This is absolutely great and needs to happen in many more places. One of the worst parts about the draconian mandatory sentencing laws so many places have is that prison turns otherwise good people into criminals. It's almost like the entire process was designed to be that way. Not only is prison itself a harsh environment that treats people like chattel, and often forces people to make morally suspect decisions to ensure their own survival. But once they're released they're given a scarlet letter that prevents them from integrating back into society. They can't find jobs, and sometimes even housing. They're finances and credit are generally in ruins from abruptly losing everything. It's no wonder so many people re-offend and generally for worse offenses. The system takes away everything and prevents them from even attempting to claw there way back. And to top it off there are these ridiculously long probationary periods where the smallest offense can land one back in prison. Oh and lastly they take away you're right to vote so you become literally an invisible member of society as far as politicians are concerned. But hey drugs are bad, and anyone who does drugs is bad /s.
Things bounced back petty quickly. It only took about 80 years for us to start having access to good beer again.
More seriously - I don't think organized crime went away. It was a big problem before prohibition, and it continued to be a big problem after. However, it may have been weakened by the loss of an extremely profitable revenue source. Alcoholism dropped precipitously during prohibition, and started coming back again after it ended. Given that the US has a huge problem with drunk driving, one could probably make a cogent argument that, with the repeal of prohibition, we replaced a relatively small but sensational amount of organized crime with a large, but relatively socially acceptable, amount of disorganized crime. One might presume that other crimes that tend to go hand-in-hand with alcohol, such as domestic and sexual assault, also got a boost from the repeal.
I'm not sure how well any of this applies to marijuana. With marijuana, the worst (non-government-imposed) externalities seem to be related to how gangs behave when they're financed by the illegal marijuana trade. With alcohol, the organized crime was a problem, but the worst problems seemed (and seem) to be a direct result of how people behave when they've been drinking.
One common thread, though, is that opposition to both bans seems to be a reaction to government overreach as much as anything else. The penalties being handed down for alcohol possession were every bit as outrageous as the ones we see for marijuana possession nowadays, and that played a big part in public perception of the law.
Organize crime is corrosive to society as a whole, in particular the power structures, whereas drunk driving leaves the social structure intact, at the expense of perhaps more deaths.
Organized crime still runs alcohol. Many mafiosos have come into cannabis from alcohol in the last two years. By alcohol I'm not only referring to the bottlers but also the distributors, bars, and night clubs.
Excuse me but the wet lawn mower clippings mixed with cinnamon and spicy chai with a shot of 5w40 for texture that is currently in vogue is not "good beer". I want a beer I can drink, not one I have to endure.
I live in a tiny town with a surprisingly popular brewery with ~8-10 beers on tap. IPAs. Every. Damn. One. Of. Them. And my local beer shop switched distributors so now I can't get my preferred beer (Prairie Bomb!).
Might as well continue this tangent. I haven't lost nearly enough karma on it yet. :)
I think that, if you're going to be a very small brewery that has that many different beers, they basically have to all be IPAs. The high alcohol content will help make the beer more resistant to going stale, and the hoppiness will cover all the flaws and consistency issues that you're very likely to have if your brewmaster is spreading themself that thin. By contrast, if you're making something like a helles lager, any problems you have with finicky things like the mash or the primary fermentation will to have nowhere to hide.
This comparison isn't useful IMO because alcohol had actually been legal prior to prohibition introduced by puritanism. If anything I'd say prohibition gave people pause since alcoholism and heavy drinking was quite common prior to it being introduced. (Note: I'm not against marijuana legalization/decriminalization - just making an observation).
To be fair, marijuana was criminalized at the same time as booze, and by the same people, but yeah, we've now had multi-generational prohibition instead of a decade.
> Judges in Seattle have decided to quash convictions for marijuana possession for anyone prosecuted in the city between 1996 and 2010. Possession of marijuana became legal in the state of Washington in 2012.
Another question is why didn't they quash convictions between 1996 and present, or between 1996 and 2012 when it became legal? Such obvious questions that aren't addressed by the article -- and this is the BBC no less.
