Government officials in Amherst, VA can now require employers to fire ex-cons
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I would think that a punishment for a crime that includes forced destitution for life independently of the nature of the crime would be considered cruel and unusual. But the Bill of Rights doesn't seem to be taken seriously anymore either.
It's technology's fault. Before the advent of widespread computers capable of indexing large amounts of data, in order for someone to know a person had a felony, they would have had to know where you were convicted, travel to the courthouse in that county, and go through stacks of dusty paper files.
This struck a good balance between making court records public (anyone can look at them), and the privacy of individual defendants (few people bothered because it's time-consuming and inconvenient, therefore expensive).
Of course software's eaten this market, there are companies that have digitized and indexed all those public records, and now you can run background checks on people with a few mouse clicks and a few bucks on your credit card.
Its our fault, not technology's. Technology is just a tool; we've failed to properly address how it should be used.
See: Drones, NSA spying, etc as well.
On a serious note, you're running perilously close to google and the right to forget. I strongly agree with you, but it's the google party line that there's no difference at all between (1) the ability to conduct a background check on someone as long as you're willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars, and (2) the ability for anyone to conduct and publicize a background check for free. You'll note also that asshole Eric Schmidt simultaneously suggested people should change their names if they want youthful indiscretions not to follow them for the rest of their life while using his billions and lawyers to erase his mistresses' stories from the internet.
But it's hard for me to separate that all from the general Calvinist/religious culture of the area where I live.
I think for some groups in this country, we're not just getting to this place, this is where we've been for a long time. It's just that the masses are better able to access information about it now.
Blacks being killed by police with indiscretion did not start in 2013. I'd guess in fact that that the past 5 years were way better for black live than the 5 years before them. People just happen to be paying attention now.
What is the name of the police camera company that you are talking about?
IMO, it's trigger, news story, more news stories, response to all the news, news stories about the movement, self sustaining movement. with more news being the fake bit.
Without people actively trying to sell things there are far more important issues, but a little media judo can shift perception and policy.
But we don't do the same with kidnappers or murderers.
How insane is that?
This doesn't change your point at all, just wanted to point out that putting "kidnappers" on the list might not be very effective.
Not unlike how putting all "sex offenders" on the list is not effective.
The 17 year old having (nominally) consensual sex with a 15 year old. The drunken liaison where one party was not able to consent (doesn't remember consenting, didn't, or otherwise). The breaking and entering to rape at knife point.
I do not consider these equal crimes, and whilst I've no objection to legal intervention in each I think the key on is to appropriately manage the risk of re offending. Making someone's life nigh on impossible after serving time only makes them resent the system and interferes with proper re-integration into society. That's the only meaningful goal. Or it should be in my opinion.
It may not be perfect, and there are very real issues with making it harder for people to resume a normal life after getting out, but this is actually one of those areas where actions are more in line with actual risks than a lot of policies relating to how past offenders are treated.
Murderers are highly unlikely to carry out another murder - most murders are "one of a kind" heat of passion, not sociopaths killing for the entertainment value or similar. The nature of the victims of murders and the low risk of re-offending makes it relatively low risk to live near someone who has carried out a murder in the past.
Sex-offenders are much more likely to be an ongoing risk to society after being released, and sex-offenders who have previously targeted children are extremely likely to target based on level of access (e.g. parents and close relatives top the list, but other people with close access to a child rank high, such as e.g. a neighbour that manages to become friends with the parents of a child), which is a particular impetus for people to worry about where they live.
There is a total of about 5,00 people in the US on the register for exposure - and obviously not all of those are there for public urination.
This means I can prevent a school from being built near my house by peeing in a public place... :-)
Intuitively (I'm not an actuary), it seems that insurance companies get away with charging you more if you've had a prior accident. It seems a person who has broken the law may be more likely to break it than the average person.
I think it stinks that this local govt can tell a business to fire a felon though, that just compounds the problem of re-entry. I smell a Supreme Court case in the future.
The courts will shut it down when challenged, I'd hope.
There's a lot more to american society than standing in a voting booth. I agree it's a steep price, but there's no need to exaggerate.
