It's certainly government-enabled as others have said. We have this principle of "innocent-until-proven-guilty" (although certainly in the media and in some more practical aspects of our judicial system that seems to get forgotten), but I think we need to consider more this idea of how someone gets innocent again. Do all felonies justify having someone labelled as a felon for life, knowing that it hinders their ability to productively participate in society again? Absolutely not. Especially if we really believe our "correctional" facilities correct people instead of just inflicting suffering, we ought to be trying harder to let go of people's pasts once it's behind him. Would I hire a white-collar criminal to handle sensitive business records? Probably not. But would I hire a guy who beat up an attacker and took it too far to fix my car? No reason no to. Yet we don't have enough nuance in our system to handle stuff like that, and no reason for businesses to do anything but discriminate indiscriminately. If one doesn't hire felons, one doesn't hire felons. And unless you can get things expunged, you're kinda screwed with a sort of life sentence.
In the US, yes. “Convicted felon” is not a protected class. Many businesses ask during your application or hiring process if you’ve ever been “convicted of a felony”. The idea is: “we don’t want a thief manning the cash registers!” There’s also the general misconception that “if you’re in, or were in, prison, it’s because you’re a bad person.” But the problem is: they served their debt to society (jail), and innocent people are jailed all the time.
If they were still a threat to society after 5 years or whatever, then they shouldn’t’ve been sentenced to just 5 years. And with innocent people being convicted, the bar to get it fixed is very high because (in some states), you have to not only prove you’re innocence, but that the prosecution messed up (such as withholding evidence). And don’t forget about prosecutorial immunity!
And if it is fixed, how do you answer that question? Yes, you were convicted, but it’s not on your record because you proved your innocence. Yes? No? Answer yes, and you’re denied. Answer no, and when they find out about it, you’re fired, and can only hope your bosses will fight for you and win.
That only ends when you make it easier to figure out whether someone is going to actually harm your business in the future, rather than finding out whether they have ever been a felon.
There's another reason why companies don't want to hire felons - liability.
I've seen many companies successfully sued over the years because one of their employees committed a crime against a customer. The lawsuit was because the company hired an ex-con.
To get companies to hire ex-cons, liability laws need to be amended to protect companies from that sort of liability.
My experience is different. I'm not a felon but I come across them in the workplace fairly often as an internal investigator. We have infosec personnel working for us with nonviolent sex offender convictions who also maintain security clearances (defense contractor). Life does not end with a conviction; don't wear a sandwich board broadcasting it but honesty goes a long way. It's the lies that I'll eventually hang you with.
Go west if you can. If you're on the east coast it's hell. The "liability" concerns are (IME) a pervasive east-coast racist myth from the 60s, but it's a real threat. The same justification was used to expand routine drug screening from forklift operators and truck drivers to keyboard jockeys. Equifax did drug testing of white-collar employees and did not hire criminals; so much for their liability and reputation following the worst data breach in history. It's all bullshit; both justifications are veiled cause to not hire blacks.
Mind your co-workers inclined to cyberstalk everyone around them and using your skeletons to raise PR hell to advance their own career. We've unfortunately thrown employees under the bus due to public outcry. Social "justice" in action! (What was the prison sentence for, if not justice...?)
It's unfortunately a self-feeding circle... in the US, if you see a felon, it's likely they will go on to commit more felonies, so you won't want to hire them.
But if you don't hire them, they may be forced to commit other felonies... tragedy of the commons I suppose, just like shopping at Walmart is bad for the community but good for the individual.
It's hard to overcome these effects without legislation, but noone (sane) wants to be in the community that starts it.
Yeah we need more pardons not less, and we need blanket laws that forbid making hiring, etc decisions based on convictions (AND forbid lawsuits around hiring) more than X years ago.
People are afraid to expose themselves to liability for hiring a felon, even if said felony is ages ago, because if something goes wrong everyone will say "well you shouldn't have hired a felon."
You would never be able to hire a felon for anything since on that theory, the felon had done something outside of work that being a criminal act, might scare someone at work who had to work around them, even though their behavior at work was perfect.
