Is Ban The Box A Good Idea?

Councilor Vop Osili has a proposal pending before the City-County Council, Proposal No. 4, which bars questions on job applications for government jobs concerning an applicant's past criminal convictions. The proposal, referred to as "Ban The Box," would extend to employers doing business with the city and those receiving local economic development incentives. Councilor Osili told members of the Public Safety Committee that he was very excited about his proposal. In committee, an amendment removed the requirement for city vendors and businesses that receive economic development incentives. The only saving in the proposal is that city and county agencies would still be allowed to perform criminal background checks after the person has been called in for an interview but before being offered a job.

Our neighboring state of Illinois enacted a similar law last year for the state of Illinois where the City of Chicago enacted Ban The Box back in 2006. The Sun-Times reports this morning that Gov. Pat Quinn has appointed a man as the state's head of the Department of Child and Family Services who was once convicted of stealing $9,000 from patients of a local mental health treatment center. The 61-year old Arthur Bishop was also forced to pay child support for a child he sired out of wedlock after a paternity action was filed against him in 2003. Bishop knew that he was the father of a daughter born in 1986, but despite his work in social services and at the state agency charged with protecting at-risk children, he refused to acknowledge the daughter. The daughter's mother obtained a child support order against Bishop, but the court wouldn't order back child support based on Bishop's contention that she had waited a long time before requesting support and had concealed that he was the daughter's father when she was first born, a fact disputed by the child's mother.

According to the Sun-Times, Bishop refused to grant an interview to the newspaper to discuss his past criminal conviction or his paternity action. A spokesperson for the Department said that she believed it was "inappropriate to raise decades-old issues that have long been resolved and have nothing to do with his performance as director." Are you kidding me? This guy runs the state agency in charge of child and family services and it's inappropriate to ask questions about him being a dead beat father and stealing from patients of a publicly-supported mental health center?  Remarkably, Bishop had listed the prior conviction on numerous job applications with DCFS and had been hired to very high-paying jobs despite his prior conviction for theft. He now earns $150,000 a year as the agency's director.

Mayor Greg Ballard support Osili's initiative. In the past, his administration has boasted of its overt efforts to hire ex-offenders, noting that at least 10% of all new hires for the city of Indianapolis are persons with prior criminal convictions. Don't be surprised when you find out that city employees are stealing, shaking down people for bribes and who knows what else when it goes out of its way to hire people with criminal pasts. There has been a plethora of cases in recent years of public employees in this state getting caught stealing money from their government employers or worse. It just seems to me that the trend is to reward people in this country at every turn for bad behavior--to the point where we are actually favoring people in public hiring decisions who have committed crimes over persons who have lived model lives. What's the disincentive to break the law if, as a matter of public policy, we're going to take the view that criminal law-breaking can't become a disqualifier?