Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records | Hacker News Reader

Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

phys.org

85 pointsaussieguy1234142 comments

In previous centuries, there were plenty of jobs with low trust requirements - chiefly, unskilled manual labor. A criminal record wasn’t such a barrier to that type of employment. Someone could spend time in prison, and then still find work on the outside. Not great work perhaps, but a living - a way forward for them, to re-integrate back into society. A way to slowly rebuild trust.

The shift away from unskilled manual labor towards higher-skilled, higher-impact jobs, raises the trust bar, locking out those with criminal records, leaving them few opportunities to re-integrate with the mainstream economy, and an incentive to fall further into the criminal economy.

This misses the point. There's an obvious solution: disallow employers (except in outlier cases where there are safety concerns) from using criminal background checks in hiring decisions.

That’s only a solution if you think there aren’t any genuine trust issues in hiring people with criminal records.

That points to a major issue of the criminal justice system. You should be clear after your sentence and have repaid your debt to society. If society wants to send people to correctional facilities for life for things like theft or drug charges, then it should be honest and do that.

If you are imprisoned for embezzlement, do your time, get your name cleared, then do it all again, and again, do you want to hire them as your purchasing agent? I think the answer here is going to have to be on a case by case basis. I'd maybe hire someone for that position if their repeat offense was unrelated and unlikely to impact the position directly (such as, I don't know, 2nd degree murder from DUIs). I'd be wary if they came to work drunk, but that's a separate issue that I'd be concerned about for anybody.

Why not leave me in prison then if we're certain I'm going to do it again?

If the chance of me doing embezzlement is the same after I come out of prison than if I had never been to prison, what is the basis for caring whether or not someone has been to prison?

This assumes a justice system that works, at least in the sense that if you commit a crime and get prosecuted, the following actions are sufficient to prevent or deter you from doing it again, which given things like plea deals, etc. is not.

If we just want to reduce our justice system to a social credit verifier and background check database maintainer, or if this is really the best that can be dne, fine, let's admit that so we can try to do it a lot more cheaply than what we're doing now.

I don't want you in prison. I just don't want to interact with you.

It also ignores how the criminal justice system works, especially in the US, on both ends. Money buys all sorts of sealed, adjudicated, pardoned, plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor, etc, type solutions. Lack of money makes it easy to press "accept this plea bargain or risk eons in jail" convictions on innocent people. There's also a myriad of ways to enhance charges that make a relatively minor crime sound much worse.

I think you've missed the point. Employers have a valid reason to want to disallow those with criminal backgrounds from a large swath of jobs.

This is an area where I think regulation would be helpful/necessary, in that when doing a background check that the employer needs to enter business and job scope, and then the law would define which types of criminal background would be relevant and potentially disqualifying by job type.

Dude I got dinged for a weed possession charge from my 17th year when I was 21 for a job at Kum'N'Go. I don't give a fuck what kinda logical hoops they jumped through, but it's obscene considering about a month after that I was working in a critical industry with literally millions of dollars of equipment in my hands and a high-risk environment. It doesn't make sense in so many cases, probably most and it only increases recidivism.

Ok but if I run a bank I don't want to hire Bernie Madoff, no matter how much time he served. So having the government tell me I can discriminate based on conviction for financial crimes but not drug possession more than 5 years ago seems reasonable. At least to improve the status quo.

If the government says an individual isn't allowed to do something, like work in a financial profession or live near a school, that's up to the government to determine and enforce: "quit/relocate or you'll be back in prison."

Don't put that on businesses.

Right now there is a block list on hiring discrimination. I’m suggesting an allow list.

"Drug possession" is also not monolithic to me.

I'd be *much* more leery of hiring someone convicted of possession of addictive drugs than someone convicted of possession of recreational drugs. Recreational use can be done only in appropriate situations. Addictive use likely means they come to work impaired.

> Addictive use likely means they come to work impaired.

For the rest of their lives? There’s a time dimension here that implies being clean for five years.

I'm not exactly sure if you are disagreeing with me, because what you are saying is exactly my point.

A weed possession charge as a minor is the type of thing that I think regulation should disallow as a disqualifying factor for all types of jobs. The idea would be that I would ask a background check service "I am hiring for a CLERK at CONVENIENCE_STORE", and I would just get back a response "No disqualifying convictions found" if all you had were a weed conviction.

I work for a financial services company, and we have pretty clear guidelines about what is or isn't disqualifying. But why should I even have the right to know, for example, if someone was convicted of a DUI 10 years ago? But I absolutely do think I should have the right to know if someone was convicted of theft 2 years ago.

I'm not disagreeing. But I don't know that I agree, it's a pretty finicky line. Crime is super contextual, so you're barring people who have been rung through the system, and probably have a new environment, a new context; I mean assuming they committed a significant crime.