I’d have to go digging around to do better than my middle-aged memory allows, but at some point shortly before legalization, Seattle PD said pot was they’re lowest priority (translation: don’t force our hand by smoking in front of a grade school, and we’ll leave you alone). Could be that there are no convictions to overturn 2010-2012.
The article doesn't address this, but the 15 years in question are actually 1996-2010. The city attorney's motion doesn't explain why, though it implies that the motion covers all cases prosecuted by that office.
The article leaves it out, but I found ought that in 2003, Washington state passed legislature stating marijuana convictions were the lowest priority crimes. I believe thats why the cut off is 15 years, to mark when the societal law and understanding changed.
This is terrible news for those that didn't get included. The public will miss the details and think that everyone was included. Anyone with a conviction outside this arbitrary time period will be assumed to have some extenuating circumstances that meant that their conviction was upheld.
Yes it is. Before when a potential employer saw a cannabis conviction on a criminal records check they would have potentially ignored it because it is no longer a crime. Now they will think that all the previous convictions that should have been struck off have been struck off and any that show will be treated as having had enough merit to have been deliberately missed out.
"542 people could have their convictions dismissed by mid-November"
That's not the number I was expecting when I saw the headline. That's 36 people a year, in a city the size of Seattle. I was expecting it to be thousands if not more.
Maybe shows that not very many people are ever convicted for simple possession alone. It's usually an additional charge along with dealing, violence, or both.
The judge threw out convictions that occurred in Seattle between 1996 and 2010. In 2003, Seattle effectively decriminalized marijuana by making enforcement of cannabis laws the "lowest priority". That covers half of the window the judge looked at.
The majority of drug offenses (~55,000 of ~95,000) in Canada for 2016 were cannabis related. There must be hundreds of thousands of people living in Canada with criminal records due to marijuana prohibition. One would expect they'd wipe all of the records clean, recent or distant past.
Making something legal now doesn't mean you didn't commit a crime before. They may wipe records clean but there is no guarantee.
And I suppose most of the records are not just the result of simple consumption. It probably involved trafficking or maybe DUI, which will continue being illegal.
As a Seattle-area resident who's a few years ahead of our neighbors to the north, I can tell that you're likely to be disappointed. If for no other reason than the places that drug-test typically pay less to begin with.
If this happens retroactively, 2/3 of the jail pop[ulations would be free to live their lives without pain, despair, the misery of 6x10 21 hours a day even. Fact.
According to the Bureau of Prisons, there are 207,847 people incarcerated in federal prisons. Roughly half (48.6 percent) are in for drug offenses. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are 1,358,875 people in state prisons. Of them, 16 percent have a drug crime as their most serious offense. There were also 744,600 inmates in county and city jails. (The BOP data is current as of July 16. From BJS, the latest jail statistics are from midyear 2014, and the latest prison statistics from year-end 2013.) That’s an incarceration rate of about 725 people per 100,000 population.
Looks like for federal prisons it's as high as 48.6%, but that looks like it's for all drugs not just cannabis.
It's also probably too big a leap to speculate how many people are incarcerated for drug related incidents (theft to get money to feed a habit for example). Crimes which would probably be greatly reduced in a treatment over prohibition system.
I wonder how often the more serious crime wouldn't have been charged had the drugs not let to it? For example, carrying a firearm isn't necessarily illegal, but carrying a firearm and weed in a place where weed is illegal is most likely a separate, non-drug charge like "carrying a firearm during the commission of a crime". Also how many non-drug arrests would have never happened if the officer hadn't been able to manufacture reasonable suspicion by simply saying, "I smell weed".
The 48% is about federal prisons, the 16% is about state prisons. Generally the 'bad' crimes we think of (murder and the like) are state offenses, not federal offenses, which is why you see so many more in the state level for something worse than drugs. Drugs is one of the few crimes punished consistently on both a state and federal level. You could go to federal prison for murder, but it generally requires something special about the case for the state to not handle it.
