NEWS & MEDIA

President Obama on Monday announced a new order to reduce potential discrimination against former convicts in the hiring process for federal government employees.

It is a step towards what many criminal justice reformers call “ban the box” – the effort to eliminate requirements that job applicants check a box on their applications if they have a criminal record.

While the rule was once seen as a common sense way for employers to screen for criminal backgrounds, it has been increasingly criticized as a hurdle that fosters employment discrimination against former inmates, regardless of the severity of their offense or how long ago it occurred. Banning the box delays when employers learn of an applicant’s record.

The U.S. is the most incarcerated country in the world. The past 40 years of criminal justice policy have yielded crowded prisons and broken lives. The sentences have gotten longer and harsher, and too often we’ve chosen criminalization and incarceration over investment in our communities and human development. As a result of these policies, nearly 1 in 3 Americans have a criminal record that shows up on a routine background check.

Workers remain the backbone of our nation, but for the about 70 million Americans with a criminal record, finding employment can be especially difficult. These individuals are required to check a box that immediately disqualifies them from consideration, before even an interview or a background check, permanently shutting them out of the workforce. The “Ban the Box” campaign, led in large part by formerly incarcerated people and their families, aims to give people with criminal records a fair shot at a second chance.

John Legend knows the value of a great education.

“I was from a pretty small blue-collar town in Ohio, and it if it weren’t for great teachers and counselors and people who really cared about me at my school, I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today,” says Legend, who calls education “my connection to the world.”

Creativity in the classroom

Now the nine-time Grammy Award winner, who also has an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, the BET Award for Best New Artist and the special Starlight Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame, is working to inspire teachers and students to be creative inside and outside the classroom.

“I always enjoyed the teachers the most that had interesting projects for us: things that connected the curriculum to our life experience; things that inspired our creativity; things that allowed us to be individuals and not just memorize things,” says Legend, who liked math, history and social studies as a student and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied English and African-American literature.

This past Thursday, President Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison; just a few days earlier, he commuted the sentences of 46 low-level drug offenders. Both are steps forward in transforming our wrong-headed criminal justice system, but they are just that: steps. Our state and local governments must follow the president’s lead and transform our destructive “War on Drugs” into the public-health campaign it always should have been.

America, as more and more people are starting to realize, is indecently over-incarcerated. We lock up far more people per capita than any nation even close to our size: roughly 2.4 million men, women, and children. The financial toll of mass incarceration is irresponsible; the human toll is unconscionable.