
As labor pool shrinks, prison time is less of a hiring hurdle - el_benhameen
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/business/economy/labor-market-inmates.html
======
RBBronson123
I read this article with interest. 70MillionJobs is a for-profit recruitment
platform for people with criminal records. Our goal is to match the huge pool
of untapped talent (those with records) with employers that have urgent HR
needs. In this capacity, my team and I engage with large, national employers,
so I think we have a strong sense of where the corporate zeitgeist lies
regarding hiring the formerly incarcerated.

While the Times author points to a historically low rate of unemployment and
cites business conditions in Dane County, WI, this willingness to hire men and
women with records does not generally exist with large, national employers.
Nearly all of them have internal criteria relating to who they will or will
not hire, based upon the nature of the crime(s) an applicant has committed and
when it occurred. Most require at least five or six years to pass before
they'd consider hiring someone guilty of a felony.

And therein lies the rub: there's nearly an 80% chance that someone released
from jail or prison will be re-arrested within five years of their release.
The vast majority of them will be unemployed at time of re-arrest.
Contrariwise, there's very little chance of someone who has found employment
being re-arrested. Employment is truly the silver bullet that short circuits
this pernicious cycle of recidivism.

Recent studies have shown that those with records often emerge as an
employer's best hires. Unlike others, people with records have no sense of
entitlement and truly appreciate the opportunity they've been afforded.
Typically, they reward employers with great loyalty, which translates to much
greater retention (the true bane of HR professionals).

While attitudes are changing for the better (I, as a formerly incarcerated
person, have noticed this in my own life), there still exists a great negative
bias towards those with records, the NY Times notwithstanding. Racism figures
mightily in this equation. But we're a country that elected a racist
President, whose Atty General is eager to reinstate ineffective drug laws
(including marijuana) that destroyed lives, families and communities in the
80's 90's and even today.

Anyone with a record can attest to the stigma that doesn't leave after doing
one's time. In fact, for most, it's a life sentence, a sentence that even low
unemployment can't expunge.

~~~
Xeoncross
If I remember correctly, while the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world's
population, we incarcerate 25% of the worlds prison population. I am thankful
for work like yours that is helping to rehabilitate people in the most danger.

~~~
shams93
More people are getting arrested and going to jail for more trivial things
than ever before. Last time I did jury duty it was not a stabbing or drug
addict it was a woman who's home had an overhang on the roof that was 3 inches
past the legal limit based on the zoning code. She was facing up to 5 years in
state prison over something that 20 years ago would have gotten her maybe a
$1000 fine.

~~~
mirimir
Huh?

There's prison time for building code violations?

~~~
ufmace
I think there may be a case of plea bargaining behind that, assuming it's
true. Many prosecutors like to offer suspects the option of pleading to a
minor crime with minor punishment versus going to trial for a more serious
crime.

In the ideal case, if the suspect is actually guilty, they save the
prosecutors office time and money in actually preparing the case for trial,
and the defendant gets a lesser punishment and doesn't spend their money on a
trial defense either.

In the less ideal case, say if the suspect is actually innocent but is not
believed or can't prove it easily, the suspects are put in a tough position -
plead guilty to something they didn't do, or a long and expensive trial with
uncertain outcome. It gets particularly dubious when the prosecutors try to
tilt the scales towards the plea side by threatening to go for the max
punishment on the most serious crime they could possibly charge if the suspect
chooses a trial. It sounds like this could be a case where this threat was
carried out and the prosecutor is going for a knowingly over the top
punishment to punish them for daring to not take a guilty plea.

------
jlgaddis
> _Ahu Yildirmaz, an economist who helps lead the research arm of the payroll-
> processing company ADP, said her firm’s data showed more people switching
> jobs, and getting bigger bumps in pay for doing so._

So... if I work for a company who uses ADP for payroll, ADP is tracking
if/when I change jobs and how much my salary is over time?

