Redemption in the face of stale criminal records used in background checks

As information technology has increased the accessibility of criminal-history records, and concern for negligent-hiring lawsuits has grown, criminal background checking has become an important part of the hiring process for most employers. As a result, there is a growing concern that a large number of individuals are handicapped in finding employment because of a stale criminal-history record.;This dissertation addresses the issue of "redemption," which I define as the process of finally ignoring a stale record and focuses on "redemption time," which is a measurement of how long it takes for an individual with a prior criminal record and no subsequent criminal involvement to be of no greater risk than appropriate benchmarks. The dissertation also provides an understanding of how the time to redemption relates to factors such as age at the prior event, the type of crime committed, and race; factors that are not only important in criminological research, but also relevant in the practice of background checking.;Chapter 2 deals with the measurements and estimation of redemption times. I propose two risk benchmarks against which the recidivism risk of those with a criminal record can be tested. One such benchmark represents the risk of arrest for similar members of the general population, and the other represents that for those who have never acquired a criminal record. The chapter introduces the primary dataset that is used in the dissertation, which is the arrest-history records of individuals who were arrested for the first time in 1980 in New York State. It discusses approaches to estimating redemption times and presents the resulting estimates by age at first arrest and the crime type of the first arrest. Finally, the chapter discusses the possibility of adjustments to the estimates due to the presence of out-of-state arrests and the mortality experience of arrestees.;Chapter 3 explores the issue of robustness of redemption time estimates. Additional data from 1985 and 1990 sampling years in New York as well as data from two additional states, Florida and Illinois, are used to test the sensitivity of the 1980 New York results to these alternative data. The results show that the redemption time estimates are reasonably robust across sampling years and states, and the range of estimates is presented to summarize the results.;Chapter 4 addresses the relationship between race and longer-term recidivism risk, which is relevant to the concern of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that criminal background checks have a disparate impact on minorities. The results show that 1) the racial rearrest-risk ratio is smaller than the arrest-prevalence ratio, and 2) the rearrest-risk ratio declines over time, so that the recidivism risk of blacks approaches the risk of whites over time.;Chapter 5 examines the relationship between the crime type of the first crime event and the crime type of a possible second arrest. This recognizes that employers are concerned mostly about particular types of offense that their employees may commit, based on the nature of the job position. The results of analysis based on crime-switch matrices and crime type-specific hazards suggest that in general the type of prior crime tends to be related to a higher risk of rearrest for the same crime.;Chapter 6 discusses how the findings can help shape policies about the use and the distribution of criminal-history records, and Chapter 7 concludes this dissertation and discusses future work, particularly the consideration of multiple prior arrests, that can help move the research on redemption forward. This dissertation contributes to the criminology literature by examining the patterns and consequences of longer-term recidivism risk, which have not been addressed by prior studies on recidivism. This dissertation also contributes to the discussion of policies that are intended to deal with the consequences of widespread background checking, by providing the first explicit empirical estimates of redemption times and by addressing how that information can be used to generate evidence-based public policies related to redemption.