Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Want to Reduce Crime? Allow Non-violent Ex-cons to Get a Job.
Want to be a florist in Louisiana? You need government approval. In four other states, you need a license before you can be an interior decorator. Tennessee requires 70 days training, a $140 fee, and two exams before allowing anyone to be a shampooer. I’m unclear how more than two months of class work is needed to lather/rinse/repeat, but government knows best.
All 50 states require millions of would-be workers to go through government-sanctioned professional boards before they can ply their trade. Now this makes sense for a CPA or a lawyer, but do bureaucrats really need to regulate upholsterers, packagers, and gas pumpers? Stephen Slivinski, an economist and researcher at Arizona State University, conducted a first-of-its-kind study on how these boards burden one group more than others. And when they make this group suffer, crime surges. I wrote about the study in this weekend’s Arizona Republic:
Employers often frown on anyone with even a non-violent criminal record, despite having the skills and education required for the job. Where this tendency is most apparent is the byzantine system of professional licenses and certifications required by many states…
These boards often set arbitrary, unnecessary requirements. It’s nice that reformers help prisoners earn GEDs and job training, but how does that help if their state board requires long work experience and a higher education level than is available in their time behind bars?
Worse still, many states have “good character” provisions that prohibit ex-prisoners from ever receiving a license. Other states allow licensing boards to reject applicants at their discretion; if the Louisiana Horticulture Commission doesn’t care for ex-cons, maybe they won’t let one become a retail florist. After all, maybe an unlicensed flower arranger will only use 11 roses instead of a dozen.
Stephen Slivinski, an economist and senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Economic Liberty, has studied this issue in detail. He compared states’ three-year recidivism rates for new crimes to their occupational licensing burdens. After crunching the numbers, he found that states with the heaviest occupational licensing burdens saw an average increase in the recidivism rate of more than 9 percent. Meanwhile, the states with the lowest burdens saw an average decline in that recidivism rate of almost 2.5 percent.
You can read the whole thing here. It’s great that criminal justice reformers are bringing education and job training behind bars, especially to non-violent offenders. But if the same government won’t let them get a job after release, what’s the point?
Published in Law
Yes because they have been mis-educated and mis-informed to believe that only the State can provide in their best interests. They don’t intentionally vote against their own interest but that is the result.
I’m close to the @fredcole position on this and my answer would occupational licensing should be an issue for the states and the people to figure out. I don’t see anything in Article I, Section 8 that gives Congress authority in this area.
Oh, sure. I’ve seen similar in a couple industries. Nothing like forcing workers to train their replacements before their jobs are shipped over to eastern Europe. But the upshot is that our manufacturing industry is making high-value items that require labor that is higher skilled and more efficient than you can get in someplace like Bangladesh. The t-shirt jobs just weren’t going to say and globalization has been rough in areas where the work can be done cheaper someplace else. Bangladesh aren’t going to be making jet engines anytime soon, however. Some day, maybe, but not today and tomorrow isn’t looking great either.
The trick is to obtain skills in jobs that can’t easily be outsourced or have to be done locally. As Thomas Sowell has taught us, public policy is about trade offs. Policies are going to have winner and losers. The political class has been just awful at addressing the losing trade offs of free-trade which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump got lots of traction on the trade issue this time around. If you just had your manufacturing job sent to the Czech Republic because some guy could do the same job you did, but cheaper, you don’t care what Mitt Romney has to say about tax policy or entrepreneurship and the Democrats talking about putting you on welfare is pretty offensive. You want a job or clear route to quickly getting the skills to get a decent job.
I wouldn’t presume to answer for Fred, but I don’t think the federal government should ban occupational licensing. That said, there may be a constitutional grounds for doing so. Unlike things such as marriage and driving, states generally don’t recognize each other’s trade licenses. You could make a better case that that affects interstate commerce than you can for many other things that have passed SCOTUS’ commerce-clause scrutiny.
In what regard?
I think the @theReticulator may assume (I suspect incorrectly) that you would favor a federal anti-licensing law.
Switching gears here, but…
Why only “non-violent” ex-cons? It seems to me that, if someone has paid their debt to society, they should be able to get a job regardless of what their crime was. Someone who got convicted, say, for involuntary manslaughter because of a bar fight that went wrong shouldn’t be punished for life or be forced into a life of crime once their sentence is up.
I think it’s hard to hire ex cons, period. Having paid their debt to society is irrelevant. I wouldn’t be inclined to believe them when they describe the nature of their offense and their behavior inside. I suspect that’s all public record, but I don’t know where to find it, or how long it may take to evaluate it. I’d only make the effort if I had no other options or I was targeting ex cons out of charity.
