This misses the point. There's an obvious solution: disallow employers (except in outlier cases where there are safety concerns) from using criminal background checks in hiring decisions.
I think you've missed the point. Employers have a valid reason to want to disallow those with criminal backgrounds from a large swath of jobs.
This is an area where I think regulation would be helpful/necessary, in that when doing a background check that the employer needs to enter business and job scope, and then the law would define which types of criminal background would be relevant and potentially disqualifying by job type.
Dude I got dinged for a weed possession charge from my 17th year when I was 21 for a job at Kum'N'Go. I don't give a fuck what kinda logical hoops they jumped through, but it's obscene considering about a month after that I was working in a critical industry with literally millions of dollars of equipment in my hands and a high-risk environment. It doesn't make sense in so many cases, probably most and it only increases recidivism.
I'm not exactly sure if you are disagreeing with me, because what you are saying is exactly my point.
A weed possession charge as a minor is the type of thing that I think regulation should disallow as a disqualifying factor for all types of jobs. The idea would be that I would ask a background check service "I am hiring for a CLERK at CONVENIENCE_STORE", and I would just get back a response "No disqualifying convictions found" if all you had were a weed conviction.
I work for a financial services company, and we have pretty clear guidelines about what is or isn't disqualifying. But why should I even have the right to know, for example, if someone was convicted of a DUI 10 years ago? But I absolutely do think I should have the right to know if someone was convicted of theft 2 years ago.
This is currently how Pennsylvania works it’s background checks for working with children. PA law requires everyone who volunteers or works with kids to do a couple state specific background checks. The response from these is a “allow to work with kids” / “not allowed”. They don’t tell you the details.
it’s actually pretty privacy focused way to accomplish things.
I'm not disagreeing. But I don't know that I agree, it's a pretty finicky line. Crime is super contextual, so you're barring people who have been rung through the system, and probably have a new environment, a new context; I mean assuming they committed a significant crime.
But honestly, in the beginning of "Noise" they start detailing some cases Marvin Frankel reviewed:
Frankel did not provide any kind of statistical analysis to support his argument. But he did offer a series of powerful anecdotes, showing unjustified disparities in the treatment of similar people. Two men, neither of whom had a criminal record, were convicted for cashing counterfeit checks in the amounts of $58.40 and $35.20, respectively. The first man was sentenced to fifteen years, the second to 30 days. For embezzlement actions that were similar to one another, one man was sentenced to 117 days in prison, while another was sentenced to 20 years. Pointing to numerous cases of this kind, Frankel deplored what he called the “almost wholly unchecked and sweeping powers” of federal judges, resulting in “arbitrary cruelties perpetrated daily,” which he deemed unacceptable in a “government of laws, not of men.”
Like those check fraud cases are crazy and having that on your record forever? That's some yellow passport shit. Over damages that could be settled trivially. If we did some criminal law reform, yeah I totally agree with you, but I think it's more complicated than just barring results. I'll grant you it'd be better than it is now, I guess, but order of operations I think would be pretty important, but that's an aside for another day.
I'm going to be honest here: if I'm hiring for a CFO or corporate treasurer, I don't want to hire anyone who has intentionally passed a counterfeit check. The fact that they probably have enough cash in their pocket to cover their fraudulent check is entirely irrelevant.
They're possible, the regulation was strike in '05 and are now "advisory".
My point was more the fact that over what, in the worst case, a day's worth of labor can not only earn you fines, time, but also the record.
Check fraud, by my estimation is basically theft. How many employers are going to want a theif?
But here's the thing, that may well have been a one time thing. Homeboy isn't necessarily a theif, but rather he committed at least one singular theft. And one of such minor magnitude I can only assume it was an act of desperation. But any "theft sensitive" employer is going to red flag him. Maybe he's a Thenadier, maybe he's Josef K. You just don't get the granularity necessary to make the determination. And the Court isn't solving moral dilemmas, but simply determining whether or not someone is guilty.
Add in complications like degrees. Somebody gets in a precarious position in their life and steals $1k or something comparably petty, does time, reparations, et etcetera but now they're permanently barred from practicing their specialization.
Ok but if I run a bank I don't want to hire Bernie Madoff, no matter how much time he served. So having the government tell me I can discriminate based on conviction for financial crimes but not drug possession more than 5 years ago seems reasonable. At least to improve the status quo.
If the government says an individual isn't allowed to do something, like work in a financial profession or live near a school, that's up to the government to determine and enforce: "quit/relocate or you'll be back in prison."
I'd be *much* more leery of hiring someone convicted of possession of addictive drugs than someone convicted of possession of recreational drugs. Recreational use can be done only in appropriate situations. Addictive use likely means they come to work impaired.
Here in Norway employers can ask the police for the criminal record for a potential employee[1]. The employer must have a legal right to request the records, and must state the reason and use for the request.
Employers for most common jobs will not have a right to request these records.