>So I'd say the parent is right that 16% are in for drugs and would be set free if drugs were legal. The others in that 48% wouldn't be.
Both would be set free. 16% from state prisons, 48% from federal prisons. These are two separate prison populations.
> "For too many who call Seattle home, a misdemeanour marijuana conviction or charge has created barriers to opportunity - good jobs, housing, loans and education," she said.
The problem isn't the marijuana convictions, the problem is a society that believes people with criminal records can and should have their entire lives ruined for it. It's a society that doesn't believe in rehabilitation, just "good people" and "bad people".
- Too many equate "legal" with "moral" and defer to the authority of the state when it labels someone officially as a "criminal," no matter the offense. This is a deep cultural problem, and I blame compulsory state schooling for exacerbating the issue of blindly trusting the government. Deference to arbitrary authority is drilled into our young minds over many formative years. Since public school is one of the main religions of America, I don't see this changing any time soon.
- The cultural perception that justice means punishing the bad guy. Too many movies end with the villain getting killed, as if that solves the problem. If instead our culture thought of justice as making the victim whole, then entire classes of crimes would not exist, and a criminal who made restitution would be done with it. BIG NOTE HERE: people should still be able to judge whether to hire or not based on a person's history. No matter how much restitution the thief has made to past victims, for instance, a bank will probably not hire him and for good reason.
- The state should have no say in whether someone is "rehabilitated." If you think for a minute how this would play out, you will realize that it opens the door to either huge abuses by the state or completely absurd outcomes. On the one hand, if you give discretion over a person's "fitness" to reenter society to a prison warden or state bureaucrat, then you allow for unlimited jail terms for those with politically incorrect views. If you try to encode into some regulation a rubric for whether someone is rehabilitated, it will utterly fail to encapsulate the nuance that is the human mind and will lead to gaming the system almost immediately.
> Too many equate "legal" with "moral" and defer to the authority of the state when it labels someone officially as a "criminal," no matter the offense.
This is s huge point, and not just in drug convictions. If someone us poor and gets a warrant on the for unpaid parking fines, that is used in any public debate about them to show they are of low moral character. Reverse the issue and executives that settled charges without admitting fault are without sin, because obviously it was all legal.
If the US wants to truly embrace the ideals of free speech, then we must also accept that there will be actions that are immoral but legal.
This whole thing is nothing more than just world fallacy.
Instead of looking at individual circumstances, people falsely assume (backwards logic) that bad things could have only happened to bad people (e.g. convictions) are dead set on revising their view of an event (well, if it happened, they must have deserved it!)
> If the US wants to truly embrace the ideals of free speech, then we must also accept that there will be actions that are immoral but legal.
I think people are more against criminals, because they go against the rules of society. The norms and rules of society are more important and mean more than most of the actual crimes. Me stealing $5 from someone is not going to do much harm, but people will want to punished not for the crime necessarily, instead for breaking the rules that bind us together and make us civil.
The only thing that separates savages from the civil are the laws and rules of a society, if you break those rules you are not just doing the moral harm in breaking the rule, but doing harm against the society as a whole.
> The only thing that separates savages from the civil are the laws and rules of a society, if you break those rules you are not just doing the moral harm in breaking the rule, but doing harm against the society as a whole.
Nonsense! You're making exactly the mistake of confusing laws with morals, but many laws are deeply immoral, even when they reflect the "rules and norms" of a society.
Homosexuality used to be criminalized. Interracial sexual relations used to be criminalized. Contraception used to be criminalized. In all these case, that was based on the "rules and norms" of society. Has moving on from those "rules and norms" harmed our society? Have the individuals prosecuted under those laws harmed our society? I dare say no.
> 'Too many equate "legal" with "moral" and defer to the authority of the state when it labels someone officially as a "criminal," no matter the offense.'
yes, people do take that mental shortcut from time to time, but it's because the legal system is supposed to reflect our collective moral code. when it doesn't, we should fix the legal code to match.
but listening to the kavanaugh hearing yesterday, it looks like things will get worse before they get better. kavanaugh was unfortunately partisan in his rebuttal, but the appalling part is that no one--especially not politicians--is discussing partisanship as a legitimate reason for disqualification. no matter your politics, you do not want partisanship in the courts.
