> It's not your job as an employer or hiring manager to judge someone's mistakes, only their aptitude to perform a job.
I have no horse in this race, so my opinion is mostly out of ignorance, but I believe that this formulation isn't entirely correct. In a sense employers should be allowed to make stupid decisions; the problem is when too many employers make correlated decisions leaving out a innocent chunk of the population.
If few employers do background checks that ex-convicts have easy to access alternatives it is not a problem, if enough employers use that a new social class of unemployable people is created it becomes a serious problem.
I like the idea of forbidding discrimination based on unrelated offences, but am not particularly informed on the topic.
Bottom line is people are absolutely horrible to each other if they're given even the slightest pretense. It's just a disgusting facet of our psyche, I guess. Those convicted of a crime are condemned to continued punishment by anybody who cares to look at their record, long after they've repaid any debts. I remember asking a police officer when I was in my early 20's why every time I handed my Id to an officer I was searched, arrested, or charged with something. She replied simply, "Because you have a yellow stripe painted down your back."
The fact I had an outstanding warrant for a speeding ticket in another state and doing stupid and illegal things aside, once you have a record it is very hard to escape it. Most are relegated to menial minimum wage jobs. I was lucky, I have a social safety net, confidence, I knew I could get around it. Decided to focus my studies on something so specialized an employer wouldn't try looking for reasons not to hire me. I don't think anybody has actually checked my record since I graduated. The only applications I've been handed were basically a token for HR and I simply mark, "No" under the, "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" question. Because it doesn't matter. It should be illegal for anybody to access resolved criminal records if they don't have a direct reason pertaining to the safety or security of others. It's not your job as an employer or hiring manager to judge someone's mistakes, only their aptitude to perform a job.