Yes, I agree. And perhaps even to some of the less likely to be violent. Our whole criminal justice system is not geared toward some form getting people back into society. There is definitely something missing. And I’m definitely not arguing for letting criminals off the hook. Reform is needed but not at the expense of being soft on criminals. We have to do something different once they’re inside the jails, and once they’ve served their term.
My father always hires ex-cons. And 90% of the time, it comes back to bite him.
People can and do change. But not most of them, most of the time.
The key is informed consent. We should be trusted to make our own decisions, and free to do so without regulation. I should be able to hire teenagers or convicts if they like the terms, and they should be able to choose to work for less than what the state thinks is a minimum wage.
To be clear, my argument above is about making sure there are no regulatory obstacles, not that people should hire ex-cons with no consideration of their past. That’s an entirely different issue.
But the situation mentioned upstream of an employee who had worked for many years suddenly being fired because their record came to light stinks of a decision made by lawyers, not people.
The only reason a lawyer would recommend such a firing is if the nature of the felony put the business at risk. For example, a convicted rapist working near helpless women in a hospital; a burglar being trusted alone in people’s homes; a drug dealer working in a pharmacy and so on. If something happened, the business owner could have liability for placing others at risk with a negligent hiring.
Just as likely, the fear of retaining a convict came from the business owner himself or herself, but without actual facts, who knows? The point is, don’t always take shots at the lawyers.
Besides, lawyers make recommendations. The business owners make the decisions.
I regularly overrule lawyers. I can tell you that it is not that easy to steamroll the guy who says “in my expert opinion, the better-safe-than-sorry thing to do is…. and if you don’t, the consequences are Bad or Worse.”
I can do it, but I recognize that in a larger company, the person who decides to go against the lawyer’s advice is putting their career at risk.
As lawyers, we generally advise our clients to take the safest course of action. But safest may not be the best from a business point of view. Successful businesses take risks sometimes. I can’t support a client taking an illegal course of action, but some walk closer to the line than others.
Having been a Real Estate Agent, subject to the licensing laws, I can see how they are important in some areas, ridiculous in others. I really think that many of those should be done away with. Likewise, I can see how some of the licensed jobs should drop the ex-con restrictions, others may be wise to keep them. imagine the damage a real estate agent could do if involved in even ‘non-violent’ criminal activity. At the same time, the obama idea of ‘ban the box’, wherein it becomes illegal to even ask if one had ever been convicted of a crime needs to never be enacted. in a free market system, an employer has the right to make his own decisions as to hiring practices.
Should registered sex offenders be hired as public school teachers? Even considering the flaws in that program, I’d say no. If too many people are unreasonably or unfairly barred from teaching jobs, then lets fix the registration program so that it only includes serious offenders.
It sounds like a bad idea to me, and I’d hope that the superintendent of the school wouldn’t hire a convicted rapist as a teacher. What I’m saying is that it should be up to the superintendent to make such a hiring decision, not the state or federal legislature or regulators.
Let’s not forget, that superintendent is every bit as much “the government” as is the legislature. I have no qualms with the people using one part of government (the legislature) to tell another another part of the government (the superintendent) what it can and can’t do. Yes, it must be constitutional, so it’s the state legislature that should make the “no sex offenders” rule, not the Department of Education, but I support the no sex offenders rule.
Private schools, on the other hand, should be able to hire whomever they want – even if they receive government funding through a charter school program or, God forbid, vouchers.
My rationale is that many people are forced to send their children to public schools, and there are relatively few ways for the citizens to influence those schools. Legislative requirements and restrictions placed upon school administrators is the primary means of doing that. Those are unnecessary when it comes to private schools, as parents choose whether or not to send their children to a private school, and can change their mind at any time.
Around here, we vote for the School Board which sets district policy and hires & fires the superintendent. We have a lot of influence on schools through this process, unless the state hasn’t taken an issue out of local hands.
Sorry to hear your area doesn’t have this.
We do too, but once your super hires a sex offender, that ship has sailed. You can get rid of the super next election, but good luck getting rid of the sex offender.
All sorts of rules for education are defined at the state level. If a state doesn’t have a law against hiring sex offenders as teachers (I’m confident that most do), I’m probably not going to petition for one. I really only had two points on the topic: 1) such a ban doesn’t violate any fundamental conservative principle that I’m aware of, and 2) I expect the blanket restriction to cause minimal unfair hardship. As such, it may be a reasonable exception to your blanket statement that there should be “no regulatory obstacles” When the government must hire, the government must establish criteria for that hiring. If some criteria are in the form of state laws with blanket requirements or prohibitions, I don’t mind.