By Jeff Parrott
South Bend Tribune
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Indiana has become the first state in the nation to ensure that employers can ask job seekers about their criminal histories when they fill out applications.
Over the past decade, so-called “Ban the Box” laws have grown in popularity as an effort to help ex-offenders re-enter society and stay out of prison. They prohibit employers from requiring applicants to check the box on applications asking whether they have been convicted of a crime. Such laws seek to establish an environment in which employers can still learn that information before making a hiring decision, but the disclosure comes later in the process so that the ex-offender can at least land an interview.
Indiana’s law, which the General Assembly passed this year and which took effect Saturday, isn’t sitting well with South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. In 2015 he had the question removed from applications for city government jobs.
City of Mishawaka government job applications also don’t contain the box, while St. Joseph County government job applications do, asking applicants if they’ve been convicted of a felony or misdemeanor that has not been expunged by a court, while noting, "(conviction will not necessarily disqualify an applicant from employment).”
Buttigieg said the city has “worked with a lot of ex-offenders who’ve gone on to make huge contributions.”
“If we want people to be able to put their lives back together, to be at work instead of going back into the criminal justice system, we should take away unnecessary barriers to employment,” he said.
Still, he said he’s been reluctant to dictate hiring practices of private sector employers, as the city of Indianapolis did with a 2014 ordinance that affects all employers in the city.
But Buttigieg said he “wouldn’t have ruled it out” and resents the new law’s intrusion on local control.
He added that he didn’t understand why Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, on the same day that he signed the bill into law this spring, also issued an executive order banning the box for state jobs.
“I’m not sure why they think this is best handled out of Indianapolis,” Buttigieg said. “It’s part of a continuing pattern of the state taking flexibility away from local government.”
In 2015, then South Bend Common Council member Valerie Schey, working with ex-offender advocate Cheryl Ashe, proposed an ordinance that would have given preference on property tax abatements to employers whose job applications didn’t contain the box. A council committee unanimously voted to pass it on to the full council with a favorable recommendation, but the council later realized that it could legally only make changes to the city’s tax abatement ordinance in even-numbered years, Ashe said.
She initially planned to try again in 2016, but ultimately decided against it after reading multiple research studies finding that Ban the Box laws were actually resulting in discrimination against black male job applicants. Employers in the Ban the Box cities and states, lacking information about criminal histories on applications, were weeding out applicants they believed were black, and therefore more likely to be ex-offenders, based on their names and addresses.
For example, multiple studies have found that an applicant with a name such as “Tyrone” or “Tyrell,” or who lived in a part of town known to be inhabited mostly by blacks, would be less likely to receive an interview in Ban the Box localities, said Ashe, who is black. The studies have found that white men with criminal records in Ban the Box states and cities are more likely to be hired than black men without criminal records.
“I’m still trying to decide if I want to push this again or not,” Ashe said. “It’s hard to make a decision because the research is mixed.”
Ashe noted that she’s recently had some success helping ex-offenders find jobs in Elkhart County, where the booming recreational vehicle industry has factories struggling to find workers.
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©2017 the South Bend Tribune (South Bend, Ind.)