64% of unemployed men in their 30s have criminal records, a barrier to landing a job
More than half of unemployed men in their 30s have criminal records — a dynamic with implications for hiring practices and ongoing challenges finding workers during the pandemic-era labor crunch, according to research published by economists at RAND Corp.
About 6% of men at age 35 are unemployed, according to the study. By that age, 64% of those jobless males had been arrested as adults. Forty-six percent had been convicted of a crime, and 27% had been incarcerated.
The study is the first to estimate the prevalence of a criminal record among the unemployed population, according to RAND.
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Many of these individuals have had difficulty finding employment despite arrests and convictions that happened years earlier, which suggests the stigma of a criminal record hurts job seekers for years, according to Shawn Bushway, lead author of the study and a senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.
That stigma hurts an applicant's chances and compounds issues such as lower levels of education that already diminish their likelihood of success, he said.
«These folks often… have an additional barrier unrelated to job skill: the ability to get a job if there's a background check,» said Bushway, who's also a professor of public administration and policy at the State University of New York at Albany.
«If you're an employer and have a background check that's very restrictive, you're going to not hire a lot of people,» he added.
Meanwhile, employers have had a tough time finding workers
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