Kids have no voting rights either. Or legal aliens. Or visiting diplomats. Etc.
If you were genuinely curious, "what's your opinion on voting rights for convicted criminals?" would be a better way to ask.
Asking nicely makes it more likely that you will get one.
People are much more likely to answer a question when it seems like you're interested in a genuine answer, than when it seems like you've already passed judgment and the question is a mere formality.
They were not asking in a pleasant manner, but they were also not being outright rude. Not every interaction has to be sunshine and lollipops.
Passive-agressive outrage at the apparent lack of concern for the disenfranchisement of a fairly large population group seems... ok in the grand scheme. No name calling, no yelling, and no 'please sir, will you answer me this' is required.
This advice parallels one of the Hacker News guidelines: "avoid gratuitous negativity". Asking questions in a gratuitously negative way doesn't usually make for good conversation.
http://www.stoppa-pedofilerna.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/...
Porn is icky, disgusting, and distasteful
A movie with torture, graphic violence, and gore is a fun friday evening.
Go to some place like Germany and notice they are very anti-violence and more sexually open. You see nudity on German broadcast television but not graphic violence. I'd say their priorities are much better in that regard.
Do you mean "not actually guilty even though they were found guilty" or do we put people on sex offender registries without due process?
But there is this about the UK: "and unconvicted people thought to be at risk of offending" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender_registry#United_K...
I work in part in reentry, these people are trying to get their lives back together yet people want to treat them like bad behaving children instead of the adults that they are. I'm not saying they are fully functioning adults, most of them are just dumped out of the prison system and need a great deal of help to get back on their feet (find somewhere to live, a job, etc) but treating them as less-than... I can't think of a worse way to approach this problem. Thankfully the company I work for is largely part of the solution and not the problem or I couldn't bear to work in this industry.
Since society is not actually an entity that can be paid anything, it's not surprising that individuals want to treat ex-cons unfairly.
I think we should scrap the notion of "paying your debt to society" altogether and instead focus on making victims whole. As it stands, victims of crime get minimal remuneration[1], and it varies by state. It's not the criminal who pays the victim, it's the taxpayer. And then the taxpayer gets to pay for the prison term as well.
[1]: http://www.victimsofcrime.org/help-for-crime-victims/get-hel...
We have a whole justice system for that -- and its not the criminal justice system.
The criminal justice system exist to serve interests that aren't addressed by the compensatory orientation of the civil justice system.
Why would you give the victim of, say, an assault... money ???
I thought the idea was to give that person justice ??? And for that reason, we put the perpetrator in a prison that, of course, we pay for.
What exactly is wrong with that system ???
A person should be in jail if they are proven to be a continuing danger to others. A person should not be put in a cage simply to give the victim an emotional release under the "Eye for an Eye" doctrine.
Monetary compensation to victims is an attempt to make a person whole. Victims of all types of crime suffer actual damages such as medical bills, lost wages, damage to property. There is there are indirect damages for things like victim counseling.
Often times it is simply not possible to fully make a person "whole" again after a crime, however monetary compensation is the best option we have today to ensure the victim can get the needed treatment, or aid they need to at-least move forward with their lives
Locking persons in a cage does not help the victim, or the criminal. Prison should be used to separate persons from society to dangerous to be allowed to walk free... Nothing else.
no. i'm sorry but just no. People are in prison because their actions have proven they are a danger to others and should only be released then they have PROVEN THEY ARE NOT a danger to others.
That's a pretty big assumption given that prosecutors face no professional or personal consequences for wrongful convictions, even if they are particularly egregious.
That takes quite a faith in process that has little remedial feedback.
Unlike say engineering or medicine where there can be a said to be an objectively observable system where all strive towards similar outcomes - and even those disciplines screw up constantly.
"Otherwise that leads to basically letting everyone go free just in case they're actually innocent"
There is a huge category of crime where long term incarceration absolutely does no help to anyone whatsoever.
Do you believe people should be guilty until proven innocent as well? Functionally that is what you are saying
Penal theory is a complex topic. The intellectual heavyweight on this topic from a philosophical standpoint is the late Michel Foucault, who wrote a book called Discipline and Punish studying the origin of the prison. It's not an easy read (I strongly suspect Foucault just banged out his first draft on a typewriter and then browbeat his publisher into printing it without any revisions) but an extremely thought-provoking one.
