Criminal Records and Employment: A Survey of Experiences and Attitudes in the United States

Abstract

Ban-the-Box (BTB) legislation, which bans employers from asking about criminal history records on the initial job application, is arguably the most prominent policy arising from the prisoner reentry movement. BTB policies assume: 1) most employers ask about criminal records, and 2) inquiries occur at the application stage. However, we lack reliable information about the validity of these assumptions or about public attitudes towards criminal background checks, which limits our understanding of the potential scope of this innovative policy. Using survey data from a national probability sample, we estimate that in the past year, over 31 million U.S. adults were asked about a criminal record on a job application. According to our survey, virtually all of the criminal record inquiries occurred at the application stage, highlighting the potential of BTB. However, we also found that the public is sharply divided on whether to prevent employers from asking on applications, as per BTB.

Keywords:

• Ban-the-Box
• hiring
• employment
• conviction histories
• public opinion

Notes

¹ John Irwin discussed reentry as a separate stage of the prisoner experience in 1970 (Irwin, 1970), a fact that Travis learned only after he started using the word (Toney, 2007).

² Only six papers were published that fall under that topic prior to 2000, and none of these papers used the word reentry to describe their research (the papers were archived online in 2006, when reentry was used as a keyword).

³ A symbolic interaction perspective (Blumer, 1969; Mead, 1934) posits that individuals are influenced and shaped by others’ perceptions, negative reactions, and formal labels to violations of prosocial norms (Lemert, 1951; Tannenbaum, 1938). Therefore, when an individual internalizes perceptions of failing, the negative feedback can induce a self-fulfilling prophecy (Goffman, 1963) and lead to recidivism.

⁴ For an exception, see Denver (2016), which evaluates a criminal background check decision guideline that increases clearance to work for individuals with “older” conviction records. In addition, Siwach (2016) shows clear heterogeneous treatment effects. Policies designed to decrease recidivism must operate on those people for whom employment will reduce recidivism.

⁵ BTB policies initially focused on public employers (Rodriguez & Avery, 2016), although the policies have evolved in scope over time and extended to the private sector in some states and cities (Agan & Starr, 2016). In addition, several large private employers—including Target, Walmart, Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond and Koch Industries—have adopted BTB nationally (Levin, 2015).

⁶ Although the Multi-city Study of Urban Inequality data that Holzer et al. (2006) use also include Atlanta, Boston, and Detroit, Los Angeles is the only city with a second survey in 2001; the other city surveys were conducted in the early 1990s.

⁷ Groves and Peytcheva (2008) also found that nonresponse bias was higher in general population surveys and for attitudinal (versus behavioral) estimates. However, these design characteristics are necessarily set by the research objective, and are obligatory in surveys like ours where the goal is to study attitudes in the general population.

⁸ These individuals are excluded from models examining respondent experiences with criminal background checks, but are included in analyses assessing support.

⁹ https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0157-employment-background-checks

¹⁰ We focused on conviction histories for two reasons. First, recent research demonstrates that conviction records dominate questions on job applications (Vuolo et al., 2017, Table 1). Second, the Equal Employment Opportunity Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (2012) strongly advises employers to consider convictions, and not arrests, in the hiring process.

¹¹ Additionally, the item-specific response scale we use in this question should reduce bias from stylistic responding (Pickett & Baker, 2014). This is important because all prior studies of public opinion about prisoner reentry initiatives have relied on Likert (agree/disagree, favor/oppose) response scales (Garland et al., 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017; Ouellette et al., 2016), which can lead to inflated estimates of popular support, because of acquiescent responding (Pickett & Baker, 2014).

¹² The BTB state variable is measured as whether the state had implemented a BTB policy at the time of the survey, not at the time of the person’s last application. The results are the same if the BTB variable is removed.

¹³ We anticipate a small portion of our sample moved from one state to another between the last job application and the time of the survey. Out of a population of around 315.1 million people in 2013, the U.S. Census estimates about 36 million people moved between 2012 and 2013, and less than a third of the movers (11.7 million) relocated to a different county (which includes both intrastate and interstate moves) (Ihrke, 2014). This amounts to less than 4% of U.S. residents ages 1 or older estimated to change counties within a year, with an even lower estimate for the proportion of interstate (and inter-BTB policy) moves for adults who are actively in the labor market.

¹⁴ This is most likely a result of the necessity of collapsing the “>10 years” and “5 to 10 years” response categories, because too few of the respondents who last applied for a job 10 years ago lived in an active BTB state.

¹⁵ See Supplement C for details on the SurveyMonkey methodology, sample descriptive statistics, and a logistic regression predicting public support for allowing criminal record questions on job applications with prior arrest experience included.

¹⁶ NIMBY was originally conceptualized to help city planners understand opposition to the development of certain types of facilities, such as low-income housing or social services facilities (Dear, 1992). While residents accept that the facilities are necessary, they also do not want them located near their homes (Dear, 1992).

¹⁷ The GfK Group’s KnowledgePanel has been used frequently to field general population surveys for the American National Election Studies, and for the Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, an ongoing interdisciplinary program funded by the NSF (Mutz, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan Denver

Megan Denver is an assistant professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. Her work examines policy responses to criminal records, employment and recidivism, and desistance.

Justin T. Pickett

Justin T. Pickett, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, SUNY. His research interests include survey research methods and public opinion about crime and punishment.

Shawn D. Bushway

Shawn D. Bushway, PhD, is a professor in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY. His current research focuses on the process of desistance, the impact of a criminal history on subsequent outcomes, and the distribution of discretion in the criminal justice sentencing process.