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.
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?
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.
There are a lot of people with a felony record who pose zero additional risk to their employer. Of course it depends on the person and it depends on the job. It certainly doesn't make sense to have a strict policy against all felons regardless of individual circumstances.
It's a case of bad incentives: nobody is going to lose his job because they harass you, but somebody is going to suffer if a felon somehow goes through unmolested and then proceeds to do something that local newspapers might report.
As an individual, I would be cautious about hiring a former convict, but it's not out of the question.
Intuitively (I'm not an actuary), it seems that insurance companies get away with charging you more if you've had a prior accident. It seems a person who has broken the law may be more likely to break it than the average person.
I think it stinks that this local govt can tell a business to fire a felon though, that just compounds the problem of re-entry. I smell a Supreme Court case in the future.
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.
Yeah, once someone makes a mistake they should absolutely be barred from gainful employment forever! That will teach them... that they should remain criminals. Yeah!
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.
The incidence of recidivism is extreme. The chances of a freed felon committing another felony are such that handing them a gun or a job in retail is very risky. Yet the alternative, keeping them in prison forever, is clearly not fair. So what should be done?
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.
It is completely unfair for felons to be shut out of jobs because of non-violent past mistakes that are ancient history and would not re-occur.
On the other hand, we have no idea who made this page. If they want to be taken seriously and given a chance, they need to be transparent enough to at least tell us who they are, and let us make our own decision on working with them.
It's often a catch-22 situation: as long as they remain in jail they will remain dangerous, due to the nature of prison.
The problem of re-integrating felons with society is difficult and often ignored. It can be impossible to get work for many of these people, leading almost inevitably back to criminality (primarily narcotics, thence prostitution and petty theft).
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.
Your attitude towards someone convicted of a criminal act isn’t uncommon, but it’s short-sighted. If the judicial system determines that the appropriate punishment for a crime is X years, then at the end of that time they should be given a chance at a fresh start. There are limits, of course, perhaps you don’t want to give them a security clearance, or a job that requires carrying a gun. Someone convicted of molesting children should probably never hold a job that gives them contact with children.
In the US at least, having a felony conviction (and the bar for that is not that high) is effectively a lifetime punishment. It’s incredibly difficult for someone with a felony conviction on their record to get a job with potential. That’s a big part of why the recidivism rate for felons is so high. They often don’t have many options to make a living.
That's a bit of a false equivalency. That's like saying why not drop out of college? Bill Gates did and he turned out fine.
Those positions are not a dime-a-dozen. For the regular working person, being a felon is a very heavy weight to carry and it immediately discredits or otherwise disqualifies many people, where they rarely have a chance to even have their story heard.
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.
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