StealThisSheen posted...
To be fair, depending what you were in jail for, it's absolutely an employer's business. If you were in jail for child pornography, for example, a day care or summer camp would probably like to know that info.
I think that's covered by the legal requirement to disclose your status on the various offender registries? Aren't you required to tell your neighbors or anyone who might employ you around kids about your offense?
That's baked into the sentence for that crime and makes it a bad example.
By and large, an employer should not have a right to ask you that on an application for employment. That's what "ban the box" is for. It's there to prevent outright discrimination against felons who have already served their sentence from being punished again.
But the examples of jail or house arrest or mental illness? Those... aren't of the scale and heinousness of what gets you put on an offender registry. It's not an applicable comparison.
Also, there's a difference between banning the box and banning background checks.