Basically his thesis is that in earlier times, most work was agricultural and lawbreaking was treated as tantamount to attacking the king of a country, so terrible retributions and tortures would be visited on the body of offenders in a way that was meant to mirror the (metaphorical) injury to the body of the monarch (which was the embodiment of society, law and so on). although such punishments were gruesome (and often had the unintended effect of creating sympathy or notoriety for criminals) they were not actually administered that often and there was actually a lot of wiggle room between what the law said and how it was enforced, which had the purpose of acting as a political safety valve while still making it easy to crack down on real threats (truly awful crimes, or waves of crime by rebellious mobs etc.).
At the dawn of the industrial age, the factors of economic production shifted away from land and towards other forms of capital, and manufacturing shifted away from skilled craftsmen in self-policing guilds towards factories and so on. The division of labor and specialization made organization essential, and first the workplace, then also schools, hospitals, and eventually prisons were reconstituted in the image of military camps, since standardization and deindividuation had long proved their worth in military conflict.
Foucault argues that organizing, quantizing, and generally systematizing the punishment of crimes led to an increasingly impersonal approach based on surveillance and the manufacture of compliant behavior as a social product (note, for example, the oddly anthropomorphic architecture of Pentonville prison, which was heavily influenced by Benthamite concepts of continuous surveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice#/media/Fil...). Insofar as this disciplinary approach became the norm across society as the middle class displaced the peasantry as the primary political force, so too it made society more and more neurotic and whole industries sprang up to manage and indeed optimize these neuroses. Further, establishment of prisons as a mainstream social technology practically guaranteed the dissemination of criminal knowledge between inmates, providing society with a way to extract value from criminal enterprises at the same time that expanding the scope of criminalization proved an effective tool for restraining whole sections of the population by channeling criminal energies into fairly predictable and manageable channels.
tl;dr by default, we're actually cogs in a big economic machine that molds our entire perception of reality. Various science fiction films like The Matrix make a similar argument in allegorical terms.
This "debt to society" was invented in order to justify the creation of 1000's of victimless "crimes"
It should be very simple... No Victim, No Crime.
As a matter of General Law, no.
However if the property owner, in this case the school board, chooses on their own to disallow guns on their property then a person violating that would be guilty of criminal trespass.
This is true for a Starbucks, Walmart, your personal home or any other property.
That being said the issue gets a little more tricky when it comes to government run property, with government run property I tend to come down on what I think is a reasonable position of if you are not required by law to be there then the individual government agencies can restrict gun possession provided there is not a superior law preventing that.. an example would be many State governments preempt local parks depts from passing rules prohibiting carry in a public park.
>>>And one can drive as fast a she wants as long as there is no accident?
Generally speaking I believe in enforcement of Reckless Driving Laws and less on arbitrarily defined laws. For the most part speed limits are less about safety and more about revenue generation for local government. Even under todays law if you are driving the speed limit and a cops believes that is unsafe for the road conditions you can be ticketed and even arrested.
>>>One can sell outdated food as long as no client gets sick?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY
Relevant Part at ~9:35
But who is the victim then? What was the damage? How does that compare to the case where they didn't make that rule?
They can say "No one wearing blue shirts", or "No entry after 5pm" or any other rule they want to impose, if you violate that you have violated their property rights.
Copyright: IP owners who lose money, everyone who no longer benefits from new content because making it is economically unsustainable.
Regulation: consumers who buy defective and dangerous products (particularly drugs), people who drink contaminated water and breathe contaminated air, people whose radio electronics won't work anymore because some asshole is jamming them, people whose retirement accounts evaporate on irresponsible trades or investment in fraudulent businesses, people who become suddenly homeless on the whims of their landlords, people who get hit by speeding cars, drunk drivers, cars without working brakes, cars that don't properly signal their presence and intentions.
War on Drugs: people whose friends and family members become unreliable and/or dead because of their addictions.
Tax fraud: people whose economic and medical situations get worse when government is underfunded.