> "I blame compulsory state schooling for exacerbating the issue of blindly trusting the government"
this is too simplistically ideological. are you really completely against patriotism? while schools do contribute to teaching deference, it's because communities believe in living together harmoniously and benefit from such social norms.
what we really need is to apply better incentives to the legal system, which has long been insulated from popular influence due to the danger of partisanship mentioned above. as in the current medical system, lawyers make more money from increased amounts of conflict and more complicated laws. we need to flip that around so that the legal system makes a living form simplifying the legal system and reducing conflict.
and more to the point, we need to realize that there is no "law-abiding citizen". we all break the law from time to time and it doesn't mean we're all criminals. if anything, we need to address rampant cheating in schools, because that's disturbingly accepted shortcut to success. let's hold each other to a higher, more honorable standard.
>but the appalling part is that no one--especially not politicians--is discussing partisanship as a legitimate reason for disqualification...
In fairness, in the modern era, partisanship has been a requirement to be on the Court. Every justice on the court is either liberal or conservative. They would not have been nominated otherwise.
Don't misunderstand me, I agree that maybe partisanship shouldn't be a requirement. I'm just saying that from a pragmatic perspective, it is a requirement. You, unfortunately, can't get nominated if you are not partisan. Even if you could, you certainly would come up against stiff headwinds in the confirmation process. It's just easier to be partisan and have half of those votes on your side no matter what.
Oddly, the same exact process applies for commissioning new judges as applies for commissioning new military officers (either President or Senate subcommittee nominates, the other can veto), but you don't hear about there being any requirement of partisanship for military officers.
sure, partisanship goes into choosing the nominee, but in the past, the nominee’s politics was inferred from their rulings and other written works. but kavanaugh crossed a line into direct partisan bickering that’s unbecoming of a justice.
One of the founding principle of the American Republic was that the government is not the country. "We the people" and all that. Many would argue that to be a "true" American patriot one should be highly skeptical of government with skepticism increasing the farther removed it is from your local community.
but the government isn't something apart from ourselves. the government is us. the more we try to "other" it and give in to helplessness, the less effective we will be in controlling our collective destiny.
skepticism is healthy, dogmatism, not so much. yes, let's keep federal power in check (because it's too tempting to abuse and degenerate into authoritarianism), but no, let's not live in fear of it either.
I agree. Blind following of any doctrine can lead to failure and helplessness and fear are not good emotions to have all the time. But with the history of the continually increasing power and scope of government, especially the federal level, I would not say that the dogmatism of the skepticism of big government is really a bad thing. Especially if one has some skepticism of dogmatisms also.
The problem is the low bar to litigation in the US. Employers are afraid hiring a person with a criminal record because if even the slightest problem occurs, they’ll be sued because they “should have known they hired a convict” and a jury will rule against them.
I don’t know how this can be solved
EDIT: It would not cause a lawsuit directly, but it would harm your defense in any lawsuit, which could increase the chances of one being brought. I've had this discussion with several business owners (with me advocating for ignoring convictions), and this is always the reason given
As someone who works on lawsuits for a living I join in your question. People make a lot of assumptions about employment lawsuits that I, as something of an insider, don't see IRL. I can at least say that this particular issue has never come up in any employment suit I've ever worked on. It may well be true that employers do certain things because they're afraid of being sued, but I'm not convinced that those fears are well-founded because the things they do to protect themselves ultimately don't seem to do much good when the case goes to trial. For example, people often say that employers put employees on PIPs as a precursor to firing them because they think it will make it harder for the employee to file a lawsuit when he or she is subsequently fired. Does that dissuade some wrongfully terminated people from talking to a lawyer? Probably. But on the other hand, in pretty much every employment case I've seen go to trial involving someone who was fired from a large company, that person was on a PIP. At the very least, the protective effects of these measures seem exaggerated.
