Don't forget who the biggest victims of background checks will be. Unemployable ex-cons. Anyone who's been convicted at any time in their life will have yet another door to employment shut in their face.
Maybe 10 or 20 years ago, New Zealand decided to ban anyone with a record of sexual offending from being a taxi driver. That sounds good and safe to the average Joe but one poor man, in his 50's I think, lost his job because he'd been convicted as a teenager of having sex with his then-underage girlfriend. They'd since been happily married and still were. Somehow that meant he was considered unsafe to drive people around in a taxi.
Background checks are a blunt and harsh tool to re-punish people for unrelated crimes.
>Maybe 10 or 20 years ago, New Zealand decided to ban anyone with a record of sexual offending from being a taxi driver. That sounds good and safe to the average Joe but one poor man, in his 50's I think, lost his job because he'd been convicted as a teenager of having sex with his then-underage girlfriend. They'd since been happily married and still were. Somehow that meant he was considered unsafe to drive people around in a taxi.
Is the tragedy here that there are taxi laws, or that there are bad sex laws?
There are lots of jobs besides jobs where strangers get into an automobile alone with you. I am against vindictive employment and voting restrictions on felons, and I'm open to having my mind changed by statistics like the recidivism rate, but I think if you commit a sex crime you don't get to be a taxi driver any more.
Maybe 10 or 20 years ago, New Zealand decided to ban anyone with a record of sexual offending from being a taxi driver. That sounds good and safe to the average Joe but one poor man, in his 50's I think, lost his job because he'd been convicted as a teenager of having sex with his then-underage girlfriend. They'd since been happily married and still were. Somehow that meant he was considered unsafe to drive people around in a taxi.
Background checks are a blunt and harsh tool to re-punish people for unrelated crimes.