jewel bush
Should applications for jobs with the City of New Orleans ask if a person has any previous felony convictions? Mayor Landrieu, to his credit, says no.
Referred to as “banning the box,” cutting this query from employment applications won’t do away with background checks. It would, however, prevent a “yes” answer from eliminating an otherwise qualified candidate from the interview process based on biases against those with criminal records. Background checks, as they should, would come down the line once that person is considered for hiring; and even then, a felony conviction won’t be an employment barrier.
According to 2010 data, 65 million people in the U.S. have a criminal record, and 1 in 13 adults have had a felony conviction.
This country is the over-incarceration capital of the globe. We lock up our citizens at young ages for long periods. Afterward, we release them into a hostile world locked out of the job market with little support and resources to live a productive, whole life. Then, we wonder why people reoffend.
Maybe you went for a joyride in your teens or were a crummy thief in your 20s before coming to your senses. Maybe the officer smelled weed in the car when he pulled you over because you were driving while being young and black – or young and brown. Or maybe it was something far worse, but you paid your debt to society and want to move on with your life and go to work.
People shouldn’t be penalized an entire lifetime for past transgressions. The whole notion of a debt to society is that it can actually be repaid. After decades in prison, many middle-aged men are ready to work and earn a living. “True justice is paying only once for each mistake. True injustice is paying more than once for each mistake,” wrote Miguel Ruiz in his book, “The Four Agreements.”
At the turn of the millennium, 3 percent of the U.S. population was either incarcerated, on probation or on parole. The Justice Department has estimated that a third of black men and nearly a fifth of Latino men born in 2001 will go to prison in their lifetime.
People often lie about their felony status out of embarrassment, shame and the stigma of being labeled an ex-con; and are therefore virtually unhireable. Arrest and criminal records can control and haunt a person’s life rendering a person perpetually misunderstood and categorized as undesirable.
I’m not condoning illegal activities, or saying turn violent offenders or sex offenders loose to the detriment of public safety. Hiring decisions should be based on a person’s ability to perform the job, and there are some people whose criminal histories make it clear there are some jobs they should not perform. But the check box does not provide this information either, or capture the complexities of an individual’s experience. A person’s life should not forever be tainted by past behavior, especially when there are systems in place that perpetuate conditions for people of color to fail — a floundering public education system, substandard housing and poor healthcare that contribute to an overall low quality of life.
Given the racial disparity in the criminal justice system, second chances aren’t always granted and oftentimes there is no lift to interrupt generations of joblessness and poverty. Sentences tend to be stiffer in the black and brown communities to fuel the prison industrial complex, where hyper policing and imprisonment are used as solutions for societal ills and the need for cheap prison labor fuels a demand for prisoners. Prisons have become supply and demand enterprises; and who better to fill them than people of color and the poor, the throwaways of society.
With such a large segment of the population criminalized, how can we as a society move forward without addressing this very real problem? Keeping the convicted on the fringe and further marginalizing an already marginalized population is not a way to reduce recidivism rates. In fact, it will only increase them.
If the Civil Service Commission votes to approve the Landrieu administration’s “ban the box” measure, hiring decisions will consider the number of crimes and when they happened, the “occurrences in the life of the applicant” since the crimes happened, and the applicant’s age at the time of conviction, according to a Nov. 5 memo issued by Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin. Evaluating a conviction in context this way is an appropriate use of a criminal history, and a policy the city should adopt.
Let’s drop the snap judgment that goes along with having a record and move our city forward by “banning the box.”
jewel bush, a New Orleans native, is a writer whose work has appeared in The (Houma) Courier, The Washington Post, The Times-Picayune, New Orleans Homes & Lifestyles Magazine, and El Tiempo, a bilingual Spanish newspaper. In 2010, she founded MelaNated Writers Collective, a multi-genre group for writers of color in New Orleans dedicated to cultivating the literary, artistic and professional growth of emerging writers. Her three favorite books are Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Catcher in the Rye, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
I think anyone who has ever had any dealings with the staff at City Hall can verify that hiring standards are often far too low. We’re paying top dollar for the salaries of many, many genuine incompetents. We need to RAISE the standards for public employment, not lower them.
We DO have some excellent employees, but we also have a great many who simply should not have been hired in the first place. I don’t think we should do “social engineering” on the people’s payroll!
We are already doing social engineering on the public payroll. Who do you think is paying for the prisons?