L
EGACY
‘ Congratulations to the Cleveland Cavaliers who, on Sunday, won the city’s first major sports championship since 1964. It was a thrilling Game 7 of the NBA finals.
Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • June 22, 2016
Richmond & Hampton Roads
LEGACYNEWSPAPER.COM • FREE
“There’s lots of research showing that Americans draw assumptions that associate blackness with criminality.”
Study: ‘Ban the Box’ helps excons find work, but may hurt prospects for law-abiding blacks BRANDON ELLINGTON PATTERSON As a bipartisan consensus on the need for criminal justice reform has solidified in recent years, one of the changes advocates have pushed for is “banning the box”—that is, removing from job applications the box people must check if they have had a felony conviction. Ban-the-box laws don’t prevent employers from asking applicants about a criminal record, but rather delay the questioning until later in the process, after an applicant has made it past that first hurdle. The idea is that applicants
with criminal records can then get an honest opportunity for consideration, as opposed to being eliminated from the get-go. Ban the box has also been touted by civil rights groups as a way to reduce unemployment among young black men (who disproportionately have criminal records) and thereby to lessen the racial employment gap. Twenty-three states have passed ban-the-box laws that apply to public employers, while nine also apply the policy to private employers. Last November, President Obama directed federal agencies to remove the box from applications for federal gigs.
The study examined callback rates for fictitious applicants for about 15,000 entry-level jobs. A new study, however, suggests that while banning the box helps applicants with criminal records, it may actually hurt applicants of color who don’t have one. Conducted by Sonja Starr, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Amanda Agan, a professor of economics at Princeton, the study examined callback rates for about 15,000 job applications. The fictitious applicants were 21-22 years old, with similar educational backgrounds and employment histories. They sought
employment in actual low-skill, entry-level positions in a variety of industries at 4,300 business locations in New Jersey and New York, both before and after each state adopted its ban-the-box law in 2015. For the applications, the researchers used real names— selected using New Jersey and New York birth certificate records and data on race and name association— that were suggestive of one race or another. Before the ban-the-box laws were enacted, 39 percent of the employers in question asked about
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