I wonder what else they're doing with my private information.

~~~
RhodesianHunter
The ADP employment report is eagerly watched by economists and traders and
goes back decades.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_National_Employment_Repo...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_National_Employment_Report)

------
lamarpye
My wife's company unknowingly hired someone with a criminal record(he used his
brother identity to get the job). He attempted to rape another employee and
killed the person who stopped him. The company paid rather large settlement to
the victims of these crimes. Incidents like this reinforce the notion that it
isn't worth the risk to hire people with a criminal record.

~~~
mc32
There's a difference between someone guilty of murder and other physical
violence such as aggravated rape and other felonies like larceny, burgling,
fraud, etc., where there is a good chance at rehabilitation, esp., if the
crime was fueled by drug addiction.

~~~
Teever
I worked with someone who had 16 assault charges. To be totally honest I'd
prefer working with someone convicted of murder than that guy.

The thing with 16 charges of _anything_ is that you know there's going to be a
17th, an 18th... and so on.

Some people can be rehabilitated, some people can't. Severity of the crime
isn't necessarily indicative of that.

~~~
vidarh
You'd likely be right to do so. Murder actually has an extremely low repeat
rate. Murderers does have a higher chance of committing another crime on
release than people not convicted of a crime, presumably in part because of
higher chance of unemployment and poverty, but most murderers are extremely
unlikely to ever kill again as most murders are crimes of passion in extreme
circumstances that are extremely unlikely to occur again.

------
thatoneguy
FWIW, when I was at Google I had at least two colleagues with felony records.
It made me even more proud to work there as it showed the company was willing
to look beyond mistakes made in someone's past.

------
GraffitiTim
There's a YC app for that:

[https://www.70millionjobs.com/](https://www.70millionjobs.com/)

------
Selfcommit
I'm really confused - when did we suddenly start having a labor shortage?

~~~
Spooky23
We do a shitty job at educating people, so it’s hard to hire qualified people
in many industries.

Try finding a master plumber or electrician. Or a mid level IT person. They
don’t exist.

Companies run so lean there’s no pipeline of internal candidates either. Where
I work, it’s impossible to hire competent managers with technical skills. The
normal places you’d look are full of young/inexperienced and old/stagnant.

~~~
iamdave
I can't speak to plumbing and electrical work, those aren't my industries but

 _Or a mid level IT person. They don’t exist._

My knee jerk reaction is to say "I absolutely refuse to believe this is true",
but I will concede that the problem (here, I am defining problem not as a
shortage of qualified talent, but a shortage of qualified talent that actually
progresses to getting hired) exists because of symptoms you correctly
highlighted "pipelines" and "competent managers". I will admit-however-to
being biased as someone who's worked in IT for decades and later became a
technical recruiter with an agency who wanted someone on staff that could have
conversations with tech professionals on a meaningful, personal level.

Unrealistic or otherwise unsustainable hiring manager expectations and
offensive constraints on salary compared with demanded skills seem to have
created artificial scarcities of talent in IT hiring (pipeline). Candidates
are expected to come in the door having every bullet point in a 120 bullet
point job ad satisfied as to core-competencies, and when hired, they're given
a workstation and sent off to the grind with just enough training and grooming
to know the name of the product and the ability to rattle off a list of
libraries and frameworks used. Skill gaps get resumes thrown out, even if it's
some middling gap that with time and support from senior techs can be rapidly
closed with a dose of on the job training. Something that seems as extinct as
the pterodactyl nowadays.

Heck, just last week I had a talk with a recruiter who was looking for a
DevOps Engineer (not strictly IT in the traditional sense of the phrase, but I
bring this up to highlight my point) and we joked about one job spec that was
looking for a senior level expert with five years experience in Kubernetes
(competent managers). Let that one soak in. The hiring manager _demanded_ a
five year expert in Kubernetes, which hasn't been around for a full three.

My recruiter friend told me they dropped this client after a few more job
specs like this because they couldn't get a single candidate past a pre-
screening due to hiring manager expecting the world-and they were preparing to
do the same to a few other clients for the same reason. I asked if she were
worried about what this would do to their billings "No, because we have other
clients who pay us more, but have much more manageable expectations on job
candidates."

