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Comment by slt2021 | Hacker News Reader

slt2021

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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