But honestly, in the beginning of "Noise" they start detailing some cases Marvin Frankel reviewed:

Frankel did not provide any kind of statistical analysis to support his argument. But he did offer a series of powerful anecdotes, showing unjustified disparities in the treatment of similar people. Two men, neither of whom had a criminal record, were convicted for cashing counterfeit checks in the amounts of $58.40 and $35.20, respectively. The first man was sentenced to fifteen years, the second to 30 days. For embezzlement actions that were similar to one another, one man was sentenced to 117 days in prison, while another was sentenced to 20 years. Pointing to numerous cases of this kind, Frankel deplored what he called the “almost wholly unchecked and sweeping powers” of federal judges, resulting in “arbitrary cruelties perpetrated daily,” which he deemed unacceptable in a “government of laws, not of men.”

Like those check fraud cases are crazy and having that on your record forever? That's some yellow passport shit. Over damages that could be settled trivially. If we did some criminal law reform, yeah I totally agree with you, but I think it's more complicated than just barring results. I'll grant you it'd be better than it is now, I guess, but order of operations I think would be pretty important, but that's an aside for another day.

But because of federal sentencing guidelines, which Marvin Frankel helped establish, those kinds of discrepancies are no longer possible.

They're possible, the regulation was strike in '05 and are now "advisory".

My point was more the fact that over what, in the worst case, a day's worth of labor can not only earn you fines, time, but also the record.

Check fraud, by my estimation is basically theft. How many employers are going to want a theif?

But here's the thing, that may well have been a one time thing. Homeboy isn't necessarily a theif, but rather he committed at least one singular theft. And one of such minor magnitude I can only assume it was an act of desperation. But any "theft sensitive" employer is going to red flag him. Maybe he's a Thenadier, maybe he's Josef K. You just don't get the granularity necessary to make the determination. And the Court isn't solving moral dilemmas, but simply determining whether or not someone is guilty.

Add in complications like degrees. Somebody gets in a precarious position in their life and steals $1k or something comparably petty, does time, reparations, et etcetera but now they're permanently barred from practicing their specialization.

There are legitimizable crimes.

> Over damages that could be settled trivially.

I'm going to be honest here: if I'm hiring for a CFO or corporate treasurer, I don't want to hire anyone who has intentionally passed a counterfeit check. The fact that they probably have enough cash in their pocket to cover their fraudulent check is entirely irrelevant.

This is currently how Pennsylvania works it’s background checks for working with children. PA law requires everyone who volunteers or works with kids to do a couple state specific background checks. The response from these is a “allow to work with kids” / “not allowed”. They don’t tell you the details.

it’s actually pretty privacy focused way to accomplish things.

Regardless of regulation, I don't see anyone who has to disclose a criminal history getting a job, unless the employer is already open to giving formerly incarcerated people an opportunity. IMHO, criminal background is a screening filter, not a thoughtful decision point. So while your criminal history is being cross-referenced with the regulation to see how you qualify, the potential employer has already labeled you as an "ex-con" in their head.

IIRC some countries in Europe do this; if you are hiring for a specific job, you call some office/bureau and they say whether you can do it or not based on your record, no why/etc.

Here in Norway employers can ask the police for the criminal record for a potential employee[1]. The employer must have a legal right to request the records, and must state the reason and use for the request.

Employers for most common jobs will not have a right to request these records.

The police will then filter the criminal records, if any, so that only relevant entries are listed.

This allows employees who have a genuine need reject potential candidates on legitimate grounds, while giving people a reasonable chance to start over in case they do something wrong.

[1]: https://www.politiet.no/en/services/police-certificate-of-co...

No, I think you're missing their point. They weren't proposing a solution. They were simply offering an explanation as to why the situation exists. A good explanation at that, too.

You'll just get discrimination based on proxies for criminal background instead (poverty, suspicious gaps in employment, zip code).

And race. If employers can't actually check your record, they'll make assumptions about it, and some of those are pretty unsavory.

I'd like to see some of those proxies removed from the picture.

1) Employment history: Ban putting dates on a resume and in general make it a prohibited question. You worked there X years, not from YYYY to ZZZZ. The current approach is obviously looking for whether you were fired, but ends up tainting you if you're ever laid off in a bad market, or even if you simply chose non-employment activity for some reason.

2) Address likewise should be removed. Phone & e-mail is all they need.

This is not a new idea, it goes by the name "Ban the Box" ("the box" here meaning the "I have been convicted of a felony" checkbox on a job application) and has been implemented in a bunch of US states. The general consensus is that it doesn't really move the needle on employment rates for felons, while at the same time making employment prospects worse for black men because employers now just discard them from the application pipeline entirely since they can't check criminal records.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted, because everything said is pretty much valid or at least substantiated.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/which-jobs-will-come-back-a...

>DOLEAC: So, we found that, on average, across the U.S., in places that ban the box, employment fell by 5 percent for young black men who didn’t have a college degree and by 3 percent for young Hispanic men who didn’t have a college degree. And so the next question is, who are they hiring instead? And we found, on average, the people who benefited were older men of color. So if you’re trying to avoid people who are actively involved in crime, older people are a pretty good bet. Criminal activity tends to decline with age.

>DUBNER: And what about young under-educated white potential employees?

>DOLEAC: For young white men who had the same level of education, we saw employment increase for that group. What seemed to be happening was that employers were substituting from young men of color to young white men.

If employers can't discriminate on the individual level, they will discriminate on the group level.