I wish this were the exception versus the norm but if I have to hear one more
time that there aren't qualified IT people I will probably rip what's left of
my greying hair right out of my head because if this is true, it's not the
fault of IT personnel, it's the fault of everyone involved in the hiring
process refusing to manage their own darn expectations.

~~~
RhodesianHunter
"offensive constraints on salary"

This is the entirety of it right here. There's only a shortage when your pay
is below market.

------
Simulacra
I think unless the crime is directly linked to the job, for instance bank
robbery and working in a bank, they should not be allowed to ask you about
your criminal history.

~~~
city41
I would not be comfortable working with people who have committed violent
felonies.

~~~
andybak
> I would not be comfortable working with people who have committed violent
> felonies.

I think that's still a very broad category. There's situations that could lead
to violent acts but wouldn't mean that person was a risk in the workplace. We
all know people who've been in fights and sheer bad luck can turn a brawl into
homocide. (a "lucky" punch, an "unlucky" fall leading to a head injury).

Personally I've never been in a fight other than the playground shoving kind -
and violence seriously freaks me out. But I know that people I know and trust
could have easily crossed that line if chance had have played them a different
hand.

------
Shivetya
work needs to be done to allow those with records into jobs that require
occupational licenses. these can be local, state, or even federal
restrictions. a felon could serve to fight wild fires and find in many
jurisdictions they cannot become a fire fighter or hold any public job.

Just check it out below!
[https://niccc.csgjusticecenter.org/map/](https://niccc.csgjusticecenter.org/map/)

~~~
shagie
Glancing at the restrictions on firefighter, it appears that they fall under
the same set of regulations as police.

One finds things like:

> Ineligible for employment with municipal fire department (mandatory for
> felonies/crimes involving moral turpitude)

> Any felony; Crime of moral turpitude; Crimes involving fraud, dishonesty,
> misrepresentation or money-laundering

or:

> Ineligible for employment in the police or fire department
> (second/third/fourth class cities)

> Any felony; Any misdemeanor

Is that a reasonable restriction?

I am of the understanding that these restrictions are in place so that others
can't can't compromise the integrity of one working in that office. Having
gambling debts is something that allows people to blackmail or otherwise
influence a person.

Looking through that, are there any that are particularly "why is this even
there?" that you can point out that fall in the mandatory/automatic for
consequence type?

------
mtgx
Also labor pool is shrinking because more people are put in prison over
nothing (while white rich people continue to get away with almost anything).

~~~
rainbowmverse
The phrasing on the latter half seems likely to cause a big mess of an
argument, despite its statistical accuracy. Is there a better way to put it?

~~~
geofft
I would hope that this forum understands the importance of not censoring
truths that are politically incorrect....

~~~
AlexB138
I may be misunderstanding you, but politically attacking rich people and white
people are some of the most popular things going right now, especially among
the demographic common around HN. It's almost the opposite of politically
incorrect.

Not saying all complaints are unfounded, but it's far from politically
incorrect in many groups.

~~~
geofft
I don't think "politically incorrect" is necessarily correlated with
"unpopular" \- see, for instance, the number of news articles about how
countless people are thrilled with Trump for saying out loud the "politically
incorrect" things that they were just thinking.

~~~
AlexB138
Fair point. Still, political correctness is very much about avoiding offense
or further disadvantage toward marginalized groups. It still doesn't fit to
claim it's politically incorrect to go after rich white people. It's a
pedantic point though, I admit.

~~~
geofft
I agree that that's how the phrase is used in practice (and yeah, language is
descriptive), but I don't think the idea itself has any fundamental reason why
it's about offense towards the marginalized and not offense towards the
powerful--especially given that the powerful, somewhat by definition, tend to
control politics and standards of decorum.

------
rootw0rm
Convicted felon here....it's still a massive hurdle.

------
kebman
No shit, Sherlock.

------
guskel
I have an engineering friend who went to prison twice a couple of years ago
and he's making 200k now.

~~~
swozey
Everyone knows people like that. The problem is the amount of ex-felons who
can't even land a median salary job. Not everyone, even in the non-con pool,
can pull off a 6 figure tech wiz job.

