11–20 of 157 posts
At least in the US one thing that has made this worse is universal cheap access to criminal background checks. That didn't used to exist, so a criminal background blocked access to jobs with big companies that could do background checks. But, you could get a job at smaller companies. That's gone now...a criminal background gets a "no" from almost everyone. Other countries have a system where some government agency pr…
They need to study deeper, why these young men engage in criminal activities in the first place, only to find themselves arrested and later ineligible for any job. Do they think that benefits from criminal activities outweigh the risks of being caught and not being able to pass any background check for entire life? First step if to stop young men from engaging in criminal behavior, to stop feeding jails with fresh bl…
How many felons, or rather what classes of felony, make you think that they will embezzle money? And what percentage of jobs have embezzlement as an option?
Like, are you worried that the person caught with (felony amount of marijuana) is going to embezzle (any amount of money) from their employer if they are hired as a (fry cook)?
Now, if you're saying that hiring a white collar criminal as an auditor is obviously bad.
They need to study deeper, why these young men engage in criminal activities in the first place, only to find themselves arrested and later ineligible for any job. Do they think that benefits from criminal activities outweigh the risks of being caught and not being able to pass any background check for entire life? First step if to stop young men from engaging in criminal behavior, to stop feeding jails with fresh bl…
To be fair, almost all of the young men I knew growing up (in an affluent chunk of society) engaged in what were then criminal activities. Almost nobody established a criminal record because everyone was wealthy enough to be insulated from law enforcement (they could do the criminal activities in parents' basements and college dorms).
Maybe part of the issue is that many non-harmful behaviors have been criminalized.
At least in the US one thing that has made this worse is universal cheap access to criminal background checks. That didn't used to exist, so a criminal background blocked access to jobs with big companies that could do background checks. But, you could get a job at smaller companies. That's gone now...a criminal background gets a "no" from almost everyone. Other countries have a system where some government agency pr…
Yeah, I wouldn't want a former embezzler in a bookkeeping job at my company.
However, until the employees are more scarce than jobs, there's no reason to hire an ex-con and every reason to skip over them (bureaucratically speaking).
To counter that you'd need to offer incentives TO hire them - tax write-offs or something, or liability protections.
Or you have to expunge records at some point, which is another issue because that only affects government records, not other things background checks may find.
In previous centuries, there were plenty of jobs with low trust requirements - chiefly, unskilled manual labor. A criminal record wasn’t such a barrier to that type of employment. Someone could spend time in prison, and then still find work on the outside. Not great work perhaps, but a living - a way forward for them, to re-integrate back into society. A way to slowly rebuild trust. The shift away from unskilled manu…
They need to study deeper, why these young men engage in criminal activities in the first place, only to find themselves arrested and later ineligible for any job. Do they think that benefits from criminal activities outweigh the risks of being caught and not being able to pass any background check for entire life? First step if to stop young men from engaging in criminal behavior, to stop feeding jails with fresh bl…
> You can’t just ask businesses to stop doing background checks and employ convicted felons and hope they will not embezzle funds from their new employer. The risk is too high. There is a reasonable solution to this, and it's "ban the box" or "fair chance hiring" laws. These laws make it illegal to perform background checks prior to making a conditional offer. The best ones make companies provide substantive, written…
A 2020 study by economist Evan K. Rose found that Ban the Box had negligible effects on ex-offenders' labor market outcomes.[36]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_the_Box#:~:text=Ban%20th....
They need to study deeper, why these young men engage in criminal activities in the first place, only to find themselves arrested and later ineligible for any job. Do they think that benefits from criminal activities outweigh the risks of being caught and not being able to pass any background check for entire life? First step if to stop young men from engaging in criminal behavior, to stop feeding jails with fresh bl…
You can, actually. Businesses exist at the pleasure of the state and the state can fix these problems. Unfortunately, we've been run by right-wing enablers and crooks (in the sense of unethical rule-breakers, not people with criminal records) for so long, we've forgotten that the left has been proposing workable solutions to these problems for decades.
Unless physical safety is at risk, nothing in a person's past should ever be made a legal reason to deny someone a job. If companies want to stay independent, they should be decent. Otherwise, nationalize them and run them as utilities.
Well, executing criminals for minor offenses seems to be out of fashion.[1] Transportation to Australia or Siberia is no longer an option. There's no frontier to ship them off to. And the US military doesn't want criminals; each soldier today has too much firepower.
There are ways back, but it's hard to scale them. Delancey Street Restaurant in SF is staffed by ex-cons. (I recommend the chicken.)
[1] https://www.nationaljusticemuseum.org.uk/museum/news/what-wa...
In previous centuries, there were plenty of jobs with low trust requirements - chiefly, unskilled manual labor. A criminal record wasn’t such a barrier to that type of employment. Someone could spend time in prison, and then still find work on the outside. Not great work perhaps, but a living - a way forward for them, to re-integrate back into society. A way to slowly rebuild trust. The shift away from unskilled manu…
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.