What I would like to see:

Utterly ban "have you been arrested".

The highest offense I have been convicted of is: xxxxxx

In special cases I would permit highest offense in certain categories.

That would not work. I do not want my teenage daughter to do part time work in a business that employs a sex offender. I do not want to work with an insurance agent who engaged in a financial fraud few years ago.

You've said why you don't like it but not why it wouldn't work.

It's pretty straightforward to extrapolate from his examples: people do not want to work with nor do business with ex cons. Therefore businesses that hire lots of ex cons likely "wouldn't work" because customers and employees would be scarce.

Are those not exceptions? How many of the unemployed young men have criminal records concerning sex offense or financial fraud?

The criminal mind uses the means available to him. Bernie Madoff was as much a psychopath as a your average mugger; he just had capabilities to not to have to resort to that crude a level of harm.

I would disagree with the implied dichotomy of 'criminal minds' and 'non-criminal minds', especially given the somewhat arbitrary nature of what we as a society decide is a crime worthy of prosecution. Possessing a bit of home-grown marijuana for personal use can give someone a criminal record the same as other more heinous crimes, and many employers will find it easier to blanket-reject anyone with a criminal record rather than dig into the context of each applicant.

Is the answer to not allow any sort of background checks? I would say no, but it also seems like there is a lot of room to improve our current system and find it in our societal heart to not perpetually punish a person for a past minor offense.

Here in the UK we a sex offenders register, but general crimes get struck off the official register after a certain period of time and no longer come up on background checks. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than locking people out of work forever!

When is someone rehabilitated, though? Must someone's past mistakes haunt their life to their grave?

Another obvious solution.. don't commit crime.

> In previous centuries, there were plenty of jobs with low trust requirements

These still exist in the modern era, primarily in industries with high turnover like the restaurant industry, farm labor, and other unsavory industries such as meat processing.

> unsavory industries such as meat processing.

I often wonder what the impact of these jobs is on the humans that are doing it. Half the reason I'm avoiding (supermarket) meat is that I feel bad about keeping these jobs alive. (The other reason is the animal suffering ofc.)

It's documented to be extremely traumatizing and physically disabling.

They still exist in all sorts of industries but have almost all been offshored to capitalize on lower wages.

The jobs left are largely just the ones where the finished product can't be put on a container ship for 2 months.

If globalization unravels due to rising geopolitical tensions and continent spanning supply chains buckle and break we will likely be quite surprised at how much unskilled labor is suddenly in demand at home.

Nope. Those jobs require trustworthy people too.

If I were running a meat processing plant, and there was:

- Sexual harassment

- Racism

- Violence

- Etc.

I'd have a huge liability on my hands. Unfortunately, prison convicts would be much more likely to expose me to those types of liability. If an employee catcalls another employee, that places a lot of burden lands on the employer.

This happened largely due to progressive reforms. I'm not claiming to have any solution here, or to even have a semblance of idea of cost/benefit. People need jobs. People deserve to be safe.

Yep. When I was a student I worked in a restaurant with an ex convict who described his previous job at the meat packing plant in precisely those terms. He told me it was a hard dangerous s*** job, and back of the house in the restaurant was a lot better. He said safety measures and equipment were inadequate, and some of the other guys that worked there wanted to kill him (his remarks on your other areas of concern would be ill suited to this forum).

That put things in perspective for me, because I had thought that the back of the restaurant was a hard dangerous s*** job - - in fact the hood fans and ac didn't and work, the food thermometer in my shirt pocket regularly read above 110F, and I was generally surrounded by sharp things, hot things, greasy floors and boiling oil, and the shift manager chest bumped me and screamed in my face. But for that guy it was a promotion.

That was in Texas, which is a "business friendly" state, so those progressive reforms might be more... incremental than the average hn reader might wish.

Why are you censoring yourself? If a job is a shit job, just fucking say it. Why pretend?

> his remarks on your other areas of concern would be ill suited to this forum

This isn't a kid's show. Your comment is really interesting to me, and I'd like to hear what he said about these issues.

(This won't make sense to anyone else but I don't care. I liked your response and I don't want mine to go to waste.)

---

My apologies, that's hilarious.

Not sure what that word is that you don't want to say, but if it's a racial epithet then I have to admit I won't say any of that shit either. I try not to even think those words, lest they become part of my internal monologue that becomes not-so-internal when I get old and demented. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite when I accuse others of self-censoring.

Your friend sounds like trash. I have some super trashy friends and acquaintances, and I can just hear them talking through your description. Trash white people are a tribe, and there's hardly anything trashier than the kind of grifting that painter did to you.

I love that Johnson quote, and it seems ever more prescient now that trash whites are a distinct voting bloc.

That quote applies just as well to black trash. There seems to be a resurgence of black nationalism now, with multitudes of black revolutionaries talking pan-africanism, reparations, and utopian black socialism. Moors and whatever the fuck else. I was reading about a group of these characters that briefly set up shop down in the far corner of my state. Black Hammer, they call themselves. They got a bunch of suckers to gofundme them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, saying they'd liberate some land and start some sort of black-supremacist commune. Surprisingly it didn't work out and the leaders have since moved on to more mainstream BLM-type activism. And they kept the money obviously.

