When Should An Employer No Longer Be Concerned About A Prospective Employee’s Criminal Record?

An on-going study funded by the National Institute of Justice attempts to actuarially estimate when a person with a criminal record is “redeemed” for employment purposes, or at no greater risk of committing another crime than others of the same age.

To do so, researchers examined criminal records for 88,000 people arrested for the first time in New York in 1980 and their criminal history for the following 25 years. They attempted to determine when their risk of recidivism is no greater than for people of the same age (1) in the general population or (2) who were never arrested. They considered the “hazard rate,” which is the probability over time that someone who has not been arrested will be. For a person previously arrested, the hazard rate declines the longer he or she goes without a subsequent arrest.

Among the preliminary May 2009 results, researchers found that the hazard rate for people 18 years old when first arrested for:

1. robbery, declined to the same level as the arrest rate for the general population of same aged individuals 7.7 years after the 1980 arrest, after which the probability that the person would commit another crime was less that the probability of other 26 year olds in the general population;
2. burglary, declined to the same rate as the general population after 3.8 years; and
3. aggravated assault, declined to the same rate as the general population after 4.3 years.

For these crimes, they found that the younger the offender at the time of the first arrest, the longer it took for the hazard rate to decline to the rate of the general population.

Researchers plan to compare their results with data from other times and places, attempt to examine the types of second arrests that people have, and look to see if people who appear to have no prior arrests in the New York data had prior arrests in other states.