In the New York Post, Virginia Backaitis writes about how deep, dark criminal pasts, whether childhood indiscretions or trivial, unrelated matters, come back to bite otherwise competent and qualified job applicants in the butt, and they never know about it.
When he was downsized from his job as a software engineer last winter, Ted Brown (not his real name) figured scoring his next gig would be a cinch. His cloud-computing skills were in high demand and he had a stellar reputation in his industry.
“I was sure that companies would be lining up to get their hands on me,” he says.
And that’s exactly how it played out at first. There was the manager who wooed Brown over a dinner of scotch and beef tenderloin, and promised a five-figure signing bonus. He said he’d send an offer via FedEx — but it never arrived. When Brown called, he was told that they’d decided to go with someone else who was “a better fit.”
Good old Ted, you see, had a bit of history.
His would-be employer, though, found what the others had no doubt uncovered as well — that Brown had a criminal record. Several years earlier, in the midst of a nasty divorce, he pleaded guilty to a charge of child endangerment — which he says he would have fought at any other time of his life — after momentarily leaving his son alone in the car to get a cup of coffee.
Putting aside the question of whether Ted’s conduct, something that was utterly ordinary when I was a kid and my mother, criminal that she was, left my sister and I, a toddler without a car seat or even seat belts, in the Chevy, with the car running, to play until she could finish her chores, this anecdote has two key features: It’s wholly unrelated to the job he would do, and when he copped out to the crime, he had no clue that it meant it would define him for all purposes going forward.
Want to bet his criminal defense lawyer told him it was a good plea, that he should take it, and that challenging it would be either expensive or unavailing? Want to bet the prosecutor who demanded a plea to a crime thought he/she was saving humanity by saddling this software engineer with a criminal record so that he would never drink Starbucks with his son in a car again? My mother would have gotten the death penalty.
Between the internet and concerns that an employer might be held liable for negligent hiring should some employee with a criminal record end up doing something that harmed another, and in combination with our trend of characterizing someone a “criminal” in perpetuity by putting them on registries for sex offenders, animal abusers, and coming soon, expensive coffee drinkers, no debt to society is ever really paid.
While those “mistakes” might have slipped under the radar a decade ago, the rise of pre-employment background checks has changed that. The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that 96 percent of employers now conduct such screenings.
What makes this discussion truly noteworthy isn’t that this is happening. We know this is the case, and we (meaning criminal defense blawgers, civil rights activists and similar reform-minded folk) have been pointing to the societal problems and human costs of this trend. No, what makes this special is that it showed up in the New York Post.
For those of you outside civilized areas, the New York Post, part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, is one of the most arch-neocon, reactionary, overly-simplistic rags around. It’s pages ooze hate toward anything and anyone who wouldn’t be invited for dinner at Rudy Giuliani’s house. And yet there it is, an article decrying the creation of an underclass because of antique unrelated offenses. This comes on the heels of the Wall Street Journal’s, another cog in Murdoch’s wheel, decrying overciminalization.
What the heck is happening here?
Nathan Burney(s) writes about how ten percent of the people (not nine or eight, but ten) can dictate the majority view.
As it happens, though, societal change may not be as impossible as all that. Science Daily now reports on a study showing that, when just 10% of a population holds a firm belief, that belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.
When the number of committed opinion holders is below ten percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority.
But,
Once that number grows above ten percent, the idea spreads like a flame.
The study, “Social Consensus through the Influence of Committed Minorities,” also found that this 10% threshold does not change much, no matter what kind of societal network is being affected. If you want to get the majority on your side, all you need is a 10% minority of *stubborn committed believers.
Nathan’s argument is that this is why we continue to push, to harp, to scold, to repeatedly bang the drum against the forces that mold our world. Whether the report upon which he relies is accurate is beyond my pay grade, but even if there’s an outside chance it’s true, the fact that media outlets catering to the harshest, most unforgiving elements of our society are now publishing articles that seek a return to sanity is huge.
Whether it’s because things have gone to far, such that even the most arch-conservatives no longer find it tolerable, or whether Murdoch’s current circumstances have provided him with a different view of the criminal justice system, is unclear. That political interests are beginning to align around the idea that we have gone overboard, criminalizing everything in sight and creating a society where the consequences never end, is unproductive.
For those who believe in the swinging pendulum, that went way left with the Warren Court and way right with Rehnquist (and where it’s gotten hung up on Clarence Thomas’ robes since), the fact that a tabloid like the Post has taken an interest in fairness suggests that there may be hope.
The New York Post says that it’s wrong to deny people jobs based on irrelevant historical convictions. I never thought I would type those words.
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