The reality is that the margins are thin and it’s really hard to retain staff, so those problems are routinely swept under the rug in meat processing plants.

Maybe that would work with construction, but they also hire a lot of exconvicts due to turnover and pay.

>restaurant industry

A job for teenagers and aspiring actors.

>farm labor

Okay, but we specifically import people to work for low (often illegally low) wages. Work for an adult, maybe, but not much of a living.

>and other unsavory industries.

Same problem as with farm labor, except now it's "unsavory" instead of "honest work".

It's not right to have a bimodal distribution of "high class professional jobs" and "unsavory jobs with low trust requirements". You need a lower-end but respectable place for people to be that's better than criminality, and you certainly can't say "go work in one of those unsavory industries" if you want them to think its better than being a criminal. In American culture we GLORIFY criminality, and loathe low-class "unsavory" work. Why would anyone choose unsavory work over being a criminal in the current environment?

I wonder if the growing number of WFH jobs would help alleviate this. I'm a software engineer who mostly works from home. We sell (mostly) support for OSS. This seems like a situation where an ex-con might have an opportunity.

I'm not seeing this materializing. You're talking about not only jobs where employees have secret keys and admin access to data, but on top of that, no fear of anyone peeking over their shoulder even if there is some remote system monitoring. The trust required for the person not to abuse the privileged access and to have a reduced chance of getting caught is a huge risk.

What does that have to do with anything? There's not a shortage of jobs that they are able to do, there's a shortage of jobs we're willing to let them do.

I think the opposite is more likely. WFH increases the level of trust needed between employer and employee.

I don't really check who's building my websites or little tools I purchase. It's not exactly wfh, it's just having your own business that does not require (much of) an office.

It seems besides the point. The vast majority of cons are people without a huge range of skills to choose from.

I'm sure convicted hackers or white collar criminals have trouble finding work that suits their skill level but probably able to do so at a cut/lower level. The one convicted white collar criminal I know is working again.

Completely unrelated to the thread but

> I don't really check who's building my websites or little tools I purchase.

How do you sleep at night? Honest question. I want to know the assumptions and reasoning that leads to one being comfortable with this decision.

I’m probably more worried than I should be, but every time I look at my puny little openBSD webserver’s log, I find about 2 to 5 new attempts to scan my server for various exploits a month. Each attempt is a relentless scans looking for all sorts of holes with hundreds of potential exploits. The first time I read those logs, I swore I would never move from openBSD + httpd ever.

The internet is outright hostile to any computer with an ip address and a port open to the internet.

I’m sure there are some companies out there that provide hosting solutions that do a good job at keeping things updated - but even they are defenseless against things like the recent log4j vulnerability (and that’s just the stuff the good guys caught). At the very least, I would want to know who is building my websites and what their track record is.

Some people are natural worriers and others aren't. I'm not. In the end it's probably as simple as that.

So, you never pay for anything on an app store? You host everything on your own hardware?

I am far more worried about the air quality that floats into my home than a website that's hosted somewhere else and isn't connected to anything but its own content.

> So, you never pay for anything on an app store?

I buy software from the app store for sure. But I do not pull down .apk binaries from the darkweb and run them on my phone - especially if I don't know who the author was. I doubt most sane people would download and run binaries from random websites (darkweb or not) even today.

> You host everything on your own hardware?

No I don't. I trust my hosting provider, and they have a track record of reputable service, I have a business relationship with them. I would say I know who is hosting my website.

From what I've read and heard, most truck driving jobs (every thing from rollback/tow trucks to long distance OTR) are full of ex-cons or ASPD type individuals-- it may even be a pre-requisite for towing companies.

Day labor like roofing, sheetrock, landscaping, etc. also typically have similar representation. Any temp agency for factory work will have a threshold or types of conviction that they will overlook, but they may be even more hostile towards their workers.

Helping people with criminal records get jobs is good. Letting then vote is also a good first step.

The focus should be on helping them -before- they end up with a criminal conviction of some sort on their permanent record.

Sadly we are engineering society to be less and less compatible for young men and this will only get worse over time.

And then these angry young men get older they beget their own angry young men.

Everyone is not compatible with sitting still and shutting up for 4 - 8 hours a day for 12 years + uni. (And far more men than women are incompatible).

That this has become the common requirement in society is a growing issue.

We need a way to productively allow these men to partake in society at their own terms, or at least a lot closer to it than we are now. That means creating jobs and frameworks that are compatible.

Crime is natural choice.

It a great outlet for adrenaline and aggression and asserting ones freedom from the chains of society. It is dangerous, sometimes lethal. and looking good for the ladies. (or other men)

You even make easy money, (a lot of t, if you happen to be among the 1% of criminals). It is a highly compatible venture.

Instead of inventing new psychological diagnosis and inventing an ever bigger stream of pharmaceuticals meant to neuter them and force compliance we should do the opposite.

Recognise it as a resource for society.

This is the best reply here. Such compassion, but intelligent too. Well done!

>Letting then vote is also a good first step.

