Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Employers who perform background checks hire more black workers

National Instant Criminal Background Check System

Federal Bureau of Investigation OMB NO. 1110-0026 National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) Enrollment / E-Check Enrollment		A study in the Journal of Law and Economics finds that employers who choose to perform criminal background checks end up hiring more black workers – especially black men. Employers who systematically check criminal background during the hiring process are 8.4 percentage points more likely to have hired a black applicant into their most recently filled position.

"The results are consistent with the proposition that in the absence of a criminal background check, employers use race to infer past criminal activity, especially employers with a strong stated aversion to hiring ex-offenders,"
write Harry J. Holzer (Georgetown Public Policy Institute), Steven Raphael (University of California, Berkeley), and Michael A. Stoll (University of California, Los Angeles).

Using a multi-city survey of more than 3,000 establishments in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles, the researchers found that the employers who are most averse to hiring ex-offenders were also the most likely to statistically discriminate. Those who perform criminal background checks are more likely to hire black applicants than those who do not, even when adjusting for proximity to black residential neighborhoods and proportion of black applicants.

"Calls to seal criminal history records fail to take into account this unintended consequence," write the authors. "The results of this study suggest that curtailing access to criminal history records may actually harm more people than it helps and aggravate racial difference in labor market outcomes."

This bias also extends to other stigmatized groups, specifically, workers with gaps in their employment history, the researchers found. Currently twenty-three state have some form of public access or freedom-of-information statutes pertaining to criminal history. Nearly all make a distinction between arrest records and conviction records and are generally less likely to disseminate information on arrests.
###

Holzer, Harry J. , Steven Raphael, and Michael A. Stoll, "Perceived Criminality, Criminal Background Checks, and the Racial Hiring Practices of Employers." Journal of Law and Economics: 49:2.

Contact: Suzanne Wu swu@press.uchicago.edu 773-834-0386 University of Chicago Press Journals

posted by sookietex at 4:14 PM

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home



From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection
From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909 presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.




View My Stats

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.

African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920

African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920

This collection consists of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920. The collection includes many songs from the heyday of antebellum black face minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period.

Post-Civil War music reflects the problems of Reconstruction and the beginnings of urbanization and the northern migration of African Americans. African-American popular composers include James Bland, Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, James Reese Europe, and Will Marion Cook.