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Comment by Agustus | Hacker News Reader

The problem in hiring criminals is that they have committed a crime. Once they are brought to justice and sentenced, there is no real rehabilitation program, why we have such a high recidivism rate in the states. The best example of this is sexual predator label, if our society honestly believed they had been redeemed they would not need the label.

The plan should be how can we get people who have been convicted to find ways to signal that they are rehabilitated. Otherwise, companies will avoid the risk of hiring a criminal and the liability of the lawsuit that might occur if said criminal commits another crime and the company is sued for hiring someone who had committed that crime before.

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"why we have such a high recidivism rate in the states."

Probably for the same reason. We never give them a fair chance afterward.

A fair chance includes a difficult employment ecosystem for everybody. Even a fair chance, likely means they'll be unemployed.

I don't disagree, but I am skeptical that they received the same chance as someone without a criminal record. Whether intentional or not there is probably some bias in the hiring process when you know they committed a felony or whatever it may be.

Two identical candidates, but one has a criminal past, you're going to take the non-criminal record every time. As unfair as it is in the larger picture, it's hard to justify the decision to hire a criminal when it's your neck on the line

You seem to have restated the problem.

Surely the decision should be based on the likelihood of future criminal action. If a criminal past is accepted as an indicator of future criminal activity then we have rejected the concept of rehabilitation. If this is the only deciding factor we may also blind ourselves to other risks.

There's more going on than that. A white man with a felony has about the same employment responses as a black man with a clean record.

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/09/study-black-man-and-wh...

> if our society honestly believed they had been redeemed they would not need the label

That assumes that "society" is correctly and fully informed on the issue. Sex offenders have one of the lowest recidivism rate compared to other crimes. Plus it is a diverse category with many different types of situations all lumped into the same connotation in people's minds.

I’ve heard in certain cases that people who’ve been caught urinating in public have been charged as sex offenders. Surely that’s not what these laws were intended to punish.

The three main things people seem to think of when they think "sex offender" is (1) an 18 year old slept with his 16 year old girlfriend (2) urinating in public and (3) child molester or rapist. There's a lot more situations, and the research shows that they all need to be handled differently, and that the current laws are much less effective than ones actually geared towards rehabilitation would be, at keeping our neighborhoods safe.

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