I'm always amazed that some Western countries don't let former convicts vote. In Serbia even current convicts can vote, atleast in republic level elections, not sure about local elections.

In America, unscrupulous politicians explicitly target voters by demographics and fill the airwaves with propaganda aimed at steering the vote.

This leads to situations like celebrity endorsements, where huge swaths of under-informed voters are influenced simply by messaging.

The saving grace is the 'representative' form of government, where at least some sanity can be injected into the process.

"By age 35, 64% of unemployed men have been arrested and 46% have been convicted of a crime, with the rates varying only slightly by race and ethnicity."

Well, executing criminals for minor offenses seems to be out of fashion.[1] Transportation to Australia or Siberia is no longer an option. There's no frontier to ship them off to. And the US military doesn't want criminals; each soldier today has too much firepower.

There are ways back, but it's hard to scale them. Delancey Street Restaurant in SF is staffed by ex-cons. (I recommend the chicken.)

[1] https://www.nationaljusticemuseum.org.uk/museum/news/what-wa...

It's idealistic but hear me out. Think of all the minor things in your neighborhood or town/village/city/parish/etc. that need to be fixed. Potholes, poor road markings, overgrown or unmaintained greenery. Uneven sidewalks. Litter, grime.

Think of the local government or contracted services that are understaffed. New construction and renovation. Forest management, wetlands management, park maintenance. Homeless shelters and soup kitchens and community centers. Crossing guards and bus drivers.

Many of these are run by organizations that restrict felons, or perversely use convicts nearly exclusively via prison release programs and monitored community service.

Why not open these up more?

A lot of what you listed there are actually highly skilled careers.

So, why not hire recently released felons at your business? If they really do have something to offer it should be an untapped market for talent.

For the record I actually think this is a good idea.

Chrysalis and the Downtown LA BID run a local maintenance program just as you describe, serving all kinds of disadvantaged folks, including the formerly incarcerated, helping them transition into full time employment.

https://downtownla.com/the-dcbid/safe-and-clean/clean-team

https://www.changelives.org/

Does the military consider criminal records even for support jobs? Theres a very broad variety of military jobs outside of being a solider, and the military offers structure, potential long term friendships with people from different backgrounds, a long term career based on good behavior, or a launching pad into a wide variety of other post-military jobs. I know it's not glamorous work but reliable and well respected throughout a broad part of American society.

I think a felony disqualifies you from military service (hard to get clearance). Maybe someone else can speak on getting waivers but I've heard that the possibility is grim. And keep in mind, that in the US between prosecutor overcharging and harsh sentencing, everything is a felony. Drug convictions make up the plurality of felony cases[1].

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Felony_S...

U.S. Army Recruiting Command Fiscal Year 2019 Overview

"Qualified youth: 71% of youth do not qualify for military service because of obesity, drugs, physical and mental health problems, misconduct, and aptitude."

"Quality: 3.2% fewer waivers than FY18, with the bulk of the reduction coming from conduct waivers. Lowest percentage of conduct waivers in two decades."[1]

So, no, the U.S. military is not looking for people with criminal records. Waivers are hard to get.

[1] https://recruiting.army.mil/pao/facts_figures/

At least in the US one thing that has made this worse is universal cheap access to criminal background checks. That didn't used to exist, so a criminal background blocked access to jobs with big companies that could do background checks. But, you could get a job at smaller companies. That's gone now...a criminal background gets a "no" from almost everyone.

Other countries have a system where some government agency provides a "does this person have any past offenses relevant to this job?" service. Where they look at the type of job, any criminal history, and make sure the specific criminal history isn't an issue for the type of job being sought.

Yeah, I wouldn't want a former embezzler in a bookkeeping job at my company.

That's the point - a former embezzler being hired as a plumber is different than hiring them as a bookkeeper.

However, until the employees are more scarce than jobs, there's no reason to hire an ex-con and every reason to skip over them (bureaucratically speaking).

To counter that you'd need to offer incentives TO hire them - tax write-offs or something, or liability protections.

Or you have to expunge records at some point, which is another issue because that only affects government records, not other things background checks may find.

There's another reason why companies don't want to hire felons - liability.

I've seen many companies successfully sued over the years because one of their employees committed a crime against a customer. The lawsuit was because the company hired an ex-con.

To get companies to hire ex-cons, liability laws need to be amended to protect companies from that sort of liability.

Yeah - hence the liability issue. There’s have to be some sort of bonus but is should be workable - something like if the company follows procedure and hires an excon who later commits a crime they’re not liable.

Or just let the state hire them all as they can immunize themselves from prosecution.

What's the alternative to public conviction information? Secret trials?

Some countries have a concept of a right to be forgotten. After a certain amount of time passes, information about criminal convictions is no longer public; disseminating such information is generally illegal; making employment decisions based on it is also illegal.

It's not airtight, but it wouldn't need to be to alleviate the problem. It would restrict what mainstream background check providers could offer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

Sounds a bit dystopian requiring everyone to pretend that a trial never took place when people know it did?

