Reentry & Background Checks

Information technology is a very good thing and the use of it by employers and the general public to become aware of criminal backgrounds of people they might hire or bring on as volunteers to their community organization or parish, is also a very good thing.

What it means for the penitential criminal is the mandate to accept the fact that, as it was centuries ago in the village and small town, virtually everyone may now know your past.

The increased burden on criminal transformative organizations is to learn how to use this in a positive way, and teach reentering criminals to adapt to this new reality.

Here is an excerpt from an article in the National Institute of Justice Journal which looks at one way of adapting—though given human nature being what it is, probably won’t be used widely, especially for reentering criminals—but still worth examining.

“According to the Society for Human Resource Management, more than 80 percent of U.S. employers perform criminal background checks on prospective employees. Add two additional factors to that equation — advances in information technology and growing concerns about employer liability — and we can begin to understand how complicated the issue of employing ex-offenders has become.

“The numbers leave no doubt that we have reached a broad penetration of criminal history records into the fabric of our society:

• In 2006, nearly 81 million criminal records were on file in the states, 74 million of which were in automated databases.
• Another 14 million arrests are recorded every year.

“What does this mean for employers? And what does it mean for ex-offenders who need a job?

“Consider a 40-year-old male who was convicted of burglary when he was 18 years old and has committed no further crimes. Every time he applies for a new job, he tells the potential employer that he was convicted of a felony; even if he does not state this up-front, the employer is likely to do a criminal background check. In either case, he probably will not get the job because many employers are unwilling to hire an ex-offender.

“This situation prompted us to ask the question: Is it possible to determine empirically when it is no longer necessary for an employer to be concerned about a criminal offense in a prospective employee's past?

“Most people would probably agree that there should be some point in time after which ex-offenders should not be handicapped in finding employment. The question is when, precisely, should this occur? In the case of our hypothetical 40-year-old, when should a prospective employer no longer consider a burglary that was committed more than two decades earlier if the job applicant has stayed clean since then?”