Last week, The Atlantic reported that the city of Los Angeles is on the verge of implementing a “Ban the Box” initiative that would bar some private employers from asking job applicants about their criminal histories. In the face of growing awareness of criminal justice issues, a number of city and states have passed similar laws in the last few years. (The state of California already has a law on the books that forbids government employers from asking applicants about any criminal history until later in the employment process.) At the national level, President Barack Obama has urged Congress to pass Ban the Box legislation, and last yeardirected the Office of Personnel Management to “modify its rules to delay inquiries into criminal history until later in the hiring process.”
There’s little doubt that Americans with criminal records face substantial discrimination in the formal labor market. In the most oft-cited study on the topic, published in theAmerican Journal of Sociology in 2003, the sociologist Devah Pager found that ex-offenders in Milwaukee were substantially less likely to be considered for employment for entry-level jobs than non-offenders. Pager also found substantial racial discrimination in the labor market. “Blacks are less than half as likely to receive consideration by employers, relative to their white counterparts, and black nonoffenders fall behind even whites with prior felony convictions,” Pager concluded.
[For more of this story, written by Dwyer Gunn, go to https://psmag.com/does-ban-the...87f790cef#.5qivumma2]
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