Isat staring at my computer screen, hitting refresh every few minutes to check for an incoming email from the company I’d interviewed with a few days prior. It was January 2023, and I was one of the thousands of tech workers laid off right before the holidays due to a slagging economy.
So many people across the country were, and many still are, in the same shoes. LinkedIn profiles became colorfully decorated with green, ominous “Open to Work” banners, indicating they had met the same fate. But there was one major difference between me and most of those people: I have a felony on my record from over 10 years ago, something that can—and does—stop an employer in their tracks when considering me for a position.
In April, KUTV reported there are over 800,000 Utahns who have a criminal background or conviction on their record. That’s one in four people, and 60 percent of them are searching for employment opportunities. Unemployment of people with criminal records is estimated to cost the United States economy up to $87 billion each year, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Half of all children in the United States have a parent with a criminal record, according to the Clean Slate Initiative, a bipartisan national movement to automate the clearing of criminal records.
A criminal record of any kind—even one that is a decade old like mine—can make life incredibly hard. Finding housing can feel impossible because most...
A woman saw her jail time extended for falsely accusing ten men of rape, significantly impacting lives A woman from Farnworth, Bolton, has faced severe consequences after being convicted of making...