1000x this. It’s one thing to have a felony for manslaughter. It’s another to have a felony for drug possession. In either case, if enough time has passed, and they have shown that they are reformed (long employment, life events, etc) then I think it should be removed from consideration. Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. The timeline for this can be based on severity with things like rape and murder never expiring from consideration.
There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes.
What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc.
That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.
They are only available for vulnerable sectors, you can't ask for one as a convenience store owner vetting a cashier. But if you are employing child care workers in a daycare, you can get them.
This approach balances the need for public safety against the ex-con's need to integrate back into society.
[1] https://rcmp.ca/en/criminal-records/criminal-record-checks/v...
You're over-thinking it, trying to solve for a problem that doesn't exist. No one has a "right" to work for me. There's plenty of roles that accept ex-cons and orgs that actively hire them.
I also think someone who has suffered a false accusation of that magnitude and fought to be exonerated shouldn’t be forced to suffer further.
So I likewise, require to know everything about you, including things that are none of my business but I just think they are my business and that's what matters. I'll make that call myself.
Note you are free to advertise hiring prior offenders.
You can also look up business ownership details and see if they have criminal records as well.
Well, no ; that's not up to you. While you may be interested in this information, the government also has a responsibility to protect the subject of that information.
The tradeoff was maintained by making the information available, but not without friction. That tradeoff is being shattered by third parties changing the amount of friction required to get the information. Logically, the government reacts by removing the information. It's not as good as it used to be, but it's better than the alternative.
This is why this needs to be regulated.
Thanks, but I don't want to have violent people working as taxi drivers, pdf files in childcare and fraudsters in the banking system. Especially if somebody decided to not take this information into account.
Good conduct certificates are there for a reason -- you ask the faceless bureaucrat to give you one for the narrow purpose and it's a binary result that you bring back to the employer.
Please don't unnecessarily censor yourself for the benefit of large social media companies.
We can say pedophile here. We should be able to say pedophile anywhere. Pre-compliance to censorship is far worse than speaking plainly about these things, especially if you are using a homophone to mean the same thing.
I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at least not with a trivial index. File the court judgement and other documentation under a case number, ban reindexing by third parties (AI scrapers, "background check" services) entirely. That way, anyone interested can still go and review court judgements for glaring issues, but a "pissed on a patrol car" conviction won't hinder that person's employment perspectives forever.
In Germany for example, we have something called the Führungszeugnis - a certificate by the government showing that you haven't been convicted of a crime that warranted more than three months of imprisonment or the equivalent in monthly earning as a financial fine. Most employers don't even request that, only employers in security-sensitive environments, public service or anything to do with children (the latter get a certificate also including a bunch of sex pest crimes in the query).
The appellate court records would contain information from the trial court records, but most of the identifying information of the parties could be redacted.
So anyone who is interested in determining if a specific behavior runs afoul of the law not just has to read through the law itself (which is, "thanks" to being a centuries old tradition, very hard to read) but also wade through court cases from in the worst case (very old laws dating to before the founding of the US) two countries.
Frankly, that system is braindead. It worked back when it was designed as the body of law was very small - but today it's infeasible for any single human without the aid of sophisticated research tools.
This made me pause. It seems to me that if something is not meant to inform decision making, then why does a record of it need to persist?
Sometimes people are unfairly ostracized for their past, but I think a policy of deleting records will do more harm than good.
Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should.
The only way to have a system like that is to keep records, permanently, but decision making is limited.
You are found Guilty or confirmed you continue to be Not Guilty.
In Scotland there was also the verdict "not proven" but that's no longer the case for new trials
At the heart of Western criminal law is the principle: You are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Western systems do not formally declare someone "innocent".
A trial can result in two outcomes: Guilty or Not Guilty (acquittal). Note that the latter does not mean the person was proven innocent.
Couldn't they just point to the court system's computer showing zero convictions? If it shows guilty verdicts then showing none is already proof there are none.
At some point, personal information becomes history, and we stop caring about protecting the owner's privacy. The only thing we can disagree on is how long that takes.
The UK does not have a statute of limitations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_Act_1980
Applies to England and Wales, I believe there are similar ones for Scotland and NI
As if "character" was some kind of immutable attribute you are born with.
Shame the same standards don’t apply to the people running the government.
That is a great recipe for systematic discrimination.
