Ex Felons For Hire

In early November, the University of Michigan announced they would remove two questions related to job applicants’ criminal history and background.

These two questions previously asked if applicants have “been convicted of a misdemeanor or felony, including alcohol- or drug-related driving offenses” and if there are any felony charges currently pending against them. 

The University will still ask these questions during a background check after the job applicant has accepted the position, according to the University Record. 

The decision follows calls from criminal justice activists and student organizations to “ban the box,” which refers to employers that ask applicants to check a box indicating whether they have any criminal charges. In Aug. 2020, the University removed questions asking applicants about misdemeanor charges in applications for admission to the University.

University spokesperson Kim Broekhuizen told The Michigan Daily in an email that the decision was made to encourage job seekers by not initially disclosing their background to the University.

“The point of it is to conduct job interviews first and select candidates that are well qualified before conducting a background check and considering whether any convictions are job-related,” Broekhuizen said. “The process helps protect job candidates from disqualification based on a non-job-related conviction, and it helps job seekers simply feel more confident about applying without upfront disclosures that might cause good candidates to never apply.”

Broekhuizen also said the University studied other employers that removed this question from their application process, which ultimately encouraged them to do the same. Broekhuizen wrote in her email that the University’s decision to remove the two questions was not a result of campus activism.

“This change resulted from the desire to assess and recognize the impact on equity and inclusion in the University’s employment process. Although there is activist activity locally and nationally in support of banning the box, the University’s decision wasn’t related to campus activism or organizations,” Broekhuizen said.

Matthew Lassiter, history professor and co-director of the Carceral State Project, has been advocating for this change since 2019 when he helped draft an open letter criticizing the University for implementing a new felony disclosure policy. The policy, known as SPG 601.38, took effect in Feb. 2019 and requires all community members to report any felony convictions or charges to the University within a week or face penalties. 

Lassiter said the decision to remove the two questions is a step in the right direction, but said he was disappointed by how long it took to make the change and worries that it may not do enough to make a significant improvement.

“The University has been a laggard, not a leader,” Lassiter said. “Many other universities, many other local governments have already (made this decision) — it took way longer than it should have. There’s no justification for why the University delayed this so long.” 

LSA sophomore Macey Owen and LSA senior Rachel Fagan, both members of the University’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said they would like to see how this decision may impact the felony disclosure policy.

Owen said the University’s chapter of the ACLU is examining how this policy is used and whether or not it is effective.

“We think that (this policy) is the University’s way of extending the inequities of the criminal justice system to the people who either work at the University or attend the University,” Owen said. “They probably don’t keep us safer in any tangible way.”

Fagan expressed doubt that University officials had seen the open letter and said she feels the University is not very receptive to the ACLU or other organizations’ advocacy. 

“We find that it’s difficult to talk with University officials about these things. We’ve really tried to go that route in the past, and it’s literally never led to anything,” Fagan said. 

Lassiter also said because the criminal justice system produces biased outcomes, background checks will inevitably be biased.

“If you’re going to run criminal background checks, people are going to get flagged, you’re going to investigate with discretion,” Lassiter said. “It’s implausible that the larger issues of racism and other kinds of discrimination that cause some people to get criminal records and some people to not get criminal records for the exact same behaviors aren’t going to get reproduced in the evaluation process.”

Lassiter said he thinks the background question empowers the University to act as a secondary criminal justice system by possibly enabling them to punish someone beyond the bounds of their state-ordered sentence.

“(The University) is not ethically justified to put itself in the place of a second-level criminal justice system, especially for people who’ve already been convicted and punished, to make a decision to punish them further by denying them employment or educational opportunities based on their criminal background,” Lassiter said.

Owen agreed that questions about an applicant’s criminal background allowed the University to doubly punish applicants. Despite this, she said she was encouraged by the change.

“I think in the past few years, the University has opted in to certain policies that create issues for people with a criminal history,” Owen said. “I think the existence of the box in the first place was the University encouraging collateral consequences, and now they’re not doing that anymore, so that’s definitely a positive change.”

Fagan echoed Lassiter’s point that the box perpetuates the biases already existent in the criminal justice system.

“The existence of the box assumes that our justice system is just and treats everyone equally and fairly, which we know is not true,” Fagan said. “There’s so much bias inherent in our justice system, so we need to ban the box because it allows us to view our justice system through a critical lens, rather than blindly trusting whoever they convicted.”

Lassiter also expressed hope that the University would begin consulting the campus community on their policies and provide explanations on why they exist in the first place.

