[quote=spdrun]Frankly, tough patooties. Working with people who have paid their debt to society and are being reintegrated is part of the price you have to pay for living in a relatively free and just society.
Not all crime is violent, even if it appears so at first glance. The guy in the article was essentially arrested for being poor and convicted of contempt of cop. What about someone caught with drugs at age 20 who’s now 30? Or how about someone who got in a bar fight while drunk, punched someone the wrong way, they hit their head and died resulting in a felony manslaughter record?
Yet plenty of people get into bar fights with non-lethal results without anything going on to their record. Oftentimes, a conviction might just be bad luck.
I’d agree with you about a very narrow subset of premeditated violent crime (premeditated murder, grievous bodily harm, rape), but most people who have problems getting a job due to their records were convicted of much less serious crimes.
Proposed solution:
(1) Forbid private sale of criminal background check data, which is often inaccurate or lists arrests even absent conviction. Police agencies should be the only source for such data, and should be required to hold arrests without convictions confidential. Innocent till proven guilty, you know.
(2) Require the subject’s notarized signature to release such data. Nothing gets released without explicit consent.
(3) Only allow employers to ask for such authorization after a job offer is made. The fines for violating this rule should be steep.[/quote]
Once again, that’s all very easy to say when you’re a single, young-ish, childless man. Not so easy when you’re a single woman living by yourself, or an elderly man, or a family with young children who might be victimized by a criminal working in their home.
I do understand 100% what you’re saying about juvenile convictions or one-off situations and bad luck, but too many crimes are committed by “former” criminals who were “rehabilitated” and let loose in society. Easy to say “tough potatoes” until it’s your wife, daughter, or son who was raped, tortured, and killed by an ex-con who was fixing your air conditioner.
Can you imagine the liability for public agencies who withhold information from prospective employers when it’s later discovered that some of their new employees are ex-felons who’ve committed heinous crimes during the commission of their work, or who got access to their victims via work?
And there is no reason to delay getting this information until later in the interview process if it’s a no-go from the beginning. If I were hiring people, especially people who had to go into people’s homes, there is no way in hell that I would hire someone with a criminal background, particularly if it involved a violent crime or theft of some sort. No way in hell.
