12 ms·

We need more of this. A criminal record in the US is a curse for life, leaving former criminals with little chance at success and little to live for. People wit

We need more of this. A criminal record in the US is a curse for life, leaving former criminals with little chance at success and little to live for. People without much to live for are dangerous. We should help our former criminals rather than condemn them for life--it benefits us all.

nickff 6y ago
People are losing their jobs because of offhand tweets completely unrelated to their occupation; how can we expect that a blemish as big as a criminal record will be overlooked?
- clevergadget 6y ago
  pretty sure the people with criminal records have already been punished?
  - UnpossibleJim 6y ago
    I believe what the person above was referring to is the dichotomy of the people cheering for prisoners getting jobs while cancelling people for a fairly innocuous tweet, however tasteless. While the prisoners may have paid for their crime, there isn't always as clear a path out of the purgatory that is becoming the social pariah of upsetting "the mob" in the Twitterverse (though, past a few professions, I'm unsure how much sway they hold).
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      I wouldn't say that's a dichotomy. Internet popularity was fleeting before twitter and it probably still will be long afterwards. In general, the path out of unpopularity is to do research before you post something. If you don't want to do it yourself, you can hire a PR firm.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  I'd rather hire a criminal (depending on the crime, obviously) than, say, a racist, especially given how many laws I disagree with.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    > depending on the crime, obviously Well, this is the big part that's missing from the story. 13 years seems like it was a big deal. Is it even legal to ask someone who was in prison what their crime was during an interview?
    - richardwhiuk 6y ago
      Definitely in the UK. You can ask for full criminal records.
      - VBprogrammer 6y ago
        Criminal convictions in the UK at least can be considered spent, after that point it doesn't need to be declared.
      - michaelt 6y ago
        You can ask. But UK convictions become 'spent' after a certain amount of time (Depending on the length of the prison sentence served, with 4+ year sentences never becoming spent) after which they leave the person's basic criminal record, and there's no obligation to tell a prospective employer about them. Only a few jobs (such as teaching) are allowed info on spent convictions.
        richardwhiuk 6y ago
        The original article was a 13 year conviction, so would have shown up.
    - 6y ago
- JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
  Because two wrongs dont make a right, and expectations are a poor way to calibrate justice.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  You don't understand. One is an accidental mishap due to the extreme cruelty and unfairness of our modern society. The other one is a sincerely held unacceptable belief which endangers the progress of humanity. /s
  - taneq 6y ago
    I guess merely being convicted of a crime isn't that bad compared with being sentenced without trial in the court of public opinion.
  - Joker_vD 6y ago
    Cf. "revolutionary conscience": [0] [0] https://www.history-of-emotions.mpg.de/texts/revolutionary-conscience https://www.history-of-emotions.mpg.de/texts/revolutionary-c...
- geofft 6y ago
  I don't think anyone expects them to be overlooked. You look at the person and you see if they've changed for the better. I would much rather hire someone who grew up poor and fell in with gangs and felt pressured to join in an armed robbery 10 years ago and understands that it's wrong than someone who had a demonstrated bias against some minority 10 years ago and still does today. This isn't about whether they're a "good person" or anything, this is a mercenary calculation based on business value. I don't expect the former gang member is going to engage in similar violent crimes if I employ them. I do expect the biased person is going to have trouble working productively with people in my company who are part of that minority or is going to negatively impact those folks' productivity. I'm not in the business of determining the magnitude of your moral transgressions. That stays in the confessional. I'm in the business of hiring folks who will deliver business value.
  - bzbarsky 6y ago
    I think there's a wide gulf between "said something that someone on the internet construed as racist" and "demonstrated bias against some minority"... But past that, the general principle you advocate seems to be "try not to hire people who will not be able to work with others", right? It doesn't matter whether they're biased against minorities or non-minorities, as long as they're biased and will be acting irrationally in ways that piss off those around them.
- nendroid 6y ago
