And this goes beyond prisons, too. Kinda hard to not turn to crime again if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail.
That's a great point that I haven't seen discussed in the media. When I was young, only "Fortune 500" type companies could afford background checks, so you had a fighting chance at getting a decent job.
Now, anybody can buy a instant background check online, and you can get not just felony data, but misdemeanor data, and even "just arrests, not convictions". And it's dirt cheap to do so. So, job prospects are dim, and even simple stuff like renting an apartment is difficult as well.
In France, once you left prison, it means that you have served what you had to serve and start again. Nobody can check whether you did prison or not.
Some specific jobs require a document stating your juridical past but you bring it, this is not some can do on their own.
Then you have military and sensitive civil servants jobs where this is checked for you, but it is really specific.
I would not be happy if anybody could check my past online...
Luckily the french did give us a tool to fight against this bullshit, it is called the guillotine?
It has its pros and cons, but the pros IMO win - bringing some peace of mind to people.
That's not what socialism is. Socialism isn't stuff you like done by the government.
Though yes, if the state is to exist, the least it should be doing is providing for its people - in my opinion via UBI + single-payer healthcare at minimum.
I'd guess the industry built around background checks and the like is partially a response to this. There isn't a national registry of crimes, at least not all kinds, so you could game the Australian system by just crossing state borders. Hence companies selling collections of people's (technically) public record. A solution may be to just create more national registries, but this seems antithetical to the US's idea of statehood. Maybe it'd be for the best, though...
Seems to be the core of the covid situation too. There is no unified plan and guidance but states doing well can't shut borders to continue doing well.
Can't or won't? If California can get away with its agricultural checkpoints without running afoul of e.g. the Commerce Clause, then it seems like restricting interstate border crossings is at least hypothetically possible.
In practice, it's pretty trivial to bypass those checkpoints if you really want to smuggle produce into the state (e.g. the I-80 checkpoint, where you can take the Hirschdale Road exit and follow Glenshire Drive to 287, then get right back on I-80). I highly doubt COVID checkpoints would be any harder to bypass.
By now, it is just accepted that it is terrible, so it is less sensational.
Searching 'criminal record employment' in Google News yields > 600,000 results.
'Ban the box' gives millions of results
'clean slate law' gives > 80k results
I'm not one to be in the "America is bad at everything" camp, but I think one of the most negative aspects of our culture is that we act entitled to everything like the world is Burger King and we should get everything our way(or your money back). Fries too cold? Send 'em back and don't tip the server! Someone backed into our rear fender? Sue 'em for all they've got! Someone stole your TV? Lock 'em up and throw away the key! It all stems from materialism.
- I was more referring to job opportunities after release; even if an inmate received a bunch of hands-on training while incarcerated, a lot of public and private sector employers alike consider a criminal record to be a disqualification. This makes getting a job harder, which makes supporting oneself legitimately harder, which makes crime more attractive to put food on the table, which drives recidivism.
- On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions; it's legal slavery (quite literally; the 13th Amendment carved out prison labor as an exception to the abolition of slavery). Prison laborers need the ability to negotiate for better wages and working conditions, and this negotiation is currently impossible because prisons can compel them by threat of violence to accept any terms, no matter how unfair to the worker. Indeed, if prisoners were fairly compensated for their labor, they might be able to save up enough money to not feel as strong of a need to return to a life of crime should they remain shunned by employers, per above (and hell, they might even be able to bootstrap themselves a startup and sidestep said shunning entirely).
That's irrelevant to the question of whether prisons are wrong to provide it.
>On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions
As in the cousin thread, this may be your objection, but it isn't the popular objection; Bloomberg was famously forced to drop prison labor, regardless of the terms offered.
If the labor is entirely volunteer and something that actually requires some training, it's job training. If it's forced (which is legal in many states) and it's entirely grunt work like janitorial duty or highway cleanup, then it's prison labor.
Bloomberg famously took flak for using paid, voluntary prison labor for call centers -- not exactly back-breaking labor.
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/24/mike-bloomberg-2020-pris...
Just because you're not personally uncharitable enough to object to something like that, doesn't man it's not a common view.
> John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers. The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.
> When asked if their total monthly earnings are capped at these levels, Scallan said incarcerated people who work for ProCom make far higher wages. “I can tell you unequivocally that is not us,” Scallan said. “Some of them are making that much every day.”
> The Oklahoma Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify the discrepancy, nor to answer questions about ProCom’s arrangement with the Bloomberg campaign.
Given the refusal to clarify that discrepancy, it ain't unreasonable to assume - barring concrete evidence to the contrary - that these prisoners are being paid a pittance for their labor, and Bloomberg - and ProCom, and the state of Oklahoma - definitely deserve any flak coming to them for that exploitation. The very fact that there is a maximum monthly wage for prisoners at all, let alone one as pathetically low as $27.09 per month, is barbaric.
Because as best I can tell, the objection is exactly the "strawman" I originally alleged, that prison labor shouldn't be used, even when rehabilitative and helps the prisoner find employment after release.
Because that's strongly implied to be the reason for any objection at all - i.e. the coercion of prisoners into working for a pathetically low wage, and the exploitation of that coercion for financial gain. Unless you can think of some other reason why people object to prison labor other than it being coercive and exploitative?
Not when there's an HR department in between the applicant and the hiring manager. People with "sufficient skills" get rejected all the time for reasons far more benign than e.g. having killed someone 30 years ago.
Like, this ain't about "stigma". This is about Kafkaesque corporate bureaucracy actively driving crime rates.