“The University owes it to all of us and the people who are potential students and potential employees to explain its policies, consult people in their formation and base their policies on evidence rather than stereotypes,” Lassiter said. “This is a good start. It’s not enough.”

Daily Staff Reporter Christian Juliano can be reached at julianoc@umich.edu.

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Many states have been introducing “ban the box” type laws intended to prevent discrimination in hiring against job seekers with a criminal history. Many hope that this will reduce the barriers to employment for these individuals and help them to reenter the workforce, but do these laws actually help?

Many have praised the positive impacts of these laws, which prevent employers from including questions about criminal history on the application. However, some evidence indicates that these laws may not only fail to help young black applicants but may even hurt their chances for employment.

Employers are naturally concerned with keeping their businesses, employees, and customers safe. As a result, employers are suspicious at the first sign of risk, which leads them to be particularly nervous when it comes to those that have recently been released from prison. During this time, employers are concerned about whether an individual may still be criminally active.

These laws do remove access to information on an individual’s criminal history generally at least until after an initial interview. As a result, these laws appear to succeed in increasing call-back rates for those with criminal convictions. However, the results have been mixed; in some cases, they appear to have increased employment rates for those with prior convictions.

Additionally, when removing an employer’s access to criminal history, these same employers are still likely to have the same level of concern, but they will not have confirmation either way. As a result, a recent study seems to suggest that instead of simply choosing not to consider it at all, this lack of information may simply cause some employers to make assumptions based on their own biases. This study found that banning the box laws appears to lower the rate of hiring for young, low-skilled black and Hispanic men by several percentage points.

This seems to indicate that when trying to guess who has a criminal record or not, some employers may assume that young black and Hispanic men, who are statistically more likely to have been incarcerated, will have criminal records and choose not to interview them at all. These policies do appear to help older black populations, possibly because employers are more likely to assume that they are less criminally active.

This means that well-intended ban-the-box policies may have the unfortunate side effect of harming the groups which have the most to gain from them. Ban-the-box policies do not appear to have a significant impact upon young, low-skilled white workers or workers with college degrees.

Overall, many critics would argue that the negatives of these laws outweigh the positives. Though they may improve the lives of some, they appear to have unintended consequences for others.

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On Thursday, Nov. 4, VC Prison Divest shared via Instagram Vassar Human Resources’ announcement that the College had “banned the box” during the employment process, meaning that the College will no longer ask prospective employees about their criminal history on job applications. “The box” refers to the check box found on Vassar’s hiring applications inquiring about an applicant’s criminal record. Vice President of Information Technology and Human Resources Carlos García noted that Vassar may still conduct relevant criminal background checks as required for some jobs, such as those positions requiring contact with vulnerable persons, access to sensitive areas on campus and/or significant financial responsibility.

Many students were satisfied with the College’s decision to ban the box. When Christopher Unruh ’23 first saw VC Prison Divest’s Instagram post, he was excited about the College’s decision: “I agree with the decision to remove the box. I mean, it was really great news to hear that they had removed it.”

Unruh shared that Vassar banning the box is an example of the College putting into practice what it often preaches. He stated, “Vassar has this whole thing where we say that we’re like this paradise of liberalism and equality and all of these ideals. But yet we h[ad] these policies in place, which disproportionately harm certain communities.” Unruh continued, “If we’re going to say these types of things … and promote these types of ideas, they [administration] better live up to what they have to say.”  

A national civil rights organization composed of formerly-incarcerated individuals and their families known as All of Us or None started the Ban the Box campaign in 2003 (The New York Times, 2016). They intend to convince employers to ban the box on their hiring applications so that ex-offenders are not automatically disqualified from the hiring pool due to prejudice before having the opportunity to fully demonstrate their qualifications. 

Employment discrimination against formerly-incarcerated individuals is highly prevalent in the U.S., which has the highest incarcerated population in the world at 2,068,800 people as of 2019 (Word Prison Brief, 2019). According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the unemployment rate for formerly-imprisoned people is nearly five times higher than that of the general U.S. populus (Prison Policy Initiative, 2018).

The Ban the Box Movement is widespread: As of 2021, the District of Columbia, 37 states (including New York) and over 150 cities and counties across the U.S. have adopted a ban the box policy for public-sector employment. Moreover, 15 states and 22 cities and counties have mandated the removal of conviction history questions on job applications for private employers. New York City, Suffolk County and Westchester County have adopted this extended policy (National Employment Law Project, 2021). 