The concern is not about wrongful termination lawsuits, but the myriad other lawsuits that a business could be subject to. Examples might include sexual harassment cases involving employees that were sex offenders, negligence in personal injury cases, customers or vendors accusing the company of violating contracts, etc.
> People make a lot of assumptions about employment lawsuits that I, as something of an insider, don't see IRL
Yet US based HR decisions aren't based on informed awareness, but instead fear. Consider what people "know" about the McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit, and what kind of training or legal advice most hr depts get (again, in the US. My understanding is that done other countries actually have standards for hr training)
I don't think that they get sued for hiring a convict.
It's more that if they get sued for some other reason (legitimate or not), the fact that they hired a convict may count against them in the jury's eyes.
So, as the business sees it, hiring a convict brings extra potential liability.
The problem in hiring criminals is that they have committed a crime. Once they are brought to justice and sentenced, there is no real rehabilitation program, why we have such a high recidivism rate in the states. The best example of this is sexual predator label, if our society honestly believed they had been redeemed they would not need the label.
The plan should be how can we get people who have been convicted to find ways to signal that they are rehabilitated. Otherwise, companies will avoid the risk of hiring a criminal and the liability of the lawsuit that might occur if said criminal commits another crime and the company is sued for hiring someone who had committed that crime before.
I don't disagree, but I am skeptical that they received the same chance as someone without a criminal record. Whether intentional or not there is probably some bias in the hiring process when you know they committed a felony or whatever it may be.
Two identical candidates, but one has a criminal past, you're going to take the non-criminal record every time. As unfair as it is in the larger picture, it's hard to justify the decision to hire a criminal when it's your neck on the line
Surely the decision should be based on the likelihood of future criminal action. If a criminal past is accepted as an indicator of future criminal activity then we have rejected the concept of rehabilitation. If this is the only deciding factor we may also blind ourselves to other risks.
> if our society honestly believed they had been redeemed they would not need the label
That assumes that "society" is correctly and fully informed on the issue. Sex offenders have one of the lowest recidivism rate compared to other crimes. Plus it is a diverse category with many different types of situations all lumped into the same connotation in people's minds.
I’ve heard in certain cases that people who’ve been caught urinating in public have been charged as sex offenders. Surely that’s not what these laws were intended to punish.
The three main things people seem to think of when they think "sex offender" is (1) an 18 year old slept with his 16 year old girlfriend (2) urinating in public and (3) child molester or rapist. There's a lot more situations, and the research shows that they all need to be handled differently, and that the current laws are much less effective than ones actually geared towards rehabilitation would be, at keeping our neighborhoods safe.
It depends on what kind of a of crime though right, something as innocuous as using pot or other drugs, sure, it's easy to say that should have a second chance --- but if you spent 10 years in prison for a bank robbery, you're probably are not going to get hired at a bank after the background check comes through, and I think that makes sense.
I absolutely believe in second chances, but I understand humans have biases also.
>but if you spent 10 years in prison for a bank robbery, you're probably are not going to get hired at a bank after the background check
I kind of find this example hilarious. It‘s not like people rob banks out of passion. They probably were in dire straits at the time and saw no other solution.
Now this person uses her time in jail to get the education necessary to work in a bank and you wouldn‘t hire her (providing them a steady income and thus financial security) out of fear they would come and rob their colleagues?
EDIT: I agree with you of course, it DOES depend on the crime. Think: pedophile working in ...church
What if that happens to any other employee? How many of them have experienced that before to know that they wouldn't have done the same? How many of them have been in those positions and did commit crime, but didn't get convicted? Having someone with criminal experience can also provide value as they would know what what to look for to find others who would do the same. Frank Abagnale Jr. being the extreme example of this.
I'm not saying they should never be hired, I'm saying that you cannot discount human bias, and unfortunately a lot of the time the person working at the bank will toss that resume. That is just the reality we live in.
