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.
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.
Don't put that on businesses.
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.
For the rest of their lives? There’s a time dimension here that implies being clean for five years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it’s actually pretty privacy focused way to accomplish things.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.