I think the cost has some influence over employers making a decision to hire an ex-con. If a store can hire someone for minimum wage without any conviction records, why would they hire someone with conviction records when they can't pay any lower than the minimum wage?
You're assuming that someone with a conviction is worse than someone without. One point in the article is that you don't know! The person who has no conviction might not have been caught.
Look at the sociopaths and murderers who sometimes have millions or billions, and are in control of thousands of jobs. They're just smarter about getting away with things.
Furthermore, you suggest that if only we didn't have those strangling minimum wage laws, businesses would hire convicts for less than minimum wage. But sticking ex-cons into wage slavery is exactly the opposite of what the business described wants! They want to maximize their positive impact on their community, not just get out the most from their employees for the least investment.
>why would they hire someone with conviction records when they can't pay any lower than the minimum wage?
Even at the lowest level, not all employees are equally productive. And even at the lowest level, there's something to be said for "loyalty" - for the employee genuinely trying to act in the best interest of the company.
Money is just one way these sorts of behaviors can be incented.
I like to give the example of the choice of hiring a citizen vs. hiring a H1B worker.
Even if the company does pay them the same as a citizen, the employer has rather more leverage over the H1B, as if the H1B gets fired, they've got two weeks to find another employer that can sponsor their visa, or to get their shit together and get out of the country.
There's the positive side of that, too; If you take a person that has never been given a chance and give them a chance, well, there's a chance they will feel grateful, and attempt to return the favor... whereas if you hire someone who gets five or six phone calls from recruiters every day? You probably aren't going to get as much gratitude from that person.
You're assuming that a conviction record is the only variable. Chances are, you're not going to have 2 applicants who are otherwise identical save for a felony conviction (the fact that one of them has a felony conviction almost guarantees there's probably a lot of other differences between them as well).
felony conviction almost guarantees there's probably a lot of other differences
Do you have some statistics you'd like to share? Otherwise this seems like the exact bias that silently justifies relegating felons to sub-citizenship.
I wasn't implying that the differences were negative, only that it's probably a fair assumption that the life experience of someone incarcerated is going to be different from someone who never has been.