> I'm not saying they should never be hired, I'm saying that you cannot discount human bias, and unfortunately a lot of the time the person working at the bank will toss that resume.
It sounded more like you were advocating for them not being hired. "Humans have biases" could be read as referring to the applicant or the employer. I think many are reading it as referring to the former, when you intended the latter.
> That is just the reality we live in.
That is the culture we live in. There is a lot of behavior we take for granted as inherent when it's really learned. Look at Germany and Japan for example to see perspectives on working and employment that don't align with ours. If different countries can have different cultures, can't we strive to improve our culture instead of simply giving up because "That is just the reality we live in"?
No offense, but many with criminal convictions are bad people. I know it may be nice to think otherwise. However there just are many people out there who are difficult if it not impossible to fully integrate into society.
then you run into not society but government issues as well. just some examples my cousins run into all the time, they have to use temporary agencies to filter people and stock crews each week. Why? Drug convictions can ban them from some sites their company does work at. It can also jack their company's vehicle insurance and health insurance cost. Plus, go figure, those with more than one don't turn out to be good employees. They used to do direct hires, they even tried VA recommended people. some just hang on long enough to start collecting benefits again or meet eligibility requirements. they have good jobs to offer as do thousands of small employers do but they cannot afford the cost of that risk.
but ignoring their hiring issues, occupational licensing which prevents competition in many fields can include clauses that block those convicted of a crime from entering a field and drug convictions doubly so.
So are many people without criminal convictions. What's your point? I for one think that, say, the Walton heirs or similar rent-extracting landlord heirs are more of a drain on society than poverty-stricken kids selling drugs or making other bad life choices. Life isn't black and white, and further to the point data shows that rehabilitating criminals delivers better outcomes than shoving them into criminality schools (i.e. prisions), as it should be crushingly obvious by now.
This is true, but I think it's understandable that many employers will see a criminal conviction as a signal and make decisions accordingly.
Is it a lazy approach to hiring? Yes. So is hiring anyone with an MIT degree just because of their credential.
If the signal is imperfect and there are efficient ways to reveal whether the signal is valid or not then some market participant would likely figure out how to exploit that right?
I think what you, the parent post, and the grandparent post are showing is: When the signal indicates a high likelihood of risk involved with hiring someone convicted of nonviolent crimes,
we have a fairly significant flaw in our system.
As other threads have been discussing, if this is the signal that people are receiving, maybe the punishment based system isn’t working and we may want to investigate systems where rehabilitation based systems are seemingly showing more promise. This may help us shift what signals society is receiving.
What do you do with "bad people?" Are they to be forever a drain on society? I agree that it's a government issue, but we should be rehabilitating our criminals instead of (just) labeling and punishing them: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/wh...
I think our biggest problem is we bundle a huge part of the "criminal" spectrum together.
The fact that we incarcerate for drug possession seems pretty strange. Petty crimes have way too high of cost in and out of prison.
I associated with a boy in highschool who shortly after graduation murdered two unarmed people in their home with a sawed off shotgun. I would consider him a very bad person.
Both the petty and the extreme carry the same label. Each join the untouchable class.
I'm not sure how to fix that, but it's an issue worth solving
I use to work in youth corrections. A gang unit I worked on housed one young guy who got behind the wheel drunk on his sixteenth birthday and accidentally killed someone, and another young man who contracted an STI from his girlfriend and decapitated her. These two young men slept 3ft apart and were treated equivalently by the system.
You've pinpointed a major flaw that is mostly invisible to the public.
In addition to what others are saying, I'll also point out that many with criminal convictions merely made bad or stupid decisions many years (even decades) ago. To put too much weight on that is to commit the fundamental attribution error[1].
Further, in our justice system there are plenty of innocent people who were convinced to take plea bargains to avoid risking much worse sentences that they don't have a good enough lawyer to do them justice. This is especially true for poor people relying on overworked public defenders. Better to just take the six months than risk 10 years and not get to experience your children growing up.
If any of what I've said above is untrue, I would love someone with more direct experience in the justice system to chime in.
