Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Ban the Box Policies: Crime, Discrimination, and Employment

(Employment and Training Programs)

In the early stages of interacting with potential employers, job seekers are often asked whether they have ever been convicted of a crime. In addition, many organizations run criminal background checks on potential employees, forcing applicants to respond truthfully. Estimates of the share of organizations carrying out such checks range from slightly fewer than half of all private-sector firms to practically all government agencies (Connerley et al., 2001). Oft-cited goals of these employee screening practices are to mitigate risk of fraud or criminal activity by employees, to protect oneself from negligent hiring lawsuits, or to avoid employing persons of poor character, skills, and work ethic, or who are likely to be arrested again soon (Freeman, 2008; Gerlach, 2006). In addition, federal and state laws ban certain employers, including public-sector employers, from hiring ex-offenders for certain positions and/or mandate criminal background checks (Freeman, 2008). Job applicants are thus likely to be confronted with inquiries regarding any past run-ins with the law, and to be excluded from consideration by potential employers if they have experienced any. This affects a significant chunk of the population: as many as 65 million people are estimated to have been arrested and/or convicted of criminal offenses (Natividad Rodriguez and Emsellem, 2011). Different groups are affected to dramatically different extents. Whereas about one out of every three African-American males, and one out of six Hispanic males will spend time incarcerated over their lifetime (Bonczar, 2003), women are convicted at much lower rates, and account for only 7% of the federal and state prison population (Carson, 2015). This state of affairs has long concerned some academics, activists and policymakers, because making it harder for convicts to find gainful employment may increase rates of recidivism while reducing the output and productivity of these potential workers (The White House, 2015). In addition, the adoption of an applicant’s criminal history as a key hiring criterion is presumed to have an adverse impact on minority applicants (Henry, 2008; Smith, 2014). In response, various jurisdictions, government agencies, and private-sector firms have eliminated questions about applicants’ criminal background or mandated that employers do so (thereby “banning the box”). However, there are several reasons that these laws might not help, or could even hurt, minority job applicants. In particular, if employers are statistically discriminating against applicants with criminal records because a criminal history is negatively correlated with (unobservable) job-readiness, then removing that information will simply lead employers to use other observable characteristics, such as race, in their hiring decisions. In effect, they might try to guess who the ex-offenders are if they are not given that information up front. This would hurt minority applicants who do not have criminal records. The net effect on minority job-seekers is therefore ambiguous. The speakers that make up this panel discuss the impact of BTB policies using a range of theoretical and empirical approaches. Their goal is to provide evidence on BTB’s effects, and to inform future policy aimed at helping disadvantaged job seekers.