It is dystopian to be sentenced to social death without any chance of reform. All the more so if we can ever figure out the medical stuff and live a lot longer and/or repair injury and defect that might hinder rational thought.

There's got to be a method for redemption and being recognized as redeemed. The issue today is that hiring processes are not really fair, they can't be objectively run with subjective measures and random entropy pools. If hiring were fair and redeemed people treated the same as never convicted people then there wouldn't be a need for the EU's current bandaid.

> There's got to be a method for redemption and being recognized as redeemed.

Surely forgiveness, rather than feigned amnesia?

"To err is human; to forgive, divine."

As is obvious from the attitudes in this thread, legally enforced amnesia is the only practical solution.

In Europe there are no such things as: 1) secret trials (there are in US[1]) 2) background checks (for the majority of jobs). Also, criminal records get erased after a period of time, depending on the crime committed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

> no such things as secret trials ... criminal records get erased after a period of time

So it becomes a secret that the trial happened?

And I've been background checked for jobs I've had in Europe, even normal civilian jobs.

If court records are public, is there any technical reason a company could not scrape the records and perform background checks? Or is it a cultural difference that makes background checks less popular?

The various predecessors of the GDPR forbid it.

Forbid looking at court records? Or forbid monetizing it?

One of the few 501(c)3's I will give money to is an organization that helps offenders go straight when they get out of jail and I see my name on a very short list of private donors.

In the 1990s I was a victim of what I would call "Domestic Terrorism", the ringleader of the group didn't go to prison for his actions against me and other people at my college but I did hear that he went to prison for drug charges not long after.

I still haven't forgiven the college administrator who chose not to take action against this person (would that person have said "there is nothing they can do" if his daughter was the victim?) but if I heard the ringleader of that gang had gotten out of prison and managed to find work and stay out of trouble I would want to shake his hand because that is something that is against the odds and so hard to do.

Forgiveness can be extremely difficult; well done for recognizing that your individual experiences aren't a reason to restrict the opportunities of others - that's more than many people are able to manage.

I helps to ask for forgiveness.

Which org do you donate to?

College administrators are like that sometimes. You wonder if they're really rooting for you or not.

Why does a college administrator have anything to do with whether the legal system would prosecute someone in a criminal matter where you were the victim?

This is why I find the German system so civilized:

Nobody but you, the police, and the courts have access to your criminal record.

Nobody but the police has access to your arrest record.

Nobody is allowed to publish your name in relation to reports of arrests or convictions, or collect such data.

Employers can request from you a criminal record check (because you're the only one who can order one), but this is only done for the most sensitive of jobs and only for relevent offences.

You can also have most offences expunged from your record after a time.

Thus, you don't end up spending the rest of your life wearing a scarlet letter.

They need to study deeper, why these young men engage in criminal activities in the first place, only to find themselves arrested and later ineligible for any job.

Do they think that benefits from criminal activities outweigh the risks of being caught and not being able to pass any background check for entire life?

First step if to stop young men from engaging in criminal behavior, to stop feeding jails with fresh blood so to speak.

Next step is rehabilitation program for previously convicted felons, does the current program work or not, how it can be improved?

You can’t just ask businesses to stop doing background checks and employ convicted felons and hope they will not embezzle funds from their new employer. The risk is too high.

It is not so cut and dry. In my experience, most criminal activity in the is done by people who don't really feel like they belong in our society. This could be because of their race/ethnicity or because of addiction or because of some trauma which left them feeling like an outcast.

If we look at the issue through this lens it becomes obvious that when one feels like they don't belong to a society then there is little perceived value in playing by the rules since nobody else seems to be doing so.

This trap is especially easy to fall into when you are young.

> You can’t just ask businesses to stop doing background checks and employ convicted felons and hope they will not embezzle funds from their new employer. The risk is too high.

No, you can't.

The problem is that the criminal history prevents employment for life, not just for the few years while someone is getting back on their feet after jail.

For example, when I was in college, my fraternity paid our cook cash. He (the cook) always seemed to have side-hustles or was picking up odd cooking jobs.

After I got to know him for a few years, he told me that he was convicted approximately 20 years prior for cocaine distribution. He implied that he had a lot when he was caught. Then he told me he couldn't get a normal job because of his record.

My point is that, after a certain period of time with no recidivism, (maybe 5 years,) the criminal record should not be a barrier to general employment.

One way around this is for them to become contractors, consultants, and other businesses.

Yes, but that's not always easy. And they shouldn't have to do this.

Nobody said it was easy. But lots of non-cons become consultants, etc.

> You can’t just ask businesses to stop doing background checks and employ convicted felons and hope they will not embezzle funds from their new employer. The risk is too high.

There is a reasonable solution to this, and it's "ban the box" or "fair chance hiring" laws. These laws make it illegal to perform background checks prior to making a conditional offer. The best ones make companies provide substantive, written justification for turning someone down after a background check, provide avenues for appeal, and make the companies front the legal fees so it doesn't just turn into a game of Who Has The Most Money. They still allow employers to reject candidates for whom there are legitimate concerns. But they give candidates, as the name says, a fair chance.

https://www.nelp.org/publication/ban-the-box-fair-chance-hir...

