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.