are recorded. Eligibility requirements say that… “no individual shall be denied enrollment in Job Corps solely on the basis of contact with the criminal justice system, except for the disqualifying felony convictions of murder…, child abuse, or a crime involving rape or sexual assault.” The program requires that applicants not be able to read at higher than an eighth grade level, saying they must be “unable to compute or solve problems… at a level necessary to function on the job, in the individual’s family, or in society,” or he must be homeless, a runaway, a high school dropout, or a victim of sex trafficking.
Jobs Corps’ failures have persisted for years. 14 years ago, James Bovard explained how federal job “training” is so dismally ineffective that it causes “significant earnings losses” for young people who participate in it, and results in participants ending up on food stamps at higher rates. As he observed in the Wall Street Journal,
The federal government has experimented with [job-training] programs for almost a half century. The record is one of failure and scandal.
In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) . . . A decade after MDTA’s inception, GAO reported that it was failing to teach valuable job skills or place trainees in private jobs and was marred by an “overriding concern with filling available slots for a particular program,” regardless of what trainees actually needed….Between 1961 and 1980, the feds spent tens of billions on federal job-training and employment programs. To what effect?… An Urban Institute study of the mid-1980s concluded that participation in CETA programs resulted in “significant earnings losses for young men of all races and no significant effects for young women.”
After CETA became a laughingstock, Congress replaced it in 1982 with the Job Training Partnership Act. JTPA spent lavishly…For years the Labor Department scorned the mandate in the 1982 legislation to speedily and thoroughly evaluate whether the programs actually benefitted trainees. Finally, in 1993, it released a study that showed participation in JTPA “actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths.” Young males enrolled in JTPA programs had 10% lower earnings than a control group that never participated. . .The GAO warned in 1969 that many teens in federal summer jobs programs “regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.” A decade later, it reported that most urban teens “were exposed to a worksite where good work habits were not learned or reinforced.” And in 1985, a National Academy of Science study found that government jobs and training programs isolated disadvantaged youth, thus making it harder for them to fit into the real job market.
