[HN Gopher] Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal ...
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Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records
Author : aussieguy1234
Score : 22 points
Date : 2022-02-18 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One of the few 501(c)3's I will give money to is an organization
| that helps offenders go straight when they get out of jail and I
| see my name on a very short list of private donors.
|
| In the 1990s I was a victim of what I would call "Domestic
| Terrorism", the ringleader of the group didn't go to prison for
| his actions against me and other people at my college but I did
| hear that he went to prison for drug charges not long after.
|
| I still haven't forgiven the college administrator who chose not
| to take action against this person (would that person have said
| "there is nothing they can do" if his daughter was the victim?)
| but if I heard the ringleader of that gang had gotten out of
| prison and managed to find work and stay out of trouble I would
| want to shake his hand because that is something that is against
| the odds and so hard to do.
| jka wrote:
| Forgiveness can be extremely difficult; well done for
| recognizing that your individual experiences aren't a reason to
| restrict the opportunities of others - that's more than many
| people are able to manage.
| Animats wrote:
| _" By age 35, 64% of unemployed men have been arrested and 46%
| have been convicted of a crime, with the rates varying only
| slightly by race and ethnicity."_
|
| Well, executing criminals for minor offenses seems to be out of
| fashion.[1] Transportation to Australia or Siberia is no longer
| an option. There's no frontier to ship them off to. And the US
| military doesn't want criminals; each soldier today has too much
| firepower.
|
| There are ways back, but it's hard to scale them. Delancey Street
| Restaurant in SF is staffed by ex-cons. (I recommend the
| chicken.)
|
| [1] https://www.nationaljusticemuseum.org.uk/museum/news/what-
| wa...
| tyingq wrote:
| At least in the US one thing that has made this worse is
| universal cheap access to criminal background checks. That didn't
| used to exist, so a criminal background blocked access to jobs
| with big companies that could do background checks. But, you
| could get a job at smaller companies.
|
| Other countries have a system where some government agency
| provides a _" does this person have any past offenses relevant to
| this job?"_ service. Where they look at the type of job, any
| criminal history, and make sure the specific criminal history
| isn't an issue for the type of job being sought.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yeah, I wouldn't want a former embezzler in a bookkeeping job
| at my company.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's the point - a former embezzler being hired as a
| plumber is different than hiring them as a bookkeeper.
|
| However, until the employees are more scarce than jobs,
| there's no reason to hire an ex-con and every reason to skip
| over them (bureaucratically speaking).
|
| To counter that you'd need to offer incentives TO hire them -
| tax write-offs or something, or liability protections.
|
| Or you have to expunge records at some point, which is
| another issue because that only affects _government_ records,
| not other things background checks may find.
| enterthematrix wrote:
| Study finds correlation not causation
| slt2021 wrote:
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > 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.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > 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.
| ilovetux wrote:
| 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.
| earspider wrote:
| _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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| One way around this is for them to become contractors,
| consultants, and other businesses.
| _moof wrote:
| _> 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...
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > 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.
| ...
| jl6 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jl6 wrote:
| That's only a solution if you think there aren't any genuine
| trust issues in hiring people with criminal records.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > 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.
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(page generated 2022-02-18 23:01 UTC)