Setting aside the fact that I do not believe in the concept of IP. To the extent that the government grants such a privilege, there is a victim, the "owner" of the intellectual privilege. That person can raise their hand and say "I am a victim of Infringement on my government granted intellectual privilege"
>>>Regulation: consumers who buy defective and dangerous products (particularly drugs), people who drink contaminated water and breathe contaminated air, people whose radio electronics won't work anymore because some asshole is jamming them, people whose retirement accounts evaporate on irresponsible trades or investment in fraudulent businesses, people who become suddenly homeless on the whims of their landlords, people who get hit by speeding cars, drunk drivers, cars without working brakes, cars that don't properly signal their presence and intentions.
All of these are victims to some extent, I do not think you understand what the term victim means in this context. One does not have to be physically harmed to be a victim, you can be a victim of fraud, theft, negligence, these are all victims.
>>>War on Drugs: people whose friends and family members become unreliable and/or dead because of their addictions.
A person using drugs of their own free will can not be classified as a Victim, it is tragic yes but so is suicided, or countless other things. Family members are not being "victimized" by that. Further arresting a Drug abuser has been objectively proven to be about the worst thing you can do for them, and a sure fire way to turn a drug user into an abuser is to ruin their lives with criminal records and penalties.
No Families are not "victims" when a family member uses drugs, any more than they are "victims" when a family member makes any other life choice that is poor.
>>>Tax fraud: people whose economic and medical situations get worse when government is underfunded
Setting aside the fact that I believe taxation to be theft, Taxation produces victims every day, every single taxpayer is a victim of unethical and immoral theft by government...
Setting that aside no one is entitled to other peoples money, if a government program is underfunded that does not make a victim.
>using drugs of their own free will
Some proponents of drug prohibition would argue that people (particularly teens) are not using drugs of their own free will, but exploited by dealers and peer groups. Others of a more liberal bent might argue that people don't use hard drugs of their own free will, but as a release from desperate circumstances - becoming a heroin addict is no more a "free" act than jumping from a burning building.
>no one is entitled to other peoples money
Says you. It's certainly not a property of the universe - just 400 years ago there'd have been no question that the lord of the manor owned all your labor, graciously giving you your daily bread out of Christian obligation. Every man for himself is a relatively recent development in human history. You may consider it progress. But a leftist wouldn't - he would say progress is the replacement of the lord of the manor by a democratic state, or the people as a whole, or something like that.
Failure to help your fellow man obviously has victims - thousands of people die of circumstances that could have been alleviated by your money. As do taxes, as do environment regulations (some are spared cancer; some are out of a job; some are out a great deal of capital equipment). The question of politics is what distribution of harm is just.
Incidentally, if you're ever tempted to shit on liberal arts majors... this is what they do all day. Philosophy is, in large part, working through very old and complex arguments on questions such as this. "What is justice?" is at least as old as Plato's Republic and the conversation continues for thousands of years.
They may be traumatized, but they are not victimized
>>>Some proponents of drug prohibition would argue that people (particularly teens) are not using drugs of their own free will
those same people believe that nothing is "free will". That free will does not exist. You should ignore those people.
>>>It's certainly not a property of the universe - just 400 years ago there'd have been no question that the lord of the manor owned all your labor,
Using unethical policies in history to justify more unethical polices today is ridiculous.
>>>Failure to help your fellow man obviously has victims - thousands of people die of circumstances that could have been alleviated by your money.
You keep using the word victim to describe tragedies, I do not think you understand the difference. Humanities failure to help people in need is not victimizing them, it is a tragedy.
"It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.
People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we’re compassionate we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint." -- Penn Jillette
But insofar as governments are constituted or upheld by the will of the citizens, there's no moral injury. People want physical and social infrastructure and voluntarily group together to set up institutions to achieve those ends. Now, since nobody alive in the USA today was around to sign the Constitution you could argue that everyone living in the US at present was opted into a social contract without their consent, but on the other hand there's a longstanding legal principle called quantum meruit that says it's OK to charge for services that were provided out of reasonable necessity even if they weren't requested. This is why you can be knocked unconscious and later receive a bill for being transported to the hospital by ambulance, even though you were aware of or competent to contract with the ambulance operators. (This has happened to me, and it's quite a strange experience to get a large bill for a service you have no memory of receiving.)
