That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.
They are only available for vulnerable sectors, you can't ask for one as a convenience store owner vetting a cashier. But if you are employing child care workers in a daycare, you can get them.
This approach balances the need for public safety against the ex-con's need to integrate back into society.
[1] https://rcmp.ca/en/criminal-records/criminal-record-checks/v...
You're over-thinking it, trying to solve for a problem that doesn't exist. No one has a "right" to work for me. There's plenty of roles that accept ex-cons and orgs that actively hire them.
True, but surely your rights to know everything about someone who would work for you also has limits.
So I likewise, require to know everything about you, including things that are none of my business but I just think they are my business and that's what matters. I'll make that call myself.
Note you are free to advertise hiring prior offenders.
You can also look up business ownership details and see if they have criminal records as well.
Why only criminal records? There is a huge amount of potentially useful information about everyone that goes way beyond criminal records.
Well, no ; that's not up to you. While you may be interested in this information, the government also has a responsibility to protect the subject of that information.
The tradeoff was maintained by making the information available, but not without friction. That tradeoff is being shattered by third parties changing the amount of friction required to get the information. Logically, the government reacts by removing the information. It's not as good as it used to be, but it's better than the alternative.
This is why this needs to be regulated.
I also think someone who has suffered a false accusation of that magnitude and fought to be exonerated shouldn’t be forced to suffer further.
Thanks, but I don't want to have violent people working as taxi drivers, pdf files in childcare and fraudsters in the banking system. Especially if somebody decided to not take this information into account.
Good conduct certificates are there for a reason -- you ask the faceless bureaucrat to give you one for the narrow purpose and it's a binary result that you bring back to the employer.
Please don't unnecessarily censor yourself for the benefit of large social media companies.
We can say pedophile here. We should be able to say pedophile anywhere. Pre-compliance to censorship is far worse than speaking plainly about these things, especially if you are using a homophone to mean the same thing.
Maybe I misunderstand your meaning.
This made me pause. It seems to me that if something is not meant to inform decision making, then why does a record of it need to persist?
Sometimes people are unfairly ostracized for their past, but I think a policy of deleting records will do more harm than good.
Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should.
The only way to have a system like that is to keep records, permanently, but decision making is limited.
Should it though? You can buy a piece of real estate without living there, e.g. because it's a rental property, or maybe the school is announced to be shutting down even though it hasn't yet. And in general this should have nothing to do with the bank; why should they care that somebody wants to buy a house they're not allowed to be in?
Stop trying to get corporations to be the police. They're stupendously bad at it and it deprives people of the recourse they would have if the government was making the same mistake directly.
To me any other viewpoint inevitably leads to abuse of one group or class or subset of society or another. If they are legally allowed to discriminate in some ways, they will seek to discriminate in others, both in trying to influence law changes to their benefit and in skirting the law when it is convenient and profitable.
I'm not sure we can write that much more COBOL.
At the heart of Western criminal law is the principle: You are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Western systems do not formally declare someone "innocent".
A trial can result in two outcomes: Guilty or Not Guilty (acquittal). Note that the latter does not mean the person was proven innocent.
Couldn't they just point to the court system's computer showing zero convictions? If it shows guilty verdicts then showing none is already proof there are none.
You are found Guilty or confirmed you continue to be Not Guilty.
In Scotland there was also the verdict "not proven" but that's no longer the case for new trials
At some point, personal information becomes history, and we stop caring about protecting the owner's privacy. The only thing we can disagree on is how long that takes.
The UK does not have a statute of limitations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_Act_1980
Applies to England and Wales, I believe there are similar ones for Scotland and NI
As if "character" was some kind of immutable attribute you are born with.
If you can know the character of individual people, you have less reason to discriminate against those from statistically higher criminal communities.
That is a great recipe for systematic discrimination.
Indeed. And as far as I know, "courts" is not an alternative spelling of "AI".
I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at least not with a trivial index. File the court judgement and other documentation under a case number, ban reindexing by third parties (AI scrapers, "background check" services) entirely. That way, anyone interested can still go and review court judgements for glaring issues, but a "pissed on a patrol car" conviction won't hinder that person's employment perspectives forever.
In Germany for example, we have something called the Führungszeugnis - a certificate by the government showing that you haven't been convicted of a crime that warranted more than three months of imprisonment or the equivalent in monthly earning as a financial fine. Most employers don't even request that, only employers in security-sensitive environments, public service or anything to do with children (the latter get a certificate also including a bunch of sex pest crimes in the query).
The appellate court records would contain information from the trial court records, but most of the identifying information of the parties could be redacted.
So anyone who is interested in determining if a specific behavior runs afoul of the law not just has to read through the law itself (which is, "thanks" to being a centuries old tradition, very hard to read) but also wade through court cases from in the worst case (very old laws dating to before the founding of the US) two countries.
Frankly, that system is braindead. It worked back when it was designed as the body of law was very small - but today it's infeasible for any single human without the aid of sophisticated research tools.
The premise here is, during an investigation, a suspect might have priors, might have digital evidence, might have edge connections to the case. Use the platform and AI to find them, if they exist.
What it doesn’t do: “Check this video and see if this person is breaking the law”.
What it does do: “Analyze this persons photos and track their movements, see if they intersect with Suspect B, or if suspect B shows up in any photos or video.”
It does a lot more than that but you get the idea…
The interpretation of the law is up to the courts. The enforcement of it is up to the executive. The concept of the law is up to Congress. That’s how this is supposed to work.