Careful What You Wish For

• Author: Kiminori Nakamura
• Date: 01 August 2017
• Published date: 01 August 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12325

POLICY ESSAY

REDEEMED COMPARED TO WHOM?

Careful What You Wish For

Redemption or Risk-Based Employment Screening

Kiminori Nakamura

University of Maryland—College Park

The use of formal risk assessment is increasing in the criminal justice setting, es-

pecially in corrections, from pretrial and sentencing to prison programming and

parole and probation decisions (Desmarais and Singh, 2013). Risk assessment is

appealing in the era of pervasive and costly mass incarceration and correctional control

as it can allow the system to be selective in imposing punishment and control. Lower

risk defendants can be on pretrial release rather than being detained in jail, and lower

risk offenders can be sentenced to community sanctions rather than to prison. As the

visibility of risk assessment grows, so do the concerns on methodological as well as on

ethical grounds (Hannah-Moffat, 2013; Harcourt, 2007; Starr, 2014). For example, how

much can we under- or overpunish individuals based on who they are (e.g., demographic

characteristics), rather than on what they did (e.g., past and current criminal offenses)?

Samuel DeWitt, Shawn Bushway, Garima Siwach, and Megan Kurlychek (2017, this is-

sue) take an important step toward bringing offending risk assessment into the area of

employment screening.1More specifically, they present a procedure for developing rea-

sonable risk benchmarks that employers can use to clear those with criminal history to

work. Although the research is ultimately about providing relief from criminal history or

redemption, the introduction of risk assessment to employment settings can also bring a

set of concerns similar to those faced in the criminal justice system as well as in other

areas (e.g., lending, insurance) where some form of actuarial risk assessment is currently

used.

Direct correspondence to Kiminori Nakamura, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of

Maryland, 2220 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742 (e-mail: knakamur@umd.edu).

1. Risk assessment in general is not new to employment; pre-employment screening procedures,

including drug tests, psychological tests for integrity, and credit checks are commonly conducted

(Brody, 2010). Nevertheless, risk assessment, specifically for predicting future offending that targets all

job applicants, is not typically part of pre-employment screening.

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12325 C2017 American Society of Criminology 1009

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 3