The fundamental thing that the left refuses to understand is that human behavior is adaptive. People seek to achieve their own goals. Regulation is not a supreme power. Rather it's a context in which people operate. The left decided to "fix" the problems of criminals finding work by banning employers from asking about criminal records.
Not only was this a terrible idea that endangered the public, there was one really obvious problem with it. Employers would work around it in very obvious ways. If they couldn't ask potential employers about their criminal records, they would screen them in much broader ways.
In a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jennifer L. Doleac of the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and Benjamin Hansen of the University of Oregon looked at how the implementation of ban-the-box policies affected the probability of employment for young, low-skilled, black and Hispanic men. They found that ban-the-box policies decreased the probability of being employed by 5.1 percent for young, low-skilled black men, and 2.9 percent for young, low-skilled Hispanic men.
That’s because, they say, when employers cannot access an applicant’s criminal history, they instead discriminate more broadly against demographic groups that are more likely to have a criminal record. The paper indicated that this type of discrimination is especially prevalent in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, where there is a larger pool of non-black applicants to choose from. In the South, because such a large proportion of job applicants are black, the opportunity to discriminate is reduced, the paper finds. “There is rapidly-increasing evidence that [banning the box] has unintentionally done more harm than good when it comes to helping disadvantaged job-seekers find jobs,” they write.
Well of course. But the left doesn't care. It can even see this as advantageous because it gives it more license to intervene with more racial bias investigations. This will lead to its own adaptation, but if the left were capable of grasping that basic human dynamic the USSR would never have happened.
When employers have less information about an applicant, they discriminate against minorities, research suggests. For example, when employers are prevented from doing credit checks on potential employees, the likelihood of black applicants being hired is reduced by between 7 and 16 percent, one studyfound. When employers have more information, though, they are actually more likely to hire minorities. One study found that black employment rates actually increased, by between 7 and 30 percent, when employers require drug tests for employees. And another found that when firms conducted criminal background checks, the last hire was 37 percent more likely to be a black man.
Obama backed Ban the Box. Like the rest of his policies, it doesn't help black people. It hurts them.