As a person with some criminal convictions in my past due to substance abuse, but now ready to reenter the workforce, this mentality terrifies me. What is going to happen if I am not deemed "rehabilitated"? It reminds me of a quote that has stuck with me from an unrelated article:
>Capitalism doesn’t just determine our source of income but how we relate to each other, our surroundings, and ourselves. To be rendered superfluous by the system is damning to social wellbeing as well as economic livelihood.
In all honesty, I don't know of a single employer who cares if you were rehabilitated or not. They see a checkbox and filter it out.
Your best bet is to move to a state with "ban the box" type legislation that prevents them from asking about criminal history until they've sent an offer. Those laws usually set up a regime around criminal history checks as well, that require companies to spend a decent chunk of change on compliance if they request criminal history. As most of these companies we're just being lazy and didn't actually care about criminal history they all tend to use cheap background check companies which give them the legal protection of having done a "check", but which usually find nothing that doesn't come up in 30 seconds of googling. The only companies that tend to do official background checks anymore are healthcare, banks, and government contractors.
I have one friend who had a checkered past and hasn't had anything come up in their background check in the past 5 background checks he's done, so there is a way forward.
Thank you for the advice. This is exactly one of the reasons I just moved to Washington to look for work. The state supposedly just implemented strong ban the box laws in June.
Because they aren't. The first is only a problem because of the second. By solving the first, you continue to allow the second to be a problem. It let's us all continue to ignore it.
This is the equivalent of saying "technical debt isn't a problem, the business priorities are a problem." Yes, the business priorities caused the technical debt, but you have to pay down the technical debt as well. Throwing out 15 years of the results of a bad culture is meaningful to hundreds, if not thousands of people whose sentences were lifted. So, too, is changing the culture. They are not mutually exclusive.
Curious: don't these people still have to report the arrests in some forms /for some jobs even if they're vacated? "Have you ever been arrested or jailed..."
I know US immigration specifically asks to mention even if pardoned or expunged.
Isn't asking just if one has been arrested in an interview for nonlaw enforcement positions technically an illegal question without qualifiers to specifically exclude the ones that didn't result in conviction or admission of guilt?
Arrest doesn't imply conviction or even the low bar for indictment. For instance SWAT protocol is to cuff literally everybody else possible on the scene for one and then assess and release after the scene is secured. One would have to be completely stupid and paranoid to think you shouldn't hire someone because they were in a bank robbery turned hostage situation as a victim.
No that's false. Every single job I've ever applied to has asked about a criminal record.
There is, however, a "ban the box" movement in a plurality of states, banning employers from asking potential employees about a criminal record.
With the internet documenting all public information, however, it's normally trivial for an employer to do a little research and find the employee's record.
Huh strange that it went straight to banning checking without an innocent until proven guilty standard. I know I have seen plenty of websites for career related where asking if you were convicted had yes, no, or resident of certain states as an effective N/A along with either telling you to select N/A regardless of personal status or flat out forbidding answering if from such a state.
"Ban the box" usually isn't an outright ban on all criminal background checks. The thing it's fighting against is a checkbox/question on the initial job application, to prevent use of it as a universal "not even going to talk to you" filter.
Typically, an employer can run a criminal background check in a "ban the box" jurisdiction, but only later in the process (for example: after completing interviews and provisionally deciding this is someone you'd like to hire). There may also be other rules in place about how you can use information from the background check, and what you have to do if you decide to revoke the offer of employment based on the result of the check.
Key distinction about "ban the box", it doesn't make it illegal to ask employees about a criminal record, or refuse to hire them if they have one.
You just can't ask on the application form. You can ask later on in the process though. The idea is to give people with criminal records at least a fighting chance of getting interviews.
One key point there, simply being cuffed is not the same as being arrested. They are just detaining which isn’t going on your record. Might have a note about being at the scene but that won’t really do much.
Yes, a criminal record never leaves you even if "expunged" or otherwise deleted from your record.
