Drug and 'Box' Bans Worsen Labor Shortage

Although her piece is slanted against employers screening out job applicants based on criminal history, Anneken Tappe of CNN Business makes an important point. Drug laws are, through manufactured criminal records, making our economic recovery from the pandemic (and related bad policy) harder by freezing out part of the work force:

Image by Ahmed Zayan, via Unsplash, license.

Criminal records are keeping certain workers from finding good jobs. This is particularly true of men in their 30s.

More than half of that group has a history of criminal conviction or arrest that keeps them from fully participating in the labor market, a study from nonprofit research group RAND Corporation released Friday found. As of January, just over one million men between the ages of 24 and 35 were counted as unemployed, the biggest group of jobless males, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. [link omitted, bold added]

And later on:

One complication is that the severity of the crime is not taken into consideration. If businesses draw the line at any criminal record, applicants arrested for a minor offense, such as possession of marijuana, get lumped in with applicants with more serious convictions like a series of assaults.

Some convictions might disqualify a candidate from a certain job -- for example, a person convicted of violent crimes might not be permitted to drive a school bus. But there are many Americans convicted of drug offenses concerning substances that have since been decriminalized in some states. Yet, their records still exist. [bold added]

Part of the problem is, as Tappe notes, that many employers use the very fact of any criminal record as a screen. This is a good point, and it probably would benefit some employers to make an extra effort to look more closely at some applicants with past convictions.

But Tappe is not exactly considering this problem from a pro-individual rights perspective:

Policy efforts like Ban the Box that stop companies from asking about criminal histories on applications don't really solve the problem either because it's easy to check records through publicly available commercial databases, according to RAND.

The solution to drug laws is to repeal them and purge the convictions -- not to force potential employers to ignore information about job applicants. "Ban the box" policies, just like criminalization of drugs, are fundamentally flawed -- and should be opposed -- because they violate individual rights. So long as what you do does not injure another, you should be free to smoke what you want or hire whom you want.

In fact "ban the box" laws perversely encourage racial discrimination, as I discussed some time back. [N]ot only are employers in "Ban the Box" locales hamstrung when it comes to screening out potential criminals, good men are being penalized for the crimes of others. Prevented from knowing about conviction history, some employers resort to screening out young, black men -- a group more frequently than most caught up in these laws as mentioned in the CNN piece.

That result is inarguably bad, but it is just one of the many symptoms that spring from the fundamental flaw in such laws: They violate individual rights, specifically those of employers, who should be free to hire and fire as they please. Employers lose out on good employees and the ones being passed over lose opportunity.

Tappe correctly notes that employers could benefit from not simply screening out any candidate with a criminal record, by making the extra effort to see what a given past conviction was for -- but that just underscores the argument against "Ban the Box:" Employers who would take the valuable suggestion that convictions for drug offenses might not be grounds for passing over a job applicant are impeded from doing so when they can't even consider a criminal record as a source of information. This hurts employers, young black men, and other people who got caught using substances that shouldn't be illegal, anyway.

-- CAV