Felons: The Cool New Protected Class. Or, You Really Needed That Job, But They Had to Give it to a Felon.

This ban the box movement is the hot new thing with the left and cropping up all over the country in places they run, like Durham.

The idea is that you can’t ask ex-cons if they have a criminal record when they apply for a job, or can only ask if they have certain convictions. Durham’s is a slightly watered-down version of this where they don’t look at criminal convictions until the end of the hiring process. (What Durham is clearly doing is getting a foot in the door for a full-out ban the box ordinance.)

This is a disaster waiting to happen on several levels. Do you want your teenage daughter unknowingly working behind the counter at your local ice cream shop after dark with a man who has a history of beating women within an inch of their lives if that history extends back longer than three years ago, past the point where you are allowed to check in many locales that have passed this?

 Too bad. There is also another possibility, that ex-cons with a long history of theft but no real desire for a $10 an hour job, people who before would have just returned to their former criminal occupation upon release from prison, will now apply for jobs at places they want to shake down knowing that they could be hired. In otherwords, criminals deliberately targeting companies they want to steal from in the hiring process.

I actually had a professor who was a guest on my show once tell me where this could eventually lead — to something like protected class status for convicted criminals. First, businesses get sued if they “discriminate” against someone in the hiring process just because they have a record of assaulting women or stealing.

That builds a nice legal foundation for the eventual step two, she said, which would be anti-discrimination laws and lawsuits targeted at mid-to-large sized companies where NO felons are employed. For discrimination against felons. The left might call this “felon under-representation.”

What would the political ad for that look like? I can already hear the script … “You really needed that job, but they had to give it to a convicted felon.”