The police will then filter the criminal records, if any, so that only relevant entries are listed.
This allows employees who have a genuine need reject potential candidates on legitimate grounds, while giving people a reasonable chance to start over in case they do something wrong.
Regardless of regulation, I don't see anyone who has to disclose a criminal history getting a job, unless the employer is already open to giving formerly incarcerated people an opportunity. IMHO, criminal background is a screening filter, not a thoughtful decision point. So while your criminal history is being cross-referenced with the regulation to see how you qualify, the potential employer has already labeled you as an "ex-con" in their head.
IIRC some countries in Europe do this; if you are hiring for a specific job, you call some office/bureau and they say whether you can do it or not based on your record, no why/etc.
This is not a new idea, it goes by the name "Ban the Box" ("the box" here meaning the "I have been convicted of a felony" checkbox on a job application) and has been implemented in a bunch of US states. The general consensus is that it doesn't really move the needle on employment rates for felons, while at the same time making employment prospects worse for black men because employers now just discard them from the application pipeline entirely since they can't check criminal records.
>DOLEAC: So, we found that, on average, across the U.S., in places that ban the box, employment fell by 5 percent for young black men who didn’t have a college degree and by 3 percent for young Hispanic men who didn’t have a college degree. And so the next question is, who are they hiring instead? And we found, on average, the people who benefited were older men of color. So if you’re trying to avoid people who are actively involved in crime, older people are a pretty good bet. Criminal activity tends to decline with age.
>DUBNER: And what about young under-educated white potential employees?
>DOLEAC: For young white men who had the same level of education, we saw employment increase for that group. What seemed to be happening was that employers were substituting from young men of color to young white men.
That points to a major issue of the criminal justice system. You should be clear after your sentence and have repaid your debt to society. If society wants to send people to correctional facilities for life for things like theft or drug charges, then it should be honest and do that.
If you are imprisoned for embezzlement, do your time, get your name cleared, then do it all again, and again, do you want to hire them as your purchasing agent? I think the answer here is going to have to be on a case by case basis. I'd maybe hire someone for that position if their repeat offense was unrelated and unlikely to impact the position directly (such as, I don't know, 2nd degree murder from DUIs). I'd be wary if they came to work drunk, but that's a separate issue that I'd be concerned about for anybody.
Why not leave me in prison then if we're certain I'm going to do it again?
If the chance of me doing embezzlement is the same after I come out of prison than if I had never been to prison, what is the basis for caring whether or not someone has been to prison?
This assumes a justice system that works, at least in the sense that if you commit a crime and get prosecuted, the following actions are sufficient to prevent or deter you from doing it again, which given things like plea deals, etc. is not.
If we just want to reduce our justice system to a social credit verifier and background check database maintainer, or if this is really the best that can be dne, fine, let's admit that so we can try to do it a lot more cheaply than what we're doing now.
It also ignores how the criminal justice system works, especially in the US, on both ends. Money buys all sorts of sealed, adjudicated, pardoned, plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor, etc, type solutions. Lack of money makes it easy to press "accept this plea bargain or risk eons in jail" convictions on innocent people. There's also a myriad of ways to enhance charges that make a relatively minor crime sound much worse.
No, I think you're missing their point. They weren't proposing a solution. They were simply offering an explanation as to why the situation exists. A good explanation at that, too.
I'd like to see some of those proxies removed from the picture.
1) Employment history: Ban putting dates on a resume and in general make it a prohibited question. You worked there X years, not from YYYY to ZZZZ. The current approach is obviously looking for whether you were fired, but ends up tainting you if you're ever laid off in a bad market, or even if you simply chose non-employment activity for some reason.
2) Address likewise should be removed. Phone & e-mail is all they need.
That would not work. I do not want my teenage daughter to do part time work in a business that employs a sex offender. I do not want to work with an insurance agent who engaged in a financial fraud few years ago.
Here in the UK we a sex offenders register, but general crimes get struck off the official register after a certain period of time and no longer come up on background checks. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than locking people out of work forever!
The criminal mind uses the means available to him. Bernie Madoff was as much a psychopath as a your average mugger; he just had capabilities to not to have to resort to that crude a level of harm.
I would disagree with the implied dichotomy of 'criminal minds' and 'non-criminal minds', especially given the somewhat arbitrary nature of what we as a society decide is a crime worthy of prosecution. Possessing a bit of home-grown marijuana for personal use can give someone a criminal record the same as other more heinous crimes, and many employers will find it easier to blanket-reject anyone with a criminal record rather than dig into the context of each applicant.
Is the answer to not allow any sort of background checks? I would say no, but it also seems like there is a lot of room to improve our current system and find it in our societal heart to not perpetually punish a person for a past minor offense.
It's pretty straightforward to extrapolate from his examples: people do not want to work with nor do business with ex cons. Therefore businesses that hire lots of ex cons likely "wouldn't work" because customers and employees would be scarce.