  You can tweet racist stuff and still be president of the United States. The law protects him from the emotions of the masses. This law does not extend over to your employment at a commercial company. The reason why people lose their jobs for racist tweets is because companies are reacting to the emotional sentiment of the masses and pulling a PR maneuver. In short, for commercial jobs, it doesn't matter your crime, or the degree of your crime or whether you committed a crime at all, it's about business and a negative public emotional mood against you at this current point in time is usually bad for business (or stock prices). Case in point, Let's say hypothetically that the OP could have mentioned that this woman's violent crime was repeatedly beating a 8 year old child for no reason and the public's emotional reaction would be drastically different. I'm not sure what her crime really was, but there is definitely a reason why it was omitted: The OP likely made a rational judgement about the crime and is likely very aware that the emotional reaction to the crime by the masses would be drastically different than her own rational judgement... thus from this line of reasoning she has chosen not to mention what the crime was. It's a fine line here. I think if I really got to know a person and I can really understand a person, I feel even a child beater or can be redeemed in my eyes but I can see how in the eyes of the public this can never happen. (Also let's be clear here, I'm not saying the womans crime was beating a child, just using that as an example). People are rarely rational and when you measure the reactions of people in response to stimuli in aggregate you will find that the bigger the aggregate the more emotional the reaction is. This is how a criminal who committed a violent crime can get public support for finding a job, and an innocent man who made a mistake and wrote a stupid tweet can lose any prospect at finding a future career.
  - stupidgarbage 6y ago
    You racist
- saithound 6y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think that's it. The same subset of my coworkers who requested that we don't invite Scott Aaronson to our colloquium because he said something vaguely anti-feminist years ago are perfectly happy to praise (literal murderer and talented number theorist) Christopher Havens, and I'm sure would be happy to have him employed by our department. edit: Of course, universities still don't hire violent offenders, but I don't think the reasons for not employing a Twitter-pariah and not employing a murderer are closely related at all.
- kazinator 6y ago
  > People are losing their jobs because of offhand tweets ... Well, not sitting-in-the-oval-office people, but anyway.
- anemoiac 6y ago
  Smoke weed in Kansas - boom, criminal record. Walk across the Colorado border and smoke weed - no problem, it's completely legal. It's also completely legal to spend your free time carting your AR-15 and Nazi flag down to the village square and recruiting supporters for your "Turn America into a white ethnostate" movement. The point I'm making is that not all criminal behavior is even widely considered objectionable and plenty of legal behavior is. Thus, why would you consider having a criminal record to be "a [big] blemish" that justifies employment discrimination, yet no personal views extreme enough to allow an employer to disassociate from their employee? When you consider that the ratio of those affected by criminal record-based employment discrimination to those impacted by twitter-based discrimination is on the order of millions to one, it seems strange to be more concerned about the latter than the former.
schoolornot 6y ago
I wonder what kind of community reaction there will be if Hans Reiser submits kernel patches after getting released/paroled.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  I, for one, would not mind him doing this while incarcerated, too. Who would be harmed if he would get a pc and internet access in prison?
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  I think as long as he did his time and behaves in the community, he'd be accepted. At least that's what I'd hope.
- guenthert 6y ago
  Who's going to dare rejecting his labor of love?
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  I don't see why they wouldn't accept his patches even if he somehow manages to submit them from inside prison. You can't murder someone with a patch file.
s_dev 6y ago
>A criminal record in the US is a curse for life The US system probably is overly harsh -- in Ireland it's probaby overly lenient and the pendulum affect is that we've criminals being called in to court with literally hundreds of prior convictions and then they're let off with suspended sentences and then go straight back to what they were doing. Equally frustrating -- to see the guilty just walk off and laugh as it is to see the redeemed struggle having conceded their mistakes. Justice is very important, hard and complex. I don't doubt that but their clearly is room for improvement on both sides.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  As with everything, there is a balance. It requires everlasting vigilance.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Out of interest what proportion of criminals let off with suspended sentences have hundreds of convictions?
  - s_dev 6y ago
    I don't have statistics but there are incidents like these that are regularly reported in Irish and International Media: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/woman-most-convictions-ireland-jennifer-armstrong-dublin-shoplifting-a9006896.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/woman-most-c...
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      Sounds like that lady needs care more than she needs more prison time. Particularly after a 16 month sentence and the petty nature of the actual crime. Incidents like these get in the national press precisely because they are rare and hence interesting. Do you think there are tens of people, hundred of people or thousands of people with >100 criminal convictions?
