Ban the Box (BTB) laws are an anti-discrimination policy intended to promote employment for persons with criminal records. However, research on law and organizations shows that firms often fail to comply with legal directives or engage in symbolic compliance that fails to alter day-to-day business practices. We consider whether BTB contributed to attitudinal or behavioral shifts among hiring managers and changes in job applications. We analyze a unique set of in-depth interviews (N = 30) and entry-level job applications (N = 305) collected from the same workplaces in 2008 and 2016, assessing the impact of state BTB legislation. We find: (1) that one in five organizations were noncompliant, with noncompliance twice as likely among employers who discriminated against applicants with criminal records pre-BTB and that widespread lack of knowledge and lack of enforcement of BTB appears to affect noncompliance; (2) organizations maintained considerable continuity in hiring practices and attitudes between 2008 and 2016, regardless of personnel changes and statewide implementation of BTB; and (3) post-BTB, strong warnings about criminal background checks at later stages of the hiring process emerged as an alternative source of gatekeeping. These findings contribute to the law and organizations literature by highlighting the importance of enforcement and limits of law for combating discrimination.
To date, most criminal justice research on COVID-19 has examined the rapid spread within prisons. We shift the focus to reentry via in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals in central Ohio, specifically focusing on how criminal justice contact affected the pandemic experience. In doing so, we use the experience of the pandemic to build upon criminological theories regarding surveillance, including both classic theories on surveillance during incarceration as well as more recent scholarship on community surveillance, carceral citizenship, and institutional avoidance. Three findings emerged. First, participants felt that the total institution of prison “prepared” them for similar experiences such as pandemic-related isolation. Second, shifts in community supervision formatting, such as those forced by the pandemic, lessened the coercive nature of community supervision, expressed by participants as an increase in autonomy. Third, establishment of institutional connections while incarcerated alleviated institutional avoidance resulting from hyper-surveillance, specifically in the domain of healthcare, which is critical when a public health crisis strikes. While the COVID-19 pandemic affected all, this article highlights how theories of surveillance inform unique aspects of the pandemic for formerly incarcerated individuals, while providing pathways forward for reducing the impact of surveillance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.