Crime can be personal, but law and justice are statistical, bureaucratic instruments that target societies, not individuals. They only produce as an accidental external factor occasional catharsis for the victim.
The inclination to enslave others is ingrained into certain strains of the human species and they will take them where it can find them.
If the offender repeated the crime while being older than 25, then no. There is no realistic hope that the person will ever be non-harmful. Never let them free.
(cases between those two extremes are questionable)
And why start with a semantically negative presumption, anyway? A world of difference in attitude can be reaped from daring to ask whether a person might harm again, rather than if they will "ever be non-harmful".
Get in to a drunken fight at the bar on night... Life
Shoplift a pack of gum.... Life
WOW....
So it's actually like this:
You reach 25. You assault somebody. You serve time in prison. (now a questionable case) We decide to give you a second chance. You feel no need to follow the law, and you enjoy assaulting people, so you do it again. OK, at this point we know what kind of person you are. You didn't just make a bad decision one day. Simply letting you out into society is pretty much the same as assaulting a random person, because that is clearly what you are going to do.
Never mind the issue of ex-cons, the premise that freedom of contract and association (i.e. gather a group of people to engage in commercial activity) is a “privilege” granted by the government is arguably unconstitutional.
There are reasons to regulate but the default position should be that you have a right to engage in commercial activities and that right should only be restricted via due process (such as the levels of scruitiny employed by the Supreme Court).
A business license is what frees you from personal liability. I don't know of any approach to contracts or personal freedom which suggests society automatically owes zero-personal-liability to everyone without conditions or restrictions attached.
Presumably the idea behind business licensing at the local level is that commercial entities require extra service from the government with regard to code enforcement, city planning, fire/police protection, and so on, and the license fees help pay for those services. Discriminating against anyone for pretty much any reason would be grounds for a lawsuit against the municipality or county.
Edit: Hell: add the Fifth amendment (double jeopardy, due process, just compensation), Eighth (cruel and unusual punishment), Ninth (generally), Thirteenth & Fourteenth (if one cannot work gainfully, what options remain, equal protection), and Fifteenth (statistically given crime and conviction statistics)?
Plus as a purely practical matter, banning former criminals from making a legal living seems like a pretty good way to ensure they continue to commit crimes.
That doctrine was reversed in the 1930s to permit states to set a minimum wage, but granting states greater authority to regulate contracts cuts both ways.
See Holmes' famous dissent in Lochner in which he said "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics."
This county wants ex-cons back in prison or in another state.
But piling on additional penalties, ex-post-facto, without hearing, isn't due process.
That's the substance of the dispute here.
Yeah. Biased jury selection.
The Sixth Amendment lays out most of what comprises due process:
the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Also Art III Sec 2:
The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment; shall be by Jury...
And again, the Virginia statute clearly fails XIV:
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
This shouldn't withstand federal judicial scrutiny for a second.
Background checks are not perfect, we know. That's why when you apply, you have the right to get a full report for free. I always recommend checking that box to get it when applying. That way, if something comes up, you can dispute it with the background check agency, and it's very easy.
1. Virginia is a "ban the box" state, meaning it is state law that the state or government contractor cannot ask about a criminal background until a formal offer of employment is on the table. Unless of course the job requires prior to extending the offer (i.e. schools can't employ sex offenders, law enforcement jobs don't want convicted felons, etc..).
2. The Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits job discrimination on a criminal background when it comes to race or nationality.
The law seems to have been written with a very broad pen. While I understand there are certain businesses that should not be run by certain convicted felons (i.e. you don't want a daycare center run by someone convicted of molesting children), this law seems like it was written to solve a specific problem and needed a very general approach. Comparably, many states/cities do have restrictions on the types of licenses an individual can get based on their background (commonly referred to a collateral consequences of a conviction - http://www.abacollateralconsequences.org/). For example, some states prohibit the issuing of a real estate license to individuals convicted of fraud.