      - 6y ago
mc32 6y ago
I agree. We should definitely have more of this and trades training for people in lock up, so they can do something productive once they get out. Instead of hitting the weights every day, they can engage in productive learning. We all benefit.
- Master_Odin 6y ago
  Except for the privatized prisons who don't actually want to rehabilitate their inmates so that they're more likely to recidivate and end up back in prison. The prison system has to be completely overhauled and freed from capitalism at the expense of human life.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    Private prisons make up 8.4% of the total prison population. [0] Interestingly, that's less than half what it is in Australia and UK. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#:~:text=Statistics%20from%20the%20U.S.%20Department,the%20overall%20U.S.%20prison%20population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#:~:text=Statist....
dfxm12 6y ago
leaving former criminals with little chance at success It's worth noting that it also leaves their children a smaller chance at success as well[0], and then the cycle continues. When you add this to the fact that Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders [1], this adds up to one aspect of systemic racism in America. 0 - https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/captive-lives/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/captive-lives/ 1 - https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencing https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...
- asdfghjkl87 6y ago
  Not to mention the systemic misandry: Female offenders of all races received shorter sentences than White male offenders during the Post-Report period, as they had for the prior four periods.
- NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
  It's important to note that [1] seems to refer to federal sentencing, and almost all criminal law in the U.S. is state law. [1] is a small subset of what's going on, and it can't be used to generalize.
  - whack 6y ago
    Election polls are a tiny subset of the general public, but they do offer very powerful insights into wider trends. Is there any reason to believe that Federal judges are more racially biased compared to State judges? I'd be shocked if State judges as a group are more color-blind than Federal judges.
    - NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
      Election polls are designed to do exactly that, whereas this sample isn't anything even approaching a random subset that could be used for inference about the whole population. It may be the case that in state courtrooms judges are the same, worse, or better, but making that inference on the basis of federal-level data is probably unjustified.
Kalium 6y ago
Once upon a time, an employer of mine was happy to work with people who had criminal records. Provided they were honest and willing to discuss the matter. It became a problem when we hired someone with a record of fraud... who had not disclosed it. And who would have had access to credit card info. He was promptly fired. We were willing to work with him, and said as much. He wasn't willing to take the risk. So he took a bigger one, and lost.
stronglikedan 6y ago
> A criminal record in the US It's worse than that. I've been denied an apartment for having an arrest on my record, even though I wasn't convicted.
stupidgarbage 6y ago
After all the law abiding have their jobs then sure, let them have the leftovers.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  What's the point of serving time if you still have to keep getting punished afterwards. According to you, every person who's committed a crime should have a life sentence?
- anoonmoose 6y ago
  [FARMER] You'll have to go/ I'll pay you off for the day/ Collect your bits and pieces there/ And be on your way [VALJEAN] You have given me half/ What the other men get/ This handful of tin/ Wouldn't buy my sweat [LABORER] You broke the law/ It's there for people to see/ Why should you get the same/ As honest men like me
ticmasta 6y ago
I agree with you, but it is a really hard problem with huge, diverse, systemic drivers. The OP mentions how much work from how many people this takes - the entire process could fall apart at any of the steps, plus it required personal relationships and favors. There's also the measure of success; it's pretty relative. I've seen programs touted as huge successes when the recidivism rate is "only" 25%. This speaks about how hard it is to break the cycle, but also would your company be happy with 1/4 employees having a serious drug problem, or stealing or committing a violent crime, vs. (number pulled from thin air) 1/50? We DO need more of this. It's going to take a lot of time and effort, and (sorry growth hackers) it won't scale.
PascLeRasc 6y ago
What's also being implied with background checks, even when they say it's relevant like with checking if a pharmacist has drug charges, is that prison does not work. If it reformed people, it wouldn't matter what your history is, because you went through a reforming process and learned to manage the root cause of why you committed a crime, like poor mental health. Instead we just send people to prison for our own sense of "punishment".
mmmBacon 6y ago
I agree. I think if you went to prison, you served your debt to society and are square with the house. Your punishment should stop. This includes inability to find work etc... with some sensible limits for certain high-trust related positions.

