The high incarceration rate combines with another complication about integrating U.S. ex-offenders into society: getting a job. I say this because in the United States, it is commonplace to ask an applicant if they have committed a felony or has a criminal record. Employers use it as a screening question, which is easier than before because of the declining cost to conduct a criminal background check. After all, it is hardly the only factor potential employers use to screen out potential employees. There are a fair number of employers that would rather have a potential employee with a college degree or has a certain number of years of experience. It makes sense for an employer wants the best qualified and most motivated workforce possible. If an employer has a workforce that lacks discipline, honesty, integrity, it will directly impact business. And in certain fields, it makes absolute sense to screen a potential employee for a criminal record. A bank is not going to want to hire a former robber as a bank teller, and a fire department is not going to want to hire a former arsonist to be a firefighter. However, there are plenty of jobs out there where the position is unrelated to the past crime. Plus, if the crime were committed years ago and the ex-offender has become a better person, that is not reflected in checking that box on the job application. The simplified nature of this filter does not provide potential employees the opportunity to contextualize their former crime.
Combine that with ex-offenders more likely to have a lower level of education, lower set of job skills, and more likely to have mental and physical health issues, not to mention that they are more disconnected from the labor market on account of being in prison, it becomes a considerable challenge to find a new job (Doleac, 2016). As such, it takes longer for an ex-offender to find a job than your typical citizen. It takes 60 percent of ex-offenders at least one year to find a new job after leaving prison, which is important since employment is the single largest factor that prevents recidivism (Raphael, 2014; Berg and Huebner, 2010). In addition, there is evidence showing that ex-offenders who cannot find a job are more likely to reoffend. Due to the fact that this integration is difficult, about two-thirds of ex-offenders commit another crime within three years (Bureau of Justice Statistics), thereby perpetuating the cycle. This increase in crime and incarceration rates ends up costing us all.
One suggestion to break the cycle is referred to as "ban the box." Ban the Box (BTB) laws make it illegal to remove from their initial hiring applications the question of whether someone has a criminal record. This question is postponed to later in the hiring process, typically during the background check right after the conditional job offer (see flow chart below). The idea is that by postponing that consideration, ex-offenders will have a better chance at gaining employment. I ask about BTB laws in the first place because a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) was released on how BTB laws affect crime rates (Sabia et al., 2018). With that said, I would like to observe the effects of BTB laws and see if proponents are correct in their optimism.
Callbacks and Employment Rates for Overall Ex-Offender Population
One question is how this affects ex-offenders. After all, the purpose of BTB laws is to make sure that ex-offenders can integrate back into society and be productive members of society, as opposed as to returning to a life of crime. A literature review from the Urban Institute (Stacy and Cohen, 2017, p. 11) shows that BTB laws increase the likelihood that an ex-offender receives a callback for employment. The same Urban Institute literature review also finds that there is little evidence that it actually increases the overall employment rate for ex-offenders (p. 12). A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston confirms these findings. This study found that BTB laws decreased ex-employer employment by 4 percent (Jackson and Zhao, 2016). Their reasoning is that the BTB laws emboldened ex-offenders to apply for jobs for which they thought were previously out of reach, thereby lowering the employment rate. Semi-conflicting research from the Right-leaning American Enterprise Institute shows how BTB laws increase employment in high-crime areas by 4 percent (Shoag and Veuger, 2016).An interesting caveat is that it increases employment in the public sector (Craigie, 2017; Atkinson and Lockwood, 2014), but again, on the whole, the information we have suggests that it does not help with the overall ex-offender population.
Employment Prospects of African-Americans
I ask about African-Americans in particular because they have been disproportionately and adversely affected by the U.S. justice system. An African-American male without a criminal record is statistically less likely to get a job than a Caucasian male with a criminal record (e.g., Pager, 2003).
Even with that being said, the problem is that BTB laws do not remove an employer's reluctance to hire an ex-offender. An employer would rather have an honest, peaceful, agreeable individual. Not only is it good for the employer's reputation within the market, but because ex-offenders are more likely to reoffend, an ex-offender is more likely to be taken off the job by another arrest or conviction. When you remove an observable piece of information, such as a criminal record, employers have to use other information. Employers will use unobservable information that is related to the potential employee being "job-ready." Employers do this with college degrees. College degrees are not necessarily sought after because of the knowledge, but because of the correlated qualities of greater motivation and diligence required to acquire a Bachelor's degree. This "statistical discrimination" happens also with BTB laws.
Using a criminal record is a filter that is far from perfect, but what happens when it is removed? Employers use other information that is even less perfect. Men are much more likely to commit crimes than women. And as the Brookings Institution points out, an African-American male has a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison, a 17 percent chance for Hispanic males, and a 6 percent chance for Caucasian males (see Brookings Institution information below for breakdown by educational attainment).
Essentially, one of the unintended consequences is that rather than use criminal record to determine whether or not a candidate committed a crime, they go ahead and do something racist and sexist by using one's skin color and gender as ways to guess who is more likely to have previously committed a crime. One study from NBER (Doleac and Hansen, 2016) goes as far as suggesting that BTB laws make it more likely for an employer to hire a young, low-skilled Hispanic or African-American male when criminal records are not observable. This has a particularly negative impact on African-American males that do not have criminal records. There are other studies that confirm that statistical discrimination exists (Agan and Starr, 2016; Stoll, 2009; Holzer and Raphael, 2006). A recent study showed that while BTB laws can increase overall ex-offender employment, it still negatively affects African-American males (Flake, 2018).
How Do BTB Laws Affect Crime Rates?
There is some evidence that BTB laws decrease crime rates (Craigie, 2017). On the other hand, there is the NBER study I had cited at the beginning (Sabia et al., 2018). The NBER study found that it lowered crime rates for those who already have lower probabilities of having a criminal record (e.g., women, older individuals). This is consistent with the labor-labor substitution toward those who are perceived to have lower criminal records. The study found that BTB laws did increase property crime rates for working-age Hispanic males. Aside from suggesting an increase of crime rates, what the study does more importantly is confirm that BTB-induced statistical discrimination exists.
Conclusion
There is a desire on my end to have more evidence because some of it is suggestive but not conclusive. Nevertheless, based on the evidence, my opinion is that a "ban the box" policy should be left up to the individual employer. Policy alternatives should be explored because the price of not being able to successfully integrate ex-offenders into society is too great. Instead of ignoring criminal records, what we should do is find ways to show that ex-offenders can be successfully and safely employed. What would help in this case is to provide employers with more information, not less, about a potential employee's job-readiness. There could also be investment in these individuals' job-readiness, something which would most assuredly cost less than recidivism. A certification program signaling that the ex-offenders are indeed job-ready would help: Ohio's job-readiness certification program is showing preliminary success (Leasure and Andersen, 2016).
Some other policy alternatives offered (see Urban Institute's list below) have been improving the background check to better contextualize the ex-offender's history, transitional employment opportunities with supervisor references, providing companies that hire ex-offenders with liability insurance, expunging criminal records [for those with relatively minor crimes], or scaling back occupational licensing (see Slivinski, 2016), the latter of which I have discussed before. While considering these policy alternatives is important, we have to remember that this problem ballooned because of mass incarceration. To solve the issue of integrating ex-offenders, we also need to create a society without over-criminalization that caused the prevalence of the problem in the first place.
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