When Banker & Tradesman offered me a columnist slot, I decided not to tell them about the time I robbed a bank. My fear was that bank robbery might not have been popular with the target audience.
The criminal record was sealed; no one ever would have found out. I think that’s fair. My life shouldn’t be ruined, and you shouldn’t be denied a great columnist, just because of a bank robbery.
It was my sister’s bank. A piggy bank. We were sitting in the back seat of the family car and she bit me. In return, when we got home, I raided her bank. The prosecutor and judge was my mom. She ordered restitution and sealed the record.
Mom was a woman ahead of her time. Across the country, the criminal justice system is wrestling with a growing population of charming men and women with criminal records and, thus, shaky job prospects.
The response has been a bewildering blizzard of state and federal initiatives to hide, avoid, pretty up, discourage, and prohibit talking about, asking about, requiring, disclosing, or otherwise thinking about whether a job candidate sitting across the desk has been convicted of a crime.
Sweeping Dirt Away
Boston’s version of the criminal don’t-ask-don’t-tell philosophy encourages the hiring of city employees with no criminal background checks and no embarrassing questions, unless the applicant wants to be a cop or a social-service type working with kids or the elderly. Companies doing business with the city must also agree to hire workers without any sneaky questions about how the food tasted in the prison cafeteria.
Gov. Deval Patrick this month signed legislation tweaking the state version of hide-the-criminal-record: felony convictions will, for all intents and purposes, disappear after 10 years, if a nosy employer comes looking for dirt.
Neighboring Connecticut just prettied up a compromise along the same lines: There will be no criminal history question on government job applications, but the hiring agents are free to ask about a criminal record or conduct a background check. The theory is that once the bad boy sits down for the interview, he will have an opportunity to explain that his sister bit him and that was why he robbed the bank.
The Connecticut legislation is riddled with all manner of complication for government jobs. Even if the criminal conviction is discovered or disclosed, the poor Human Resources creature must take into consideration the level and length of rehabilitation and whether the crime and the job are too closely aligned for comfort, and whether the applicant is so spectacularly qualified that he’ll be given a pass on the assault and battery.
A handful of states have some version of all this, in response to weepy social science research that suggests recidivism may be reduced if a fella has a chance to get a real job, without any embarrassing questions.
Many jurisdictions have exceptions for jobs in law enforcement and nursing homes and child protection – and there are spotty non-employment exceptions that allow public housing administrators to screen out potentially dangerous tenants.
The theory behind all this has its charms. If a population of miscreants is doomed to wander the Earth, unable to get past the job application, we are risking a permanent class of folks directed toward criminal activity. On the other hand, the hiring side of the fence might well begin to use guesswork; to “profile”; to find reasons other than criminal record to reject applicants who may not have a criminal record.
The trial lawyers may well play a role in this game as well. If a convicted creature commits an unspeakable crime while in the employ of a blissfully unaware employer, is the boss facing punitive civil damages for being clueless or stupid?
The real test will come when a gainfully employed poster boy for rehabilitation, while on the public payroll, reverts to his life of crime. The public will lose patience for reassuring lectures about lowered recidivism rates, if the end result is an unpleasant surprise.
In a perfect world, there would be no mandatory secrets in the hiring process. Lacking perfection, the ongoing experiments to hire convicted criminals are justifiable, but rigorous evaluation and honest reporting must be the rule.