nickff 6y ago

People are losing their jobs because of offhand tweets completely unrelated to their occupation; how can we expect that a blemish as big as a criminal record will be overlooked?

clevergadget 6y ago
pretty sure the people with criminal records have already been punished?
- UnpossibleJim 6y ago
  I believe what the person above was referring to is the dichotomy of the people cheering for prisoners getting jobs while cancelling people for a fairly innocuous tweet, however tasteless. While the prisoners may have paid for their crime, there isn't always as clear a path out of the purgatory that is becoming the social pariah of upsetting "the mob" in the Twitterverse (though, past a few professions, I'm unsure how much sway they hold).
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    I wouldn't say that's a dichotomy. Internet popularity was fleeting before twitter and it probably still will be long afterwards. In general, the path out of unpopularity is to do research before you post something. If you don't want to do it yourself, you can hire a PR firm.
staticassertion 6y ago
I'd rather hire a criminal (depending on the crime, obviously) than, say, a racist, especially given how many laws I disagree with.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- secondcoming 6y ago
  > depending on the crime, obviously Well, this is the big part that's missing from the story. 13 years seems like it was a big deal. Is it even legal to ask someone who was in prison what their crime was during an interview?
  - richardwhiuk 6y ago
    Definitely in the UK. You can ask for full criminal records.
    - VBprogrammer 6y ago
      Criminal convictions in the UK at least can be considered spent, after that point it doesn't need to be declared.
    - michaelt 6y ago
      You can ask. But UK convictions become 'spent' after a certain amount of time (Depending on the length of the prison sentence served, with 4+ year sentences never becoming spent) after which they leave the person's basic criminal record, and there's no obligation to tell a prospective employer about them. Only a few jobs (such as teaching) are allowed info on spent convictions.
      - richardwhiuk 6y ago
        The original article was a 13 year conviction, so would have shown up.
  - 6y ago
JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
Because two wrongs dont make a right, and expectations are a poor way to calibrate justice.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
You don't understand. One is an accidental mishap due to the extreme cruelty and unfairness of our modern society. The other one is a sincerely held unacceptable belief which endangers the progress of humanity. /s
- taneq 6y ago
  I guess merely being convicted of a crime isn't that bad compared with being sentenced without trial in the court of public opinion.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  Cf. "revolutionary conscience": [0] [0] https://www.history-of-emotions.mpg.de/texts/revolutionary-conscience https://www.history-of-emotions.mpg.de/texts/revolutionary-c...
geofft 6y ago
I don't think anyone expects them to be overlooked. You look at the person and you see if they've changed for the better. I would much rather hire someone who grew up poor and fell in with gangs and felt pressured to join in an armed robbery 10 years ago and understands that it's wrong than someone who had a demonstrated bias against some minority 10 years ago and still does today. This isn't about whether they're a "good person" or anything, this is a mercenary calculation based on business value. I don't expect the former gang member is going to engage in similar violent crimes if I employ them. I do expect the biased person is going to have trouble working productively with people in my company who are part of that minority or is going to negatively impact those folks' productivity. I'm not in the business of determining the magnitude of your moral transgressions. That stays in the confessional. I'm in the business of hiring folks who will deliver business value.
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  I think there's a wide gulf between "said something that someone on the internet construed as racist" and "demonstrated bias against some minority"... But past that, the general principle you advocate seems to be "try not to hire people who will not be able to work with others", right? It doesn't matter whether they're biased against minorities or non-minorities, as long as they're biased and will be acting irrationally in ways that piss off those around them.
nendroid 6y ago
You can tweet racist stuff and still be president of the United States. The law protects him from the emotions of the masses. This law does not extend over to your employment at a commercial company. The reason why people lose their jobs for racist tweets is because companies are reacting to the emotional sentiment of the masses and pulling a PR maneuver. In short, for commercial jobs, it doesn't matter your crime, or the degree of your crime or whether you committed a crime at all, it's about business and a negative public emotional mood against you at this current point in time is usually bad for business (or stock prices). Case in point, Let's say hypothetically that the OP could have mentioned that this woman's violent crime was repeatedly beating a 8 year old child for no reason and the public's emotional reaction would be drastically different. I'm not sure what her crime really was, but there is definitely a reason why it was omitted: The OP likely made a rational judgement about the crime and is likely very aware that the emotional reaction to the crime by the masses would be drastically different than her own rational judgement... thus from this line of reasoning she has chosen not to mention what the crime was. It's a fine line here. I think if I really got to know a person and I can really understand a person, I feel even a child beater or can be redeemed in my eyes but I can see how in the eyes of the public this can never happen. (Also let's be clear here, I'm not saying the womans crime was beating a child, just using that as an example). People are rarely rational and when you measure the reactions of people in response to stimuli in aggregate you will find that the bigger the aggregate the more emotional the reaction is. This is how a criminal who committed a violent crime can get public support for finding a job, and an innocent man who made a mistake and wrote a stupid tweet can lose any prospect at finding a future career.
- stupidgarbage 6y ago
  You racist
saithound 6y ago
Unfortunately, I don't think that's it. The same subset of my coworkers who requested that we don't invite Scott Aaronson to our colloquium because he said something vaguely anti-feminist years ago are perfectly happy to praise (literal murderer and talented number theorist) Christopher Havens, and I'm sure would be happy to have him employed by our department. edit: Of course, universities still don't hire violent offenders, but I don't think the reasons for not employing a Twitter-pariah and not employing a murderer are closely related at all.
kazinator 6y ago
> People are losing their jobs because of offhand tweets ... Well, not sitting-in-the-oval-office people, but anyway.
anemoiac 6y ago
Smoke weed in Kansas - boom, criminal record. Walk across the Colorado border and smoke weed - no problem, it's completely legal. It's also completely legal to spend your free time carting your AR-15 and Nazi flag down to the village square and recruiting supporters for your "Turn America into a white ethnostate" movement. The point I'm making is that not all criminal behavior is even widely considered objectionable and plenty of legal behavior is. Thus, why would you consider having a criminal record to be "a [big] blemish" that justifies employment discrimination, yet no personal views extreme enough to allow an employer to disassociate from their employee? When you consider that the ratio of those affected by criminal record-based employment discrimination to those impacted by twitter-based discrimination is on the order of millions to one, it seems strange to be more concerned about the latter than the former.

