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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Surely not, if by "applicable" you mean to suggest that employers would never want to hire such a person for any job.

Should a person convicted of theft, who's served their time, paid the fine, made the victims whole, and learned not to steal, be discarded from consideration as a useful member of society? In case it's not clear, I think they should have the same rights as any other human being.

No one seriously advocates the death penalty or life imprisonment for petty crimes. But depending on the ability of a society to forget (which the information age is rapidly making very difficult) and the ability of a society to forgive (which the climate of fear is also making difficult), a conviction in your record can ruin a life.

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If that is the case their record should be wiped at the end of their sentence. What's the point of a record if it can't be used to warn people of your past?

"Same rights" - no sorry, somebody who stole before will be regarded with higher suspicion than other people, and that's OK.

How do you know they "learned not to steal"? Can you look inside of their heads?

There are jobs with less opportunities to steal, for example. Trust has to be regained, simply "having been in prison" is not really worth much in that respect. You would stay in prison, regardless of your mindset, because you are forced to be there.

As an Australian, I find that perspective awful. Going to jail is the punishment society has chosen for the crime. Once you've served your time, you rejoin society on an equal footing. Denying jobs to ex-cons makes it much harder for them to integrate back into society, and increases the recidivism rate. (Which you pay for via taxes.)

The equation isn't "bad person -> steals". Its "person maladapted to society / with unhealthy community -> steals". Why would someone be a thief if they have a stable job and community?

And how do you expect someone fresh out of jail, with no connections and community, to make a stable life for themselves if nobody will give them a job?

Not "nobody should give them a job", just not a job with ability to do harm. But that's for every employer to decide for themselves.

If you don't think somebody having done X before makes them more likely to do it again than normal people, I don't know. (More accurately, people who did X are more likely to be people who would do X again). We just have to disagree - but you can not enshrine such beliefs in law.

As I said, trust has to be regained, merely doing something you are forced to do anyways does not prove anything about your real attitudes.

In "How To Change Your Life In 7 Steps", the founder of the homeless magazine "The Big Issue" John Bird describes what he had to do to be able to have homeless people work for him. I have high respect for people like him.

The issue is risk. Hiring someone with a criminal record is riskier than hiring someone with a clean record. There is no upside to mitigate that risk either. So it shouldn't be surprising that hiring managers discriminate on anything they can legally get away with.

>and learned not to steal

That's the issue at hand. Serving a prison sentence doesn't mean that you have learned not to steal. It's difficult for the company to verify that you have "learned your lesson".

What will satisfy you then? Should people who come out from prison for stealing sit around jobless since nobody trusts them? That's bound to get them back into prison.

I would be satisfied if there was a proper criminal justice system. Unfortunately, in the US (and most of the world) that is not the case, and former prisoners are more likely to commit crime than people who have never been in prison. I know that is "unfair", but I chose to live in a safe neighborhood and work with safe people. It is not my job to put my safety on the line in order to try to rehabilitate a criminal.

It’s interesting that the very people that say ‘they haven’t learned their lesson’ perpetuate that exact thing.

There was an article a little while back about a company tracking the employees behavior on the computer, and a lot of people mentioned that ‘if you are not trusted regardless, what incentive do you have to be trustworthy’.

This is the exact same thing.

I'm not responsible for strangers. If I'm a hiring manager, I'm responsible for my company and the safety of my employees. I owe nothing to a stranger. Take your problem to someone else.

How about: an insurance policy such that, if the employee does end up stealing, then the employer is made whole. The former-thief employee could pay for such a policy, and then it would seem the employer would be indifferent between the former thief and the average applicant. The policy could be paid for out of the thief's salary; he would effectively be accepting a lower wage.

If the job is minimum wage, of course, then it's not possible to lower the wage further.

Also, discovering the theft and proving it was that employee might be difficult.

No they should find jobs where they have less opportunity to cause harm.

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