THE EDGE OF STIGMA: AN EXPERIMENTAL AUDIT OF THE EFFECTS OF LOW‐LEVEL CRIMINAL RECORDS ON EMPLOYMENT

• Published date: 01 November 2014
• Author: HILARY K. WHITHAM,CHRISTOPHER UGGEN,EBONY RUHLAND,MIKE VUOLO,SARAH LAGESON
• Date: 01 November 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12051

THE EDGE OF STIGMA: AN EXPERIMENTAL AUDIT

OF THE EFFECTS OF LOW-LEVEL CRIMINAL

RECORDS ON EMPLOYMENT∗

CHRISTOPHER UGGEN,1MIKE VUOLO,2SARAH LAGESON,1

EBONY RUHLAND,3and HILARY K. WHITHAM4

1Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota

2Department of Sociology, Purdue University

3Department of Social Work, University of Minnesota

4Department of Public Health, University of Minnesota

KEYWORDS: employment, arrest, experimental

Ample experimental evidence shows that the stigma of a prison record reduces em-

ployment opportunities (Pager, 2007). Yet background checks today uncover a much

broader range of impropriety, including arrests for minor crimes never resulting in for-

mal charges. This article probes the lesser boundaries of stigma, asking whether and

how employers consider low-level arrests in hiring decisions. Matched pairs of young

African American and White men were sent to apply for 300 entry-level jobs, with

one member of each pair reporting a disorderly conduct arrest that did not lead to

conviction. We find a modest but nontrivial effect, with employer callback rates about

4 percentage points lower for the experimental group than for the matched control

group. Interviews with the audited employers suggest three mechanisms to account for

the lesser stigma of misdemeanor arrests relative to felony convictions: 1) greater em-

ployer discretion and authority in the former case; 2) calibration of the severity, nature,

and timing of the offense; and 3) a deeply held presumption of innocence, which con-

trasts the uncertainty of arrest with the greater certainty represented by convictions. In

addition, personal contact and workplace diversity play important roles in the hiring

process.

The presumption of innocence has been a cornerstone of Anglo-American criminal

law since the eighteenth century, reflected in the dictum “innocent until proven guilty.”

Yet criminal records can haunt the accused, as well as the convicted. As comprehensive

background checks have become standard practice in hiring, rising numbers of low-level

arrestees are correspondingly subject to their stigmatizing effects. In Erving Goffman’s

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2014.52.issue-4/issuetoc.

This research was conducted in partnership with the Council of Crime and Justice and supported

by the JEHT Foundation and the National Institute of Justice. Uggen is additionally supported by a

Robert Wood Johnson Health Investigator Award. The authors owe a special debt to Devah Pager

for consulting on this project and to Lindsay Blahnik, Tom Johnson, Blake Kragness, Heather

McLaughlin, Suzy McElrath, Sarah Shannon, and Jessica Molina for their generous assistance.

Direct correspondence to Christopher Uggen, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota,

267 19th Avenue South #909, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (e-mail: uggen001@umn.edu).

C2014 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12051

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 52 Number 4 627–654 2014 627

628 UGGEN ET AL.

(1963) terms, they have gone from potentially “discreditable” to formally “discredited”

as applicants.

Arrest records have long been available to anyone with the time and inclination to seek

them, but a tectonic shift has occurred in their accessibility (Bushway, Stoll, and Weiman,

2007; Raphael, 2010). What once required a trip to the courthouse and the better part

of an afternoon is now accomplished with a few keystrokes or a nominal fee to a private

firm. As a result, everyday citizens, employers, and landlords now routinely consult crimi-

nal databases. These background checks can be consequential, as felony criminal records

clearly reduce employability (Apel and Sweeten, 2010; Bushway and Apel, 2011; Pager,

2007; Western, 2007). Because background checks typically unearth information on ar-

rests as well as convictions, however, even people never charged with a crime may still

bear the mark of a criminal record.

Yet we know little about the far-flung effects of arrest records and “misdemeanor

justice” (Kohler-Hausmann, 2013). Are arrests for relatively minor transgressions over-

looked, or do they effectively disqualify applicants? On the one hand, any negative signal

could hinder an applicant’s prospects. On the other hand, employers are likely becoming

more discerning in evaluating criminal records, such that they may discount an otherwise-

qualified applicant’s brush with the law. Emile Durkheim (1895: 100) famously imagined

a society of saints, where “crime” was unknown but trivial or venial faults aroused scan-

dal. Although the United States is no society of saints, the question before us today is

whether the routine public disclosure of low-level arrest data arouses scandal sufficient to

bar the door to employment.

This article first reviews research establishing 1) that a rising proportion of firms are

routinely checking applicant backgrounds and 2) that employers discriminate on the basis

of felony-level records. We then ask the following scientific question with pressing policy

implications: Does low-level arrest information affect hiring, and if yes, then how does it

affect hiring decisions? We use an experimental audit method to estimate the impact of

a single arrest on employment, and then we interview a subset of audited employers to

learn precisely how they incorporate low-level records in their decisions.

PROLIFERATION OF BACKGROUND CHECKS

It is normative for firms to conduct background checks, with 60 percent of California

employers indicating that they always check the criminal backgrounds of applicants and

another 12 percent reporting they sometimes check (Raphael, 2010). A Society for Hu-

man Resource Management survey (2010) puts the figure even higher, with 73 percent

reporting checks for all positions and 19 percent reporting checks for selected positions.

Apart from new technologies that have made the checks cheap and easy, this high preva-

lence can be explained by employer fears of liability (Finlay, 2009), confusion over legal

responsibility (Bushway, Stoll, and Weiman, 2007; U.S. Equal Employment Opportuni-

ties Commission [U.S. EEOC], 2012), a desire to avoid high monitoring costs (Finlay,

2009), and simple distrust of those with criminal backgrounds (Bushway et al., 2007).

Employers can access criminal history information using public court records, Internet

searches, and private data harvesting companies, each of which has become more acces-

sible in the past decade. According to one survey, 28 states allow direct Internet access to

criminal records (Mukamal and Samuels, 2003). Although the use of public and private

databases is soaring, there is little consistency in how such databases are compiled and