> A 2020 study by economists Jennifer L. Doleac and Benjamin Hansen found that Ban the Box increased employer discrimination against young, low-skilled black men. The authors argue that when employers are unable to check job applicants' criminal records early in the hiring process, they instead resort to statistical discrimination against groups that include more ex-offenders.[35]

A 2020 study by economist Evan K. Rose found that Ban the Box had negligible effects on ex-offenders' labor market outcomes.[36]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_the_Box#:~:text=Ban%20th....

1) Racial discrimination is itself illegal.

2) Ban the Box didn't prevent criminal background checks, it just pushed them to the end of the hiring process. So it's unsurprising that it didn't have a significant effect.

> You can’t just ask businesses to stop doing background checks and employ convicted felons and hope they will not embezzle funds from their new employer. The risk is too high.

How many felons, or rather what classes of felony, make you think that they will embezzle money? And what percentage of jobs have embezzlement as an option?

Like, are you worried that the person caught with (felony amount of marijuana) is going to embezzle (any amount of money) from their employer if they are hired as a (fry cook)?

Now, if you're saying that hiring a white collar criminal as an auditor is obviously bad.

> They need to study deeper, why these young men engage in criminal activities in the first place, only to find themselves arrested and later ineligible for any job.

To be fair, almost all of the young men I knew growing up (in an affluent chunk of society) engaged in what were then criminal activities. Almost nobody established a criminal record because everyone was wealthy enough to be insulated from law enforcement (they could do the criminal activities in parents' basements and college dorms).

Maybe part of the issue is that many non-harmful behaviors have been criminalized.

You can’t just ask businesses to stop doing background checks and employ convicted felons and hope they will not embezzle funds from their new employer. The risk is too high.

You can, actually. Businesses exist at the pleasure of the state and the state can fix these problems. Unfortunately, we've been run by right-wing enablers and crooks (in the sense of unethical rule-breakers, not people with criminal records) for so long, we've forgotten that the left has been proposing workable solutions to these problems for decades.

Unless physical safety is at risk, nothing in a person's past should ever be made a legal reason to deny someone a job. If companies want to stay independent, they should be decent. Otherwise, nationalize them and run them as utilities.

> we've been run by right-wing enablers and crooks (in the sense of unethical rule-breakers, not people with criminal records) for so long, we've forgotten that the left has been proposing workable solutions to these problems for decades.

Okay, but we've had a Democratic Senate for 10 of the last 16 years and a democratic president 9 of the last 13 years.

Having just done 8 years inside, I saw the split two ways: (1) a lot of people with a huge variety of undiagnosed mental health issues that made regular jobs difficult; and (2) those that had been indoctrinated since birth to believe that working a regular job was a loser path and that gaining income through crime was the only route acceptable due to peer pressure.

Would you agree that group (2) is not actually unemployed, since they dont seek employment in the first place, but rather employed full/part-time in criminal scene industry?

Well, then I guess it comes down to how you define "employment". I've never thought about that before. If I'm employed as an assassin, I guess I'm employed, even though the work I am doing is illegal. tl;dr: yes.

Maybe I'm nuts, but I don't think a person's record should be available. Maybe in extreme circumstances, like they're still a danger to those around them, but beyond that, once the sentence has been completed it should be 100% back to normal.

As in anything, some middle-ground is where things generally sit.

The no record available once the sentence is completed is fine until someone gets killed or their daughter raped by someone with extensive criminal record of things not related to murder or rape.

The unfortunate reality is, a certain type of people will continue to commit crimes all their life and many of them aren't even premeditated, it's a "it just happened" thing.

Having said that, a "no second chances for anyone" approach would have the same results as the secret records approach you described. IMO most of the crime problems are attached to the culture and their vicious cycles, but that's an ultra-radioactive topic and every discussion easily goes south, so, just another day I guess..

Blaming "culture" for crime is a racist dog-whistle, and it's very rightly radioactive to talk about because there's almost no evidence to support it. Your opinion is rooted in stereotypes and you should investigate this more before continuing to jump to the culture conclusion.

Your assumption is more racist in my opinion. It sounds more classist to me, but I think that's just reality. Desperate people make desperate decisions, and their pro con list is different then middle and upper class.

you might think it’s classist if you have no experience being subjected to it, it’s an incredibly pointed claim that has been used for decades… note that no one blames white “culture” when a white suprematist goes on a shooting rampage

It seems like at least part of what you are reacting to is blaming racial culture. I agree that is far too broad to be meaningful. Would you agree that part of the transgenerational cycle of poverty and crime involves family and community factors. I think this is true and spans genetic divisions. There are communities that are blighted in noneconomic ways that are difficult to address only with money.

it seems more likely that factors like continued poverty and unfair policing and incarceration rates (minorities are both stopped more frequently and punished more severely) are to blame for both violence and the resulting culture, as these are things we have actual evidence for

blaming culture and ignoring measurable factors is almost always lazy racism

I think you are missing my point. I specifically avoided blaming culture. If you magically fixed policing and hiring discrimination tomorrow, it would still take generations for blighted communities to overcome their current inertia. I am simply saying that additional factors exist and are relevant.