First, you have to admit to it with many jobs/other things anyway (e.g., fbi, military, bar exam etc). And it's usually worse to lie about the charge.
Second, everything is documented on the internet. Thus, even if you're eventually proven innocent and never had anything to do with the criminal charge, it will still be associated with you throughout life.
not sure what types of jobs would make you answer that question (outside of security maybe), but at least in principle, such questions should be completely illegitimate within the US legal system.
In Scotland there's a system called "Disclosure"[0]. There are different types of disclosure[1]:
- Basic disclosure
- Standard disclosure
- Enhanced disclosure
- Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) Scheme
Depending on the level of disclosure, "spent" convictions may need to be disclosed. You can however apply for spent convictions to be removed from the disclosure process.
As an employee for a private consultancy which was carrying out software development work for the Scottish Government I had to get a Basic Disclosure to be able to perform my duties on that contract.
It asks but doesn't mean you're automatically denied. BUT a just pardoned person in Seattle would have to answer yes if Canada asked the same question (they probably do)
I’m just commenting on the “bad people” part, but at 40 years old I’ve seen enough people remain completely stuck in their dysfunctional patterns to have very little faith in rehabilitation.
But then ... we don't really do a great job at even attempting to rehabilitate anyone. When we stick a non-violent offender in a prison, it's "Not A Good Time™️" for them. They become institutionalized, they make criminal connections, they join gangs ... they do these things in order to survive; for protection not only from other violent inmates, but also from abuse by corrections officers.
Let's not lose faith in rehabilitation before we've actually tried rehabilitation.
I see people say things like this, but I don't understand it. Why is the subject so obviously at fault and not the process? At 30 years old it all just sounds more like "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" than anything more sincere.
First, not everyone has close friends and family. Second, dysfunctional families and bad friends are absolutely a thing and can even be the cause of problems.
Friends and family can be an important part of rehabilitation, there's no doubt in that, but I don't see a reason to abandon people just because those have failed them, if they even had them available to rely on at all.
> why would one expect a monolithic system to do any better?
Because such systems have the resources available to hire and manage trained professionals. What in particular do you think makes a monolithic system unsuitable for solving the problem of effective rehabilitation?
> The problem isn't the marijuana convictions, the problem is a society that believes people with criminal records can and should have their entire lives ruined for it.
People grow up. I had my crimes expunged after 13 months of probation as a teenager. I went to college, stopped hanging out with bad influences, realized and cultivated my potential, moved across the country. I guess internally I sometimes still think about the things I did, but I'm glad I don't have to answer for it to anybody else. It seems so long ago and so radically different from my life now that I can't relate to it and it definitely doesn't feel like it defines who I am. I'm glad I'm not a Supreme Court pick. I am more aware of how situations affect people. Or at least me. I could easily see myself hanging around the same people and getting into more trouble. But at the same time, there was a reason I wanted to leave so badly and there's a reason I rarely go back. Maybe that is what should define me.
I would disagree with that. Being young does not inherently mean you make bad decisions. Some people make dumb decisions in their youth but no need to discriminate against a population based on age. Many people enlist in the military, start companies and/or start families before 25.
Because unlike a marriage, buying a house, or moving to the big city, having kids is a colossal life decision, with life-changing consequences that you can't reverse.
You can divorce, sell your house, file for bankruptcy, or move back to your parents' basement, but you can't unhave children after having them. You can't go on a break from your children, even to take care of your own physical, mental, or economic health.
Most people at 25 don't have any of that shit figured out yet, and in the modern day and age, they don't have the support network of grandparents, that prior generations had.
You make the common mistake of disregarding time during this discussion. This is interesting and part of the reason why I think we as humans are still developing our concepts of time.
We still talk about people in absolutes, as if the labels we assign someone today are still relevant tomorrow.
Perhaps previous you should have been judged for your poor decisions. I don’t know.
Later you does not deserve to be beholden to those judgements though. People change.
Labeling someone something for life is a poor heuristic, probably more relevant when we died around 20, not now we live 4 of those short lives in one of our long lives.