I don't know if it is a coincidence or not, but this ordinance came into effect a month after the governor of Virginia signed the Ban the Box law.
What happens if the answer is "Yes, I've been convicted of a serious felony" after a formal offer of employment is on the table?
but there has to be a justifiable reason why the individual cannot be hired.
Hold them accountable under the Hobbs Act for obstructing interstate commerce via extortion of business licenses? http://extortion.uslegal.com/anti-racketeering-act-hobbs-act...
Not to mention a local "business license" is shady. It seems like a major restraint on first amendment freedom of association.
But unless other wise mandated (mostly sexual offenders stuff) It's up to the employer to make that decision, what right does a government has to force a private employer to fire their employees on any count?
I'm perfectly fine with that following due process for the specific matter pertinent to the firing, or as part of an issued sentence or punishment for an original crime.
E.g., sexual predators (and no, not someone urinating in public) not working in seclusion with children, or those convicted of business fraud and related crimes not being officers of a company, losing accounting, actuary or similar licenses, etc.
But "thou shalt not work" doesn't cut it.
I think this is the key point. You have a fundamental right to work for anyone who wants to hire you. The government can take away that right (and other fundamental rights) as punishment for a crime when you are convicted. I don't see how they can take away rights that are not a part of that sentence. That would be like calling you back for another year of prison after your sentence was completed.
If you're in the left and believe in equality, it's disgusting.
If you're in the right an believe in freedom, it's disgusting.
While many on the left believe that the criminal justice system has structural inequities that need to be addressed, few on the left would adhere to the position that past conviction of a crime is categorically unacceptable basis for discrimination (though they might agree that particular instances of it exceed what is warranted.)
So, I don't think this works as a blanket statement.
> If you're in the right an believe in freedom, it's disgusting.
Most on the right would not, IME, support the position that freedom cannot be restricted based on past conviction of a crime. So I don't think this works as a blanket statement either.
On the left, while supporting equal opportunities, there'd be simply no reason to support outcasting individuals, especially when many ex-cons were raised in poverty and are URM. You don't have to be like SFiscans(tax breaks for employers that hire ex-cons) to be against this.
As someone on the right, one issue here is who is doing the restricting of freedom. One approach that strikes me as reasonable is requiring full disclosure, but the state then can't interfere in the relationship between a business and potential employee, aside from obvious exceptions like crimes of pedophilia and care of children.
In between there can be issues where someone is put in a position of trust over other's lives, like, say, a bus driver. But this sort of meat ax approach ... no, I doubt it's going to find a lot of support on the right. Certainly not from myself.
but as someone on the left, a great deal of what is taken for granted in the US penal system is categorically unacceptable to me. In my country (Ireland) and most other EU countries except the UK, people in prison are still allowed to vote in elections, for example; we consider the ideal of political self-determination so sacred that it is inalienable even if you lose your liberty.
Of course a cynical rejoinder to this is to point out the futility of voting as a political determinant and I can't really answer that other than to stand on principle. As a pragmatic matter I dunno how you expect people to reintegrate into society by formally excluding them from the annual rituals of civic participation but then most hardliners aren't interested in the rehabilitation arguments anyway. As a foreigner living in the US I can't vote anyway and I feel left out on election days; I think eliminating the franchise for people with a felony conviction is an appalling psychic injury to inflict on people (even if they never voted before going into prison) and it's one of the least defensible features of UK and US culture.
If you convince one person to change their vote from what you wouldn't have voted to what you would have, you've done twice as much good as simply casting a vote.
When Do You Need a License?
Your gross income is $12,000 per year or more.
Your business is required to collect sales tax.
Your business is required to pay taxes or fees to the Department of Revenue.
You are a buyer or processor of specialty wood products.
If you answer yes to any of the above statements, then you need to register with
the DOR. If you’re a corporation, limited liability company, limited liability
partnership, a limited partnership, or one of the offshoots of these three
organizational structures, you need to register with Washington’s Secretary of
State Office prior to filing a Business License Application.
I think most state licensing is more limited, but still tends to cover wide professional areas and often is more trade protectionism than public benefit.