Student activists helped inform the College’s decision to remove the criminal history question on employee applications.  In particular, VC Prison Divest, a student-led coalition between Vassar’s Black Students’ Union, Gradient and Vassar Prison Initiative spearheaded the movement. VC Prison Divest launched the Vassar College Prison Divestment Campaign during the spring of last year. At this time, they circulated a statement and petition outlining their demands for the College’s divestment from the Prison Industrial Complex, one of which was banning the box.

Since the campaign launched, VC Prison Divest has engaged in continuous discussion with various administrative offices across campus in order to reach the goals outlined during their spring campaign. According to VC Prison Divest organizer Xade Wharton-Ali ’22, the organization’s members have met with different heads of offices, such as the Office of Admission, Human Resources, Finance and Administration and the Chief Financial Officer . “It was a lot of education that needed to happen in terms of educating the higher ups of each of the offices [about] the intellectual and moral basis of our arguments,” Wharton-Ali recalled.

Elaborating on the importance of these conversations, fellow VC Prison Divest organizer Jhujhar Sarna ’22 stated, “I think our goal was really to make sure that when we work towards these demands [for prison divestment] that we try to work with the administration, because we felt [that] more can get done if we’re able to sit in these rooms and have conversations with them.”

Vassar’s administration acknowledged the role of student activism in this decision. García stated, “We are grateful to the VC Prison Divest group for bringing new attention to this matter.” He continued, “They provided very helpful insights into the impact of continuing to ask the criminal history question and, as importantly, the benefits of removing it.”

Before banning the box, Vassar had attempted to take steps to mitigate hiring bias against formerly-incarcerated applicants. García explained, “In the past, Vassar had made changes to the way it asked about criminal history so as to give prospective employees the option of declining to answer.” However, after reflection, the College realized that their current policies could be improved: “In reevaluating the issue today, we determined that we could do more—and that forcing prospective applicants to decline to answer a sensitive question may nevertheless have a chilling effect on job applications and/or signal to prospective applicants and the public that it was Vassar’s intent to filter job applications based on the people’s responses to that question,” stated García.

Although VC Prison Divest organizer Chelsea Quayenortey ’22 was pleased with the College’s decision, she felt as though they could have taken such actions sooner: “I feel like it’s something that should have been done a long time ago. And it’s something that a lot of institutions have already done … As an institution, we should be more on top of things like this,” she said.

Despite slower progress than they would like, other members of VC Divest noted that Vassar’s decision to ban the box is a step in the right direction. As organizer Sulekh Fernando-Peiris ’22 noted, “When we started this, the box was not banned … I think one of the things that we want people to notice is that stuff is happening and…more stuff would happen if more people were to do it.”

The head organizers of VC Prison Divest all shared the common sentiment that banning the box is a good starting point but more work still needs to be done. As Wharton-Ali stated, “There’s still a lot of uncharted territory that we haven’t gotten into. I feel like this is definitely only the start.”

Currently, VC Prison Divest is working on recruiting and dividing members and volunteers up into department-specific working groups, which include the following: Investment/Financials, Human Resources, Admissions and Title IV. Each group focuses on implementing policies and changes that help the College reach the broader prison divestment goals outlined during VC Prison Divest’s campaign, such as the College providing full transparency about what companies and funds they are invested in, divesting from those that use prison-labor and reinvesting in those that practice restorative justice. 

Members of VC Divest also hope for more engagement from Vassar students going forward. Sarna articulated this sentiment: “This is an issue that affects every single Vassar student because we all benefit from the prison industrial complex, and I feel like this is something that people should feel passionate about.” 

While student-led initiatives will persist, the College believes that banning the box demonstrates Vassar’s dedication to dismantling historically oppressive systems. As García put it, “Removing the criminal history question from Vassar’s job applications…signals to both our community and the public that we are committed to ending cycles of structural racism that may have found their way into Vassar’s own systems over time.”

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JOBS COURT: New Mich. program proposed to give non-violent criminals employment  nbc25news.com

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JOBS COURT: New Mich. program proposed to give non-violent criminals employment  nbc25news.com

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‘Ban the box’ laws offer some protections for past offenders  New Castle News

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We asked Atlanta mayoral candidates their no. 1 issue. Here’s what they said.

Tomorrow, after surviving roughly a year of friendly policy forums, politicking and mudslinging, Atlanta voters will cast ballots for their next choice for mayor, City Council president and representatives, and school board members.

• Every candidate makes promises to solve Atlanta issues. But time, energy, and resources can be limited. So, we asked all 14 candidates where their administrations would focus most of their attention if elected.

The big picture: Campaign promises can set up candidates for failure, but they’re a good indication of priorities.

