Study suggests that background checks boost Black employment
(forbes.com) As more and more employers conduct criminal background checks on applicants, critics have charged that such screening is unfair to blacks, who are more likely to have criminal records.
But a new study published in The Journal of Law and Economics argues just the opposite. In fact, employers who perform criminal background checks “are in general more likely to hire African-Americans,†say the authors, Harry J. Holzer of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael A. Stoll of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Why might this be so? Because in the absence of concrete information, employers tend to use race as a proxy for criminality. Hiring managers may feel that their bias is justified by the numbers: While about 9% of all American men will spend some time in state or federal prisons, the figure is 4% for white men, 16% for Hispanic men and 28% for black men.
We tend to think of racial discrimination as hard to root out, but the study suggests that in employment, at least, sharing information on criminal backgrounds can have a big impact. (more…)
