Give ex-felons a ‘fair chance’ for decent jobs

“You make a mistake and there are no second chances, even if you want to do the right thing. Nobody will hire you once you have a record.”

That was the voice of a young man who spoke at a community meeting last week in West Palm Beach’s Gaines Park, in a neighborhood that’s been wracked this summer with gun violence — and which generally sees too much of crime, drugs and joblessness.

There are, we all know, no easy solutions to this problem. But it would certainly help if we could make it easier for people with criminal records to get jobs once they have served their prison time or probation.

As many as 1.5 million Floridians have felony convictions, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. For a great many, that criminal record is an insurmountable barrier to getting hired.

It’s easy to see how this happens. Say you’ve just been released from prison. Or that you got out of prison years, or even a couple of decades, ago. You need a job. You reach for an application.

And there on the first page comes the question: Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Figuring that you’d better be honest, you check the box. And the moment you do, you feel the door slamming shut. Chances are, that application is going straight to the reject pile.

Now imagine that the application doesn’t ask that question. The employer gets a look at your qualifications and might ask you in for an interview. Then, when they run a background check or ask about your criminal history, you have a chance to explain your past in context.

That’s the idea behind a campaign called “Ban the Box,” referring to that check-box. Sometimes called “Fair Chance,” the grass-roots movement started in San Francisco and Boston in the early 2000s. By now, more than 100 cities and counties have set the idea into policy for public employment.

So have 18 states — but not Florida, although several cities have enacted “ban the box” policies for public employment, according to the National Employment Law Project: Orlando, Jacksonville, Tampa, Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee and Daytona Beach. Only one town on the list is in South Florida: Pompano Beach.

When President Barack Obama toured a federal prison this summer — a presidential first — to show his support for criminal justice reform, he voiced support for “ban the box.” Some major private businesses are employing the concept without government prodding, including Wal-Mart, Target and the nation’s second-largest private company, the 100,000-employee Koch Industries. Yes, Koch brothers. On this issue, they and Obama are in agreement.

Palm Beach County government, with 6,000 employees, does ask applicants the felonyconviction question on its job applications. But a “yes” answer is an automatic disqualifier only for certain sensitive jobs, such as working with juveniles, said Wayne Condry, the county’s director of human resources. Otherwise, background checks aren’t made until later. For some jobs (senior care, public safety) that’s when a job offer is made. For most, it’s after they start working.

“We’ve hired people with felony convictions,” Condry told The Post Editorial Board. But he said the county is aware of the “chilling effect” the criminal-history question can have, and staff members are in “preliminary discussions” on whether further ban-the-box protections are needed.

At least 70 million Americans have criminal records that could show up in a background check, according to NELP. But the impact is hardly equal. In today’s America, black men have a 1 in 3 chance of being imprisoned at some point in life, according to The Sentencing Project. For Hispanic men, the odds are 1 in 6. (For white men, it’s 1 in 17.)

For these people, the future holds little but poverty — or a return to crime — if it does not offer a fair chance to join the workforce and earn an honest, dignified living.