schoolornot 6y ago

I wonder what kind of community reaction there will be if Hans Reiser submits kernel patches after getting released/paroled.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
I, for one, would not mind him doing this while incarcerated, too. Who would be harmed if he would get a pc and internet access in prison?
jonny_eh 6y ago
I think as long as he did his time and behaves in the community, he'd be accepted. At least that's what I'd hope.
guenthert 6y ago
Who's going to dare rejecting his labor of love?
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
I don't see why they wouldn't accept his patches even if he somehow manages to submit them from inside prison. You can't murder someone with a patch file.

s_dev 6y ago

>A criminal record in the US is a curse for life The US system probably is overly harsh -- in Ireland it's probaby overly lenient and the pendulum affect is that we've criminals being called in to court with literally hundreds of prior convictions and then they're let off with suspended sentences and then go straight back to what they were doing. Equally frustrating -- to see the guilty just walk off and laugh as it is to see the redeemed struggle having conceded their mistakes. Justice is very important, hard and complex. I don't doubt that but their clearly is room for improvement on both sides.

jonny_eh 6y ago
As with everything, there is a balance. It requires everlasting vigilance.
meheleventyone 6y ago
Out of interest what proportion of criminals let off with suspended sentences have hundreds of convictions?
- s_dev 6y ago
  I don't have statistics but there are incidents like these that are regularly reported in Irish and International Media: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/woman-most-convictions-ireland-jennifer-armstrong-dublin-shoplifting-a9006896.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/woman-most-c...
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Sounds like that lady needs care more than she needs more prison time. Particularly after a 16 month sentence and the petty nature of the actual crime. Incidents like these get in the national press precisely because they are rare and hence interesting. Do you think there are tens of people, hundred of people or thousands of people with >100 criminal convictions?
    - 6y ago

mc32 6y ago

I agree. We should definitely have more of this and trades training for people in lock up, so they can do something productive once they get out. Instead of hitting the weights every day, they can engage in productive learning. We all benefit.

