Ban-the-Box Busted

Among released criminals, there is a substantial connection between employment and going straight. That is, those who find employment are less likely to commit new crimes. The “ban the box” movement seeks to forbid employers from asking about criminal convictions. A related effort is to expunge criminal convictions. The theory is that by removing this information from employers, more past offenders will find employment, and fewer will return to crime.

But does it work?

This study has recently been posted on the National Bureau of Economic Research site. “We find consistent evidence that removing an existing record does not improve labor market outcomes, on average.”

Add another example to the list of confirmations of H.L. Mencken’s famous observation: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

The study is Can you Erase the Mark of a Criminal Record? Labor Market Impacts of Criminal Record Remediation by Amanda Y. Agan, Andrew Garin, Dmitri K. Koustas, Alexandre Mas & Crystal Yang. Robert VerBruggen has this article at City Journal.

So why doesn’t “ban the box” work? There can be no doubt that employers’ practices of refusing to hire people with criminal records can make employment more difficult, but perhaps it is not as high up on the list of difficulties as is commonly believed. Particularly during tight labor markets, so long as such practices are not universal those who truly wish to find employment and have employable skills may be able to find a job eventually, even if it takes longer.

Neat solutions are often wrong because real human problems are usually complex. There is also an ideological imperative to blame problems on people who are deemed acceptable targets. It’s all the fault of employers or biased HR directors or greedy corporate executives, and on and on. Neat and plausible solutions can correct these problems via laws and regulations, but they are wrong when the perceived problem is not really the problem.

Problems internal to a person’s psyche are more difficult, and identifying them is often politically incorrect. I do not at all seek to minimize or dismiss the difficulties faced by an ex-con who genuinely wants to go straight and become self-supporting via honest employment, particularly one who has no work experience or employable skills. We should have vocational programs in prison and support services after release to help such people.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the reality that there are large numbers of people in our society with no work ethic and with the anti-social attitude that work is for chumps and smart people take what they want from others. The correlation between unemployment and recidivism comes, at least in part, from the reality that both are caused by wrong attitudes. We can try to help such people see the light, but don’t expect miracles.

And no, convicted child molesters should not be driving school buses. Convicted embezzlers should not be working in banks’ trust departments, managing the trust funds of orphans. “The box” has legitimate uses.