Yes, we e have evidence that incarceration is detrimental to outcomes.

We also have data that uneducated single parents are detrimental to outcomes. We also have data that criminal and drug addicted parents are detrimental to outcomes.

Let me ask you, do you think that white America's gun culture is partly responsible for violent crime in the US?

no because 99.99% of people aren’t walking into schools shooting people, the .01% doesn’t represent the entirety of culture… at best it represents how outliers with mental health issues don’t have access to mental health services

Well I'm glad you're intellectually consistent on that.

I don't really think that accepting that cultural trends influence behavior, including violent and/or criminal behavior, is racist. Culture is influenced by environment, and culture influences behavior. To pin all criminal behavior on culture though is incorrect IMO.

Study finds correlation not causation

If “Black men” is capitalized, shouldn’t it be “White men” also, except where one is referring to a man that is the color white, for example due to having been painted?

Jobs are either:

1. Rising in impact, so employers simply have to rank candidates mercilessly, ...

Think: Creatives, White Color Workers, Executives, ...

2. ... Or becoming homogenized in order to be easily scalable and easily replaceable, so employers have no incentive not to weed mercilessly

Think: Driver, Warehouse Worker, Restaurant/Retail Chain Employees of all Kinds, Low Level Managers, ...

This is natural trend for LOCAL-OPTIMIZED action in an economic system continually optimizing for efficiency. Trust is a huge efficiency.

But while I am a fan of ever rising standards, GLOBAL OPTIMIZATION of the economy requires rising standards to be coupled with on-ramps and advancement support. So people can also efficiently rise to those higher standards.

Easily identifiable on-ramps, and self-advancement opportunities are important for those with lack of experience, and overlooked talents, but also victims of inequitable or self-inflicted history.

Acceptance of dead ends for people creates immediate local problems (unemployment, family stress), but also metastasizes into global societal problems (political instability, tribalism, crime, less capable work force, less wealthy consumer class, retirement problems, social support oversubscription, etc).

> "Employers need to understand that one big reason they cannot find the workers they need is too often, they exclude those who have had involvement with the criminal justice system,"

Pretentious academics need to understand that one big reason employers exclude those who have involvment with the criminal justice system is because they have a history of criminal behavior.

This is horrifying. You have a huge number of disfranchised people, who can't normally participate in society -- they can't get a job, they can't a mate. On this path lies radicalization and violence. I'm not sure you understand how truly chilling this is. These people, with nothing to lose, absolutely nothing to lose, have easy access to weapons and ammunition.

You are sitting on a very very large powder keg and it will take just one spark, one charismatic leader, to unite them and blow the whole shebang up.

Act now before it's too late.

> These people, with nothing to lose, absolutely nothing to lose, have easy access to weapons and ammunition.

Isn't it illegal to buy a gun if you have a felony?

Putting aside the whole "they're criminals, they don't follow the law". Unless that was your point

Hardened criminals they aren't, most of them probably are convicted for having some marijuana on them. They study doesn't say all of them are felons.

And really, does it matter if they personally can't buy guns? It's the US, guns grow on trees. They probably already have a gun, gifted to them by their parents. And it's a moot point once they start organizing.

You can't (generally) legally possess a gun as a felon (even if you legally possessed it before), and it is illegal to gift a gun to a felon.

Those laws probably explains why so few criminals in the US have access to guns then, since criminals tend to closely follow the law.

Before I went to jail I wouldn't know where to buy drugs or guns from. Now, I could make a call and have an entire raft of fun things at my disposable within hours, given some cold hard cash.

Going to jail increases your criminal networking considerably.

It has already happened, notice how any BLM type protest quickly erupts into looting and chaos at dusk. Also organized retail crime in San Francisco, train theft in Los Angeles, crime gangs in south Chicago, etc.

Defunding police also serves them well to run rampant crime without the fear of prosecution for their crimes

A criminal record in a database forever is a punishment that isn't talked about. When someone files bankruptcy, they are only punished for 7 years then the record is dropped.

Once you are labeled a criminal, you carry that mark for life. It's easy to see how that could cause resentment and anger and lashing out.

I think there should be time limits on criminal records just like there are time limits on jail time.

What % are for non-violent drug related charges that we could expunge by making marijuana legal?

It's crazy to me that this hasn't been done.

OK, let's start by saying that this is specifically for US young men. And since the USA has a higher percentage of citizens either behind bars or having been inside this is not so surprising. Other developed countries support the unemployed, so they're much less likely to commit crime to survive.

In the US, of course.

> a stigma that poses a barrier to them participating in the nation's labor force.

No, it poses a barrier to them participating in elections. That's the idea behind their racist politics-police-court system.

See, this is why in my ideal society the cronically criminal are put for life in gulags. This mind simply can't coexist with nirmal people in modern society.

Further, family dynamics dictate how many young males face these difficulties.

Here's where the solution lies. Strong families make the bedrock of a strong society.

"Researchers say the main lesson from the study is that unemployment services need to do more to help people cope with their criminal histories."

Could another "main lesson" be for people to commit less crime?

Do we need a study to find this?

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