Master_Odin 6y ago
Except for the privatized prisons who don't actually want to rehabilitate their inmates so that they're more likely to recidivate and end up back in prison. The prison system has to be completely overhauled and freed from capitalism at the expense of human life.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  Private prisons make up 8.4% of the total prison population. [0] Interestingly, that's less than half what it is in Australia and UK. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#:~:text=Statistics%20from%20the%20U.S.%20Department,the%20overall%20U.S.%20prison%20population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#:~:text=Statist....

dfxm12 6y ago

leaving former criminals with little chance at success It's worth noting that it also leaves their children a smaller chance at success as well[0], and then the cycle continues. When you add this to the fact that Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders [1], this adds up to one aspect of systemic racism in America. 0 - https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/captive-lives/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/captive-lives/ 1 - https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencing https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...

asdfghjkl87 6y ago
Not to mention the systemic misandry: Female offenders of all races received shorter sentences than White male offenders during the Post-Report period, as they had for the prior four periods.
NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
It's important to note that [1] seems to refer to federal sentencing, and almost all criminal law in the U.S. is state law. [1] is a small subset of what's going on, and it can't be used to generalize.
- whack 6y ago
  Election polls are a tiny subset of the general public, but they do offer very powerful insights into wider trends. Is there any reason to believe that Federal judges are more racially biased compared to State judges? I'd be shocked if State judges as a group are more color-blind than Federal judges.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
    Election polls are designed to do exactly that, whereas this sample isn't anything even approaching a random subset that could be used for inference about the whole population. It may be the case that in state courtrooms judges are the same, worse, or better, but making that inference on the basis of federal-level data is probably unjustified.

Kalium 6y ago

Once upon a time, an employer of mine was happy to work with people who had criminal records. Provided they were honest and willing to discuss the matter. It became a problem when we hired someone with a record of fraud... who had not disclosed it. And who would have had access to credit card info. He was promptly fired. We were willing to work with him, and said as much. He wasn't willing to take the risk. So he took a bigger one, and lost.

stronglikedan 6y ago

> A criminal record in the US It's worse than that. I've been denied an apartment for having an arrest on my record, even though I wasn't convicted.

stupidgarbage 6y ago

After all the law abiding have their jobs then sure, let them have the leftovers.

ehsankia 6y ago
What's the point of serving time if you still have to keep getting punished afterwards. According to you, every person who's committed a crime should have a life sentence?
anoonmoose 6y ago
[FARMER] You'll have to go/ I'll pay you off for the day/ Collect your bits and pieces there/ And be on your way [VALJEAN] You have given me half/ What the other men get/ This handful of tin/ Wouldn't buy my sweat [LABORER] You broke the law/ It's there for people to see/ Why should you get the same/ As honest men like me

ticmasta 6y ago

I agree with you, but it is a really hard problem with huge, diverse, systemic drivers. The OP mentions how much work from how many people this takes - the entire process could fall apart at any of the steps, plus it required personal relationships and favors. There's also the measure of success; it's pretty relative. I've seen programs touted as huge successes when the recidivism rate is "only" 25%. This speaks about how hard it is to break the cycle, but also would your company be happy with 1/4 employees having a serious drug problem, or stealing or committing a violent crime, vs. (number pulled from thin air) 1/50? We DO need more of this. It's going to take a lot of time and effort, and (sorry growth hackers) it won't scale.

PascLeRasc 6y ago

What's also being implied with background checks, even when they say it's relevant like with checking if a pharmacist has drug charges, is that prison does not work. If it reformed people, it wouldn't matter what your history is, because you went through a reforming process and learned to manage the root cause of why you committed a crime, like poor mental health. Instead we just send people to prison for our own sense of "punishment".

mmmBacon 6y ago

I agree. I think if you went to prison, you served your debt to society and are square with the house. Your punishment should stop. This includes inability to find work etc... with some sensible limits for certain high-trust related positions.