“Ban the Box” Backfire

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Ryan Sherrard of UC Santa Barbara has a draft study on SSRN titled “Ban the Box” Policies and Criminal Recidivism. Here is the abstract:

Employment has long been seen as a mechanism for reducing criminal recidivism. As such, many states and municipalities have tried to increase the employment prospects of ex-offenders through “Ban the Box” (BTB) policies, making it illegal to ask about an individual’s criminal history on a job application. There are, however, questions as to how effective these policies are at helping ex-offenders successfully stay out of prison. In addition, recent research has shown that BTB policies may lead employers to racially discriminate in hiring. Using administrative prison data, this paper examines the direct effect of BTB policies on rates of criminal recidivism. I find that while BTB policies don’t appear to reduce criminal recidivism overall, these policies may be exacerbating racial disparities. In particular, I show that being released into a labor market with a BTB policy is associated with higher rates of recidivism for black ex-offenders, with little to no eff ect for white ex-offenders. This result is robust to a number of specifications and sub-samples.

A particularly disturbing aspect of this problem is the possibility that Ban the Box increases discrimination against law-abiding minority applicants. It is possible that when employers are inhibited from screening out criminals explicitly they will turn to screening out people with any characteristic they perceive as having a correlation with offending, which regrettably includes race.

Ban the Box became popular in a way all too typical today. The cause of helping released offenders became trendy and Politically Correct. The measure had some intuitive appeal to those who wanted to “virtue signal” that they were “woke” and on board with this cause. Laying mandates on employers is seen as a cheap and easy way to score points among people who are clueless as to how business actually operates. So go ahead and enact it into law, whether it actually does any good or not.

In my view, anyone who wants to have government dictate business practices has a heavy burden of proof. We need to know that the proposed measure will really help and be worth the cost. “Sounds good” doesn’t do it, or at least it shouldn’t.