Second chance, my ass.

• Author: Edelman, Gilad
• Position: The Eternal Criminal Record - Book review

The Eternal Criminal Record

by James B. Jacobs

Harvard University Press, 416 pp.

Ex-offenders need jobs to stay out of jail. But easy access to criminal records, a gift of the Internet age, means that employers won't hire them

What does a criminal record tell us about a person? Does it forever identify him as a threat to society? This is not an idle question: between a quarter and a third of American adults--around sixty-five million people--have some type of criminal record. About twenty million of them, or 12 percent, have a felony conviction. Among African Americans, the rate of felony convictions rises to an astonishing 25 percent.

The most debilitating consequence of having a record is employment discrimination. Three out of four employers run criminal background checks on all applicants, and some 90 percent use them for at least some hires. In studies, an overwhelming proportion of employers say they are unwilling to hire someone with a felony conviction. Many refuse to hire anyone with a record, period. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has declared that it's illegal for companies to categorically exclude ex-offenders, but its rules leave enough wiggle room to make them difficult to enforce.

The single most important predictor of future crimes is whether or not an ex-offender finds work once he or she leaves prison. This creates what economists call a collective action problem: hiring ex-offenders reduces recidivism, which is in everyone's best interest; but to any individual employer, the perceived risk of hiring someone with a record outweighs the marginal benefit to society.

The current landscape of criminal records and background checks developed under little scrutiny. It just sort of happened, according to the New York University law professor James B. Jacobs in his recent book, The Eternal Criminal Record. Jacobs tries to catalog and comment on every aspect of criminal record keeping in America. It's an impossible task for one volume, and the result is an overbroad and sometimes meandering book, written in an academic's flat prose. Still, for the patient reader, there is probably no better single source of information on the ways in which criminal records are created, stored, shared, and used.

In the United States, criminal court records have traditionally been available to anyone who wants to see them. For most of the country's history, however, the files lived in what the Supreme Court called "practical obscurity."...