You can't refuse to hire someone for race, or family status. It would be reasonable if you couldn't refuse to hire someone for a crime they have already completed a sentence for (unless it's relevant to the job). There already exist some state laws of this sort, especially for crimes that have been expunged.
Friendship is unrelated, and you wouldn't even know if they were a felon.
And non-felons are capable of horrible crimes too. They weren't born felons.
Who cares what they think; would a judge consider me liable because I hired the ex felon? If so, aren't they admitting that the criminal system shouldn't be trusted?
It's interesting seeing people get upset at this. I'm a felon - and this makes sense to me. It's your business, you should choose who works for you.
While it's illegal in the US for most places to outright not hire you solely because you're a felon, you'll have a hard time actually proving that.
If you go by the numbers, felons are more likely to break the law again than folks that aren't felons. You can argue up and down the _why_ around this, but that's the numbers.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but it's your right to hold your opinion and run your business in a way you see fit.
I'm not a lawyer and can't comment on if they are liable or not, but I take issue with the idea that they should be. Adding this liability just compounds the current issues where felons are nearly incapable of becoming employed after serving their sentence. If the state determines that a person is safe enough to the general public to be released from prison, why should an employer be expected to investigate beyond that? On the flip side, if a person is a significant threat, the state should be liable for letting them out of prison, not the employer who hired them.
I am also very attached to this, even though I don't have a direct family member or friend being a felon in the US.
From an ethical and social perspective, how terrible is society if doing one (sometimes small) mistake which we could realistically all make at some point in our life pushes us to constantly fail everything in life going forward? Think about the stupid shit you did at 19 year old that could follow you your whole life?
I understand that some positions require background checks, but it shouldn't be like it is today where no businesses will even take the risk to hire anyone with the slightest dent in their criminal past.
If I'm hiring for a job, all other things being equal, why choose the felon? It's possible, maybe even likely, that the person was reformed in prison. But if I choose the non-felon, then I don't even have to worry about it.
To be honest, though, it depends a heavily on what the person's crime was. Do I care that a guy got caught with a pound of weed? No. Do I care that he embezzled from his employer? Definitely. A guy who killed his cheating wife isn't a big concern, but I could never trust a guy who "snapped" and assaulted some random person.
Even if you've "reformed your past ways of crime" after serving jail time and "learned your lessons":
non-felon > felon
Especially in terms of potential risks to my staff or property. Basically, would you hire a babysitter with a criminal record or one without a criminal record and good references?
Maybe my employees break the law when they're not at work, but that's none of my business. If one of my employees is indicted or cited for rioting / DUI, welp I'll fire them on the spot.
Also, re "all crimes are behind you once you leave prison" - how would you explain repeat offenders? At this point I'm trusting my business against statistics of a felon committing a crime again lmao.
By this logic, wouldn't people the state labeled as felons, who don't believe they are guilty, be unable to speak about discrimination against felons, even though they personally experienced it at both a institutional and societal level?
You could always find a reasonable case to screen felons, but the first step to reintegrating people into the society is trusting them. It does involve risk.
I’m not a felon but get so upset at our current system that tries to pretend to care about people with records but in actuality leaves them to rot.
I’m a business owner and my first employee and current operations manager is a felon. I knew this prior as I worked with him before, before starting my own business. He ended up in that position and doing 3 years of prison because America for a lot of people sucks. It sucked for him and he was in a position where it was either do felonious things or be homeless. So he made an obvious choice.
He’s struggled with work since then, because as soon as they see felon they tend to disregard him. It sucks. I know his case isn’t standard, but it also isn’t rare. Society treats these people like lepers and I hope the tides change on this, or we get actual criminal reform. Because what we’ve got right now OP’s business should have went under because it wasn’t needed anymore. But that’s not the case.
It's relevant for most jobs. In America it's considered bad to hire a felon. It's really bad. IMO everyone deserves a second chance if they make the effort to better themselves. However, my in laws and parents do not agree with this. Once damned, you are damned forever.
Though I want to know about those who were former felons in the US and leave the country and pick up citizenship else where. I'd really like to hear those stories.
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