• Four of the five top candidates listed crime or public safety as the number-one issue facing Atlanta.

Below are the answers of all the mayoral hopefuls who responded to our question, in alphabetical order:

Antonio Brown

• Issue: Generational poverty and income inequality
• Idea: Increasing access to living-wage jobs with health insurance in tech, healthcare, and infrastructure, and capital to build and expand businesses.”
• What he’s saying: “By creating this inclusive ecosystem we can address these systemic issues and ensure no Atlantan is ever left behind again.”

Andre Dickens

• Issue: Public safety
• Idea: The SAFE Streets Plan centers on officers building trust with the community, using new technology and following policy and operating with oversight. In addition, addressing socioeconomic issues that contribute to crime with after-school programs, jobs and affordable housing.
• What he’s saying: “We have to… [do] more to ensure that we don’t just try to arrest our way out of the issue, but we truly address the issues facing our city.”

Kirsten Dunn

• Issue: Lack of unity
• Idea: Creating a three-tier plan with other mayoral candidates to address immediate, intermediate and long-term solutions to city issues, and a One Atlanta app to gain feedback and create policy.
• What she’s saying: “I am a leader’s leader. I have no problem allowing other leaders to lead in their strengths. My strength just happens to be unity.”

Nolan English

• Issue: Public safety
• Idea: Reopen the city jail, hire retiring military police officers, use tech like drones and ShotSpotter, and order officers to suppress crimes in certain areas when they occur.
• What he’s saying: “[The police chief] would have one year maximum to turn the tide with regard to crime and retain his role as chief.”

Sharon Gay

• Issue: Public safety
• Ideas include: A four-point plan to recruit, retain and equip officers; build stronger bonds with neighborhoods to address community concerns like unlicensed nightclubs; reduce recidivism by working with the judicial system; and address the root causes of crime.
• What she’s saying: “By working together, we can ensure that Atlanta is again a safe and welcoming city for all.”

Mark Hammad

• Issue: Violent crime
• Idea: Support the Fulton County district attorney’s office and address its case backlog, reopen the city jail, end the use of signature bonds for repeat offenders, increase transparency about judicial records, close venues that are “magnets for criminals and crime.”
• What he’s saying: “While the APD is understaffed and overworked, simply adding police alone won’t alleviate the increase in crime.”

Kenny Hill

• Issue: “Deep-seated division”
• Idea: “Deliberately and transparently” build a new relationship with the Atlanta City Council and City Council president.
• What he’s saying: “Without addressing this core issue any would-be solutions to the [crime, affordable housing, infrastructure and socioeconomic disparities] would be temporary Band-Aids.”

Rebecca King

• Issue: Crime
• Idea: Expand the city’s prearrest diversion program, adopt the community policing model, address the root cause of crime and focus on repeat offenders.
• What she’s saying: “Crime affects everyone as a victim even if you are not the direct victim of the crime.”

Felicia Moore

• Issue: Crime and public safety
• Ideas include: New unarmed first responder unit to address those experiencing homelessness and behavioral and mental health crises, more transparency and accountability from the public safety department including releasing body cam footage and records within at least 72 hours, anonymous tip line for officers.
• What she’s saying: “Crime and public safety are the number-one concern for all Atlanta residents, businesses and visitors. It has not only covered this city in a cloud of unease, but it’s hurting our brand.”

Kasim Reed

• Issue: Crime
• Ideas include: Hire and train 750 new officers, add implicit bias and de-escalation training, keep Atlanta City jail open, reopen recreation centers, expand the prearrest diversion program, triple the network of traffic light cameras and license plate readers.
• What he’s saying: “Crime impacts our personal and collective quality of life and the city’s reputation, creating a vicious cycle that undermines everything that makes our city vibrant. The fundamental truth is that until Atlanta feels safe again, nothing else will feel right.”

Richard Wright

• Issue: Crime
• Ideas include: End policing zones in favor of district policing, hire more officers, reward officers who engage with the community, create capital/lending opportunities for Black businesses, offer free apprenticeship programs to young people.
• What he’s saying: “The number-one issue is crime and more importantly the root cause of systemic crime, which is systemic poverty. My administration will look to solve crime by lifting more people out of poverty.”

Glenn Wrightson

• Issue: Smart government
• Idea: Improve morale to increase productivity to build.
• What he’s saying: “As operations become more efficient, people gain respect to conserve, more funds are available for social welfare programs, housing is more affordable… and overall perception of goodness begins to spread in society.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to show that there are 14 candidates (not 15) running for Atlanta mayor.

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