7 ms·

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

by jl6 5y ago

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.

earspider 5y ago
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.
- seandoe 5y ago
  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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jl6 5y ago
  That’s only a solution if you think there aren’t any genuine trust issues in hiring people with criminal records.
  - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    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.
    - jimmygrapes 5y ago
      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.
      - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
        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.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      I don't want you in prison. I just don't want to interact with you.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      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.
  - Helloyello 5y ago
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  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.
  - brnaftr361 5y ago
    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.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      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.
      - mLuby 5y ago
        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.
        mulmen 5y ago
        Right now there is a block list on hiring discrimination. I’m suggesting an allow list.
      - 5y ago
- yuliyp 5y ago
  You'll just get discrimination based on proxies for criminal background instead (poverty, suspicious gaps in employment, zip code).
  - dibujante 5y ago
    And race. If employers can't actually check your record, they'll make assumptions about it, and some of those are pretty unsavory.
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    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.
- Analemma_ 5y ago
  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.
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    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.
  - gruez 5y ago
    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-and-when-ep-420/ 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.
  - polski-g 5y ago
    If employers can't discriminate on the individual level, they will discriminate on the group level.
    - earspider 5y ago
- KorematsuFredt 5y ago
  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.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    You've said why you don't like it but not why it wouldn't work.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      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.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
    Are those not exceptions? How many of the unemployed young men have criminal records concerning sex offense or financial fraud?
    - lr4444lr 5y ago
      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.
      - rilezg 5y ago
        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.
- lazyeye 5y ago
  Another obvious solution.. don't commit crime.
chaostheory 5y ago
> 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.
- brnt 5y ago
  > 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.)
  - rexpop 5y ago
    It's documented to be extremely traumatizing and physically disabling.
- pydry 5y ago
  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.
  - blip54321 5y ago
    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.
deeg 5y ago
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.
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  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.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  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.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  I think the opposite is more likely. WFH increases the level of trust needed between employer and employee.
  - brnt 5y ago
    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.
    - handmodel 5y ago
      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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vgeek 5y ago
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.

by jl6 5y ago

earspider 5y ago

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.

seandoe 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jl6 5y ago
That’s only a solution if you think there aren’t any genuine trust issues in hiring people with criminal records.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  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.
  - jimmygrapes 5y ago
    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.
    - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
      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.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    I don't want you in prison. I just don't want to interact with you.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    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.
- Helloyello 5y ago
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
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.
- brnaftr361 5y ago
  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.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    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.
    - mLuby 5y ago
      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.
      - mulmen 5y ago
        Right now there is a block list on hiring discrimination. I’m suggesting an allow list.
    - 5y ago
yuliyp 5y ago
You'll just get discrimination based on proxies for criminal background instead (poverty, suspicious gaps in employment, zip code).
- dibujante 5y ago
  And race. If employers can't actually check your record, they'll make assumptions about it, and some of those are pretty unsavory.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  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.
Analemma_ 5y ago
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.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  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.
- gruez 5y ago
  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-and-when-ep-420/ 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.
- polski-g 5y ago
  If employers can't discriminate on the individual level, they will discriminate on the group level.
  - earspider 5y ago
KorematsuFredt 5y ago
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.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  You've said why you don't like it but not why it wouldn't work.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    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.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  Are those not exceptions? How many of the unemployed young men have criminal records concerning sex offense or financial fraud?
  - lr4444lr 5y ago
    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.
    - rilezg 5y ago
      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.
lazyeye 5y ago
Another obvious solution.. don't commit crime.

chaostheory 5y ago

> 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.

brnt 5y ago
> 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.)
- rexpop 5y ago
  It's documented to be extremely traumatizing and physically disabling.
pydry 5y ago
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.
- blip54321 5y ago
  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.

deeg 5y ago

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.

lr4444lr 5y ago
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.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
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.
dahfizz 5y ago
I think the opposite is more likely. WFH increases the level of trust needed between employer and employee.
- brnt 5y ago
  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.
  - handmodel 5y ago
    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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

vgeek 5y ago

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.