To be fair, almost all of the young men I knew growing up (in an affluent chunk of society) engaged in what were then criminal activities. Almost nobody established a criminal record because everyone was wealthy enough to be insulated from law enforcement (they could do the criminal activities in parents' basements and college dorms).

Maybe part of the issue is that many non-harmful behaviors have been criminalized.

How many felons, or rather what classes of felony, make you think that they will embezzle money? And what percentage of jobs have embezzlement as an option?

Like, are you worried that the person caught with (felony amount of marijuana) is going to embezzle (any amount of money) from their employer if they are hired as a (fry cook)?

Now, if you're saying that hiring a white collar criminal as an auditor is obviously bad.

No, you can't.

The problem is that the criminal history prevents employment for life, not just for the few years while someone is getting back on their feet after jail.

For example, when I was in college, my fraternity paid our cook cash. He (the cook) always seemed to have side-hustles or was picking up odd cooking jobs.

After I got to know him for a few years, he told me that he was convicted approximately 20 years prior for cocaine distribution. He implied that he had a lot when he was caught. Then he told me he couldn't get a normal job because of his record.

My point is that, after a certain period of time with no recidivism, (maybe 5 years,) the criminal record should not be a barrier to general employment.

If we look at the issue through this lens it becomes obvious that when one feels like they don't belong to a society then there is little perceived value in playing by the rules since nobody else seems to be doing so.

This trap is especially easy to fall into when you are young.

There is a reasonable solution to this, and it's "ban the box" or "fair chance hiring" laws. These laws make it illegal to perform background checks prior to making a conditional offer. The best ones make companies provide substantive, written justification for turning someone down after a background check, provide avenues for appeal, and make the companies front the legal fees so it doesn't just turn into a game of Who Has The Most Money. They still allow employers to reject candidates for whom there are legitimate concerns. But they give candidates, as the name says, a fair chance.

https://www.nelp.org/publication/ban-the-box-fair-chance-hir...

A 2020 study by economist Evan K. Rose found that Ban the Box had negligible effects on ex-offenders' labor market outcomes.[36]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_the_Box#:~:text=Ban%20th....

2) Ban the Box didn't prevent criminal background checks, it just pushed them to the end of the hiring process. So it's unsurprising that it didn't have a significant effect.

You can, actually. Businesses exist at the pleasure of the state and the state can fix these problems. Unfortunately, we've been run by right-wing enablers and crooks (in the sense of unethical rule-breakers, not people with criminal records) for so long, we've forgotten that the left has been proposing workable solutions to these problems for decades.

Unless physical safety is at risk, nothing in a person's past should ever be made a legal reason to deny someone a job. If companies want to stay independent, they should be decent. Otherwise, nationalize them and run them as utilities.

Okay, but we've had a Democratic Senate for 10 of the last 16 years and a democratic president 9 of the last 13 years.