A common employment application question may soon become a thing of the past in Massachusetts, as the House voted 138 to 17 to pass legislation banning employment applications from inquiring into criminal history, and taking a stand to “ban the box” as activists have advocated for years. Briefly, the House approved a provision that would seal records of felony convictions, making them unavailable to potential employers, after 10 years. The provision would also seal records of misdemeanor convictions after 5 years. In addition, the House voted to “ban the box,” adding a provision that would ban employers from including questions in their job application forms about a person’s criminal background.
But there are some loop holes. First, records for some crimes, such as murder and manslaughter, would never be sealed from a criminal background (or CORI) check under this House bill. Second, while employers will not be able to ask about criminal records on application forms, they will be permitted to ask during a job interview.
Whether this is a good idea remains to be seen. People in Massachusetts still remember the Christa??Worthington case, where the estate of a woman murdered by a trash collector sued the trash collection company for failing to conduct criminal background checks that would have disclosed the collector’s violent past. While reintegration of convicts back into productive society can serve to reduce crime generally, hiring an individual with a violent past can serve to increase an employer’s potential liability, not to mention the risk to unsuspecting customers and other members of the public.
The state’s Senate passed a similar version of the bill with a few variations, such as including sex crimes among the list of crimes exempted from the sealed record requirement. That said, a bill with these general provisions will likely be passed into law soon, and only time will tell whether society will be better off when it decides to “ban the box.”
Christopher Vrountas, Chair of the Employment Counseling and Litigation Practice Group, contributed this entry.
