In Search of a Job: Criminal Records as Barriers to Employment

Regardless of the legal restrictions, the majority of employers indicate that they would "probably" or "definitely" not be willing to hire an applicant with a criminal record, according to a study by Harry Holzer and colleagues. In fact, a recent report by the National Employment Law Project found frequent use of blanket "no-hire" policies among major corporations, as evidenced by their online job ads posted on Craigslist. The employer motivation is understandable. Employers do not want to hire individuals who might commit future crimes and who may be a risk to their employees' and customers' safety. The assumption, of course, is that a prior record signals higher odds that the individual will commit more crimes in the future. A key question is: If a person who has been arrested stays arrest-free for some period of time, do the odds of further criminal activity go down? A recent study sheds light on just this issue.

Alfred Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura conducted the NIJ funded "Redemption Study." They were looking for a way to empirically determine when it is no longer necessary for an employer to be concerned about a criminal record in a prospective employee's past. The researchers examined the criminal records of everyone who was arrested for the first time in 1980 in the state of New York. They then tracked those criminal records forward to find who was arrested again, who wasn't and how long people "stayed clean." In general, once a person had stayed clean for a certain period of time, his chances of being arrested for a new crime were substantially reduced. This is what the researchers refer to as the "point of redemption" — when a prior arrest no longer distinguishes that person from a similar person in the general population in terms of the risk of future criminal arrests.

For individuals who commit their first crime at a very young age or who are first arrested for a more serious crime, it takes longer — about eight years — to reach the point of redemption; but for those who are older when first arrested or who commit less serious crimes, the point of redemption can come in as little as three or four years. After staying clean for this period of time, these individuals become indistinguishable from the general population in terms of their odds of another arrest.

This research has important practical implications. Blumstein and Nakamura suggest that "forever rules be replaced by rules that provide for the expiration of a criminal record." They continue, in an op-ed published by The New York Times, that "it is unreasonable for someone to be hounded by a single arrest or conviction that happened more than 20 years earlier — and for many kinds of crimes, the records should be sealed even sooner."

Some states are taking steps in exactly this direction. Thirteen states enacted laws in their 2010–2011 legislative sessions to expunge and seal low-level offenses after a discrete number of years. Three states passed laws to limit the liability of employers that hire people with criminal records.

This is not to say that criminal background checks serve no purpose. They give employers a tool — albeit an imperfect one — for helping assess risk to their employees, customers, assets and reputations when making hiring decisions. In fact, some of the same research cited earlier indicates that the use of criminal history records and the practice of performing background checks can, in some cases, reduce racial discrimination in hiring. The Holzer study, in particular, suggests that employers that perform background checks may end up hiring more African American workers (especially African American men) than those that do not perform them. This is because some employers may assume young African American men have criminal records, and a background check may actually dispel that assumption and increase their chances of being hired.

Read the rest of the article/testimony at the NIJ site.

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In Search of a Job: Criminal Records as Barriers to Employment

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