History
Statistical risk assessment and the science of prediction were first developed and refined in this industry.
Insurance
Though overt mentions of race have long been removed from crime prediction tools, critics say criminal history operates as a...
Proxy
This former prisoner-led grassroots campaign swept the nation in the early 2000s, demanding an end to the stigma and discrimination associated with a criminal record.
Ban the Box
Alphonse Bertillon's system of criminal identification sought to capture a body’s details through dozens of measurements. Which body part, in his view, held especially unique qualities?
Ears!
On what basic premise is exclusion on the basis of criminal record accepted as legitimate?
Someone who has been convicted of a crime poses a future risk.
While a “right to know” has dominated US policy on access to criminal records since the 1970s, experts believe the public interest is shifting back to an emphasis on...
Privacy
The British scientist (Francis Galton) who aimed to develop criminal prediction as a science was cousin to which famous evolutionary biologist?
Charles Darwin
Criminal record discrimination is often justified by concerns about future criminal behavior, but scholars have shown something deeper and more fundamental at work.
Stigma
A series of assaults in the mid 2010s led Uber to begin running continual background checks on all drivers. Yet most of the drivers who caused harm did not have criminal records, thus checks would not have prevented the harm. What do people count on background checks to provide?
Assurance that the bad guys have been weeded out.
Many US states passed punitive felon disenfranchisement laws during this period in US history.
Reconstruction/post-Civil War and through the 1870s
Employers’ and landlords’ fear of being sued under this legal doctrine has been a major driver of increased background screening in recent years.
Negligent hiring/negligent landlording
Whereas we tend to imagine that change is made through direct appeal to power holders, a power-mapping approach encourages us to think about how to persuade...
People whose opinions power-holders value
Efforts to anticipate and predict future crime risk were originally motivated by reformers seeking to improve outcomes in what part of the criminal legal system?
Parole
Risk assessment tools that rely on prior criminal history as a factor tend to aggravate racial disparities in the criminal legal system. Why is this the case?
Because racialized people are more often arrested and convicted, even for crimes in which their rates of participation are similar.
Legal scholars have argued that the field of HR management is more exclusionary than the law requires, not because the law is ambiguous, but because of “structured uncertainty.” Describe the difference.
A: Whereas ambiguity describes a fuzziness, the problem of structured uncertainty is that the law does not spell out how to achieve its standard of reasonable care, leaving it up to case by case judgement after the fact.