Give people a second chance, a few of them screw up, and it's your fault for hiring anyone with a record. Don't give anyone a second chance, and having a criminal record becomes a ticket to lifelong unemployment.
Criminal records are not really public, but you can get your personal criminal records easily from the police and it will cost quite some money. Some employers will ask for it, but they're only allowed to if they have a good reason for it (e.g. handling confidential information, etc.). After some time (5-20 years depending on the crime) crimes will be removed from your criminal records again.
Most employers won't ask for your criminal records so you simply have to find such a job. For driving people around commercially you need a special driver's license. Your criminal records will get checked as a part of that driver's license.
Our CDL system is really restrictive to the point where it can be a serious PITA since state laws tend to vary a lot in terms of what's a misdemeanor. Towing an unregistered car/trailer in Maine is a misdemeanor, in Vermont it's legal under some circumstances, some States don't even require registration on small enough trailers. Taking someone else's junk to the scrap yard for a few bucks could be the end of your CDL. In Virginia 15 over is a misdemeanor and having an out of state plate would paint a target on you. Traffic flow on most highways is 15-over at times.
Obviously many people manage to get and hold CDLs but a zero tolerance based system does have its flaws.
A basic criminal records check costs ~$20 here FWIW
Depends on the crime, right? I don't particularly care if my taxi driver embezzled $500k from his employer, or if my daycare provider stole a car when she was 23.
Ok with the first example, definitely not OK with the second. Car theft is a pretty serious crime which oftentimes is correlated with other violent crime.
Young person A (23) drives friends home in friends (person B) car after a party as a designated driver. Parents of person B (who own the car) don't like person A and claim it's theft (even though they got the car back with no issues). Person A gets grand theft on his record. because A couldn't afford decent lawyer.
Maybe this is contrived - I don't know - I can think of a lot of things that are equivalent to "grand theft auto" but no actual harm was done except for a few miles on the car.
If it was your one friend who got drunk and in a bar fight and charged with assault when he was 20, maybe you'd think differently :)
Even if you restrict your view to felons, in california, for example, there are plenty of assault charges that are easily classifiable into "stupid thing you did once and did not cause long-term harm" but still felonies.
At some point, what folks are really saying is "i'm okay assuming this person is a bad person likely to do something bad". This is, for better or for worse, at this point, pretty unrelated to whether they have a criminal record or not.
And you know what? If I'm sending my kid on something like Shuddle,
http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/15/shuddle-ride-sharing-serv...
I don't want the driver to have ever been in a bar fight ever.
And for what it's worth, I do have a friend who got in a fist fight in a grocery store parking lot in college. It's certainly not damnation and I think he paid his debt, but I also think that incident accurately reflects on his character. He's a good guy most of the time, but I don't want him driving my grandmother around.
...doesn't have a felony record, even if he was convicted, because simple assault is a misdemeanor charge. The cases really aren't parallel.
(The rest of this comment seemed general enough to promote to top level: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11780434)
The widespread abuse of children actually happens though.
Sexual offender registers aim to prevent the loophole widely used by abusers of getting a new job in a different town. (In the case of priests and nuns that move was arranged by their employer).
They also stop some familial abuse. Someone who sexually abused their nieces/nephews would not be able to adopt and would be under greater scrutiny from child protective social services when they move to a new area.
> it is a good precaution
Do you have any evidence as to its efficacy?
Based on what evidence?
Let's say that something bad happens and they assault a client or whatever.
Client finds out they have priors. Asks you if you think you made a wise choise, or if you'd change something in your hiring process.
What would your answer be?
Without that data, i can't really say anything at all.
Every piece of research i've ever seen basically says "intuition is wrong here, they don't actually assault people at a higher rate".
IE people who repeatedly are arrested for dealing drugs are not likely to have a higher rate of assaulting people while driving ubers.
But, again, i'm data driven on this, if we have data/research, and the scientific consensus is that they are worse, and significantly worse, than yeah, maybe it's worth doing something.
From what i know, most of this is driven by gut feelings and politics, and not actual data.
And another one a bit more provocative :D
You alleged above that your parent commenter would think differently if the driver was a friend of theirs.
If the passenger/client was a friend of yours and you knew the driver had priors, would you advise them against getting into the car or not?
(With that said, I agree that there's a lot of contradiction in the hive mind. One day, people are like, "How horrible to turn someone down merely because of a crime they already paid their debt on!" And the next day, "Wait, the bad driver had one time been suspected of a felony? How was he allowed to see sunlight in the first place?!")
Why pulls and such are so damn hard to get right. Just the way the question is asked will get a change in response. And that is on top of the issues of race, class, and whatsnot that you want to get a representative mix of to get as objective a result as possible.
If the point is punishment, well, the reoffense rate for those prisoners that never are put into rehabilitation programs is 67% after 3 years, and 75% after 5 years.
http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welco...
So i'm going to suggest that unless we have a scheme for warehousing large numbers of people pretty much forever, and supporting them, we literally have to do something different.
Well, there's always the prison system.
A food-worker who has been convicted of poisoning food ought to be able to be blocked from food-working. But a food-worker who's been convicted of wreckless driving would not be blocked from food-working.
Second chance within reason.
How about this question: Are people with records as a direct result of performing services for Uber simply unhireable by Uber?
Example: In Miami, Uber/Lyft drivers are issued citations for violating various municipal ordinances (i.e. for-hire; chauffeur violation) which carry a maximum of $1,010 fine and/or 45 days county jail per violation.
Uber provides drivers with a lawyer, represents they will reimburse the fines and even provides training on how to avoid getting citations. However, after sometime Uber also fires these drivers/stops send them rides.