• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    1 month ago

    I wasn’t trying to say anything against people who do those jobs or that they shouldn’t be paid. I was saying that having a felony will severely constrain your options going forward in life changing fashion.

    That outcome, and also the mistreatment financial and otherwise of the people doing those jobs, are two things we gotta fix.

    • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
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      1 month ago

      Is this an American thing? I (French) have never been asked for my police record when applying for a non-government job. Employers don’t check for this.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        1 month ago

        In America it is almost a universal practice. If you have a criminal record, you might or might not have problems; if you have a felony, you’re fucked for almost every job.

        If you want to learn a depressing amount about it, I have heard that the book “The New Jim Crow” makes a pretty compelling argument that the systems of criminal conviction, credit, educational qualifications, rent, bank loans, probation and parole, and what-have-you, have functionally brought back a good amount of the machinery of segregation into the modern era, because it creates effectively a two-tier system with most people who started out poor and a huge majority of minorities stuck into the second system.

    • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I believe you, my comment is just saying that the system is fucked at the punitive way society acts after time served and a lack of rehabilitation while serving time does nothing for the person incarcerated, those harmed by the initial crime, and definitely not society as a whole. The only people who benefit are for profit prisons and the judges getting kickbacks from sentencing.