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104 Iowa L. Rev. 1079 (2018-2019)
Do Ban-the-Box Laws Really Work

handle is hein.journals/ilr104 and id is 1107 raw text is: Do Ban-the-Box Laws Really Work? Dallan F Flake ABSTRACT: Ban-the-box laws, which delay an employer's inquiry into an applicant's criminal record until later in the hiring process, are gaining remarkable traction at the local, state, and even federal levels. But the assumption that employers will be more likely to hire ex-offenders if forced to evaluate their qualifications before discovering their criminal record has gone largely untested. Empirical uncertainty has given rise to various criticisms of ban-the-box laws, chiefly that they merely postpone the inevitable decision not to hire the ex-offender-often at considerable cost to both the employer and applicant-and, worse yet, that they may actually harm racial minorities by prompting employers to assume all minority applicants have a criminal record in light of their much higher arrest and incarceration rates, and eliminate them from consideration on that basis. This Article reports the findings of a field experiment that tests both of these criticisms. The experiment entailed applying to food-service job openings in Chicago, which bans the box in private employment, and Dallas, which does not, using a fictitious ex-offender applicant profile. One-third of the applications in each city used a black-sounding name, one-third used a Latino-sounding name, and the other third used a white-sounding name. Each application was tracked to determine whether it elicited an employer callback (i.e., a request for an interview or additional information). Multiple regression modeling was then used to compare callback differentials between cities and across races. The results refute the contention that ban-the-box laws do not increase employment opportunities for ex-offenders, as applicants were 27 % more likely to receive a callback in Chicago than in Dallas. The results likewise contradict the claim that banning the box harms racial minorities. * Associate Professor of Law, Claude W. Pettit College of Law, Ohio Northern University. I presented earlier versions of this Article at the 2017 University of Kentucky College of Law Developing Ideas Conference, the 2017 Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law, the 2018 Ohio Legal Scholars Workshop, and the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association. I would like to express my gratitude to participants at those conferences for their helpful comments on this project. I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Renata Forste for her expert assistance with the data analysis, to Dr. John Hoffman for his helpful input on the experimental design, and to Professors Richard Bales, Terry-Ann Craigie, Erica Goldberg, and Deidre Keller for their input on earlier drafts of this Article. I would also like to thank ONU Law for generously funding this project and William Salkin for his research assistance. 1079

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