I've often seen various places asking for "business licenses" but as far as I know there's no such thing where I live (New York State). There are licenses for certain professions and types of business of course, but you don't need a license to start a business in a field that isn't explicitly regulated.
We can all hate lawyers and laws, but throwing around "felon" and "convict" so loosely has brought us to this unsettling situation. I can understand giving a commissioner power to have a "felon" fired or barred from certain employment, but only under the old definition of the word (murders, rapists, arsonists etc).
I'm not sure the law could be used to bar any and all employment. It may be constitutional as a 'regulation' but a total ban on any form of work would be a per se deprivation. It's akin to land use rules which can limit used but cannot forbid any and all economic use. That constitutes a taking, as banning someone from any and all work would constitute an unconstitutional exile and/or an ex poste facto increase in punishment.
A C corp (a la Clerky) would still be a bit of a pain because you're subject to all the regulations & double taxation of a corporation, but I believe an LLC gives you pass-through taxation with little administrative hassle.
If you incorporate as a single member LLC, then the IRS doesn't usually consider you to be an employee either.
The truth of this problem however is probably more prosaic. Someone in Amherst has somehow gotten under the skin of the mayor or city council - probably refused to contribute to a campaign or hire someone's dumbass relative so now the target gets to enjoy the benefits of "civil society" or whatever half-assed rationale finds its way to the local rag.
Ironically, these are just the qualities that make you most suited to be a municipal politician.
There are restrictions around certain trades (electricians, doctors, etc), but they're the exception, not the rule.
"Behind Deadly Tianjin Blast, Shortcuts and Lax Rules" http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/world/asia/behind-tianjin-...
One partner was the son of a local police chief, the other an executive at a state-run chemicals firm. After meeting at a dinner party, they started a company here to handle the export of the most dangerous chemicals made in China, promising “outstanding service” and “good results.”
Some days I read the news and can scarcely believe what I'm reading. I wouldn't believe it at all if it weren't under the Washington Post banner...
This is the same place conspiratists say Disney is building a theme park. Nothing to see here, really.
We don't let people use submission titles to editorialize. If you have a point to argue, such as that a law effectively makes ex-cons unemployable, you should argue it by commenting in the thread, where everyone is on a level playing field. Otherwise the submitter of a story would get to frame it for everyone else, a huge undue influence over the discussion.
Getting the original submission title is one of my favorite things about having my own HN reader.
(Its derived from the usage of the term "convict" to refer specifically to a person who is currently serving a sentence for a conviction of a crime, i.e., a prisoner or inmate.)
If "convict", the noun, had a primary definition of anyone who has ever been convicted rather than someone serving a sentence for a conviction, then, yes, you might be right that you couldn't be an "ex-convict". But that's not what the word means.
The article of course means you can't obtain government protection for your business. You can still privately transact as much as you'd like. If you've been convicted criminally, the possibility of some direct civil liability shouldn't scare you. For instance, put your savings in bitcoin or an offshore trust and have a plan to get the fuck out of dodge to avoid debtors' prison. Obviously this isn't an ideal way to live your life, but these are our times.
Of course if the government were functioning properly, keeping a business license would be contingent upon not firing "ex-cons", since having served their time their punishment is complete. But we already know it's irreperably broken.
This makes no sense whatsoever.
You're thus already disqualified from relationships that require you to be a squeaky clean perfect abstraction. Those databases showing a large debt / bankruptcy / ongoing suit / etc will not harm you nearly as much as someone who was clean, and even having to relocate to duck a judgment won't hurt you as much since you're already not benefitting from touting your identity.
I'm not saying you should deliberately attract civil suits since losing one would still be quite disruptive, but that spectre of a little-merit high-payout suit destroying your perfect life is no longer so large since you're already suffering half the damage.
Which obviously means that you have even more to lose from further setbacks, since your options were constrained to begin with.
You're assuming that there are very few opportunities outside of those databases, so a second event would wipe out a good part of your remaining ones. If this is your worldview, then yes your best bet is to live as a second class citizen within the system.
But I say that there are many opportunities in the world that don't require assenting to being tracked. The first event has eliminated the highest quality in-system options, so you've already been forced to look for opportunities outside of the surveillance bubble.