Christine M. Flowers: 'Ban the box' law is a con on Philadelphia

SO THE City of Brotherly Love has decided to extend that love even further.

Our fair metropolis is going to prevent employers from asking about a person's criminal history before first interviewing him for a job.

So please line up, rapists, embezzlers and car thieves: Here's your opportunity!

And you have to thank Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller, who was able to convince her colleagues on City Council that it's discriminatory to ask an ex-felon if, in fact, he is an ex-felon before inviting him in to discuss whether to put him on the payroll.

Mayor Nutter agreed, and signed the "Ban the Box" legislation into effect this week.

And it's not only city employers that have to comply. Private agencies that do business in Philadelphia are also required to wear those legislative blinders, at least until after that first interview.

Fortunately, as a favor to the vast majority of the public who think that a person's propensity for violating the law is a legitimate public-safety issue, the regulation will not apply to criminal justice agencies like the police and prisons.

SO WHEN the prospective cadet is asked what he was doing between 1997 and 2007, he'll have to truthfully say: "Ten to 20, with time off for good behavior."

Other employers are not so fortunate.

The reasoning behind the law is to give ex-offenders an opportunity to remake their lives. A letter-writer in this paper was complaining the other day about how difficult it was to find employment once his criminal record was revealed.

But while I understand his plight (at least to some degree, since I don't know what crime he actually committed), my sympathies lie with the employer who has to waste valuable time and energy on a candidate who violated the law, when there are hundreds of equally qualified, law-abiding citizens out there who deserve consideration.

When you decide to break the law, you give up your right to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Once you have shown your propensity for lawlessness, you go to the back of the line behind people who would never consider living outside of the system. It doesn't mean that you have to wear a Scarlet "C" for convict. And you might very well have reformed, and even developed valuable skills that benefit an employer.

But between two people with the same qualifications, an employer has the right to choose from the get-go the one who never thought about lifting some merchandise, beating his wife, smoking some weed or forging a few checks.

Of course, giving someone an interview doesn't mean he gets the job. The employer can still do a background check to see who'll make the first cut. But it's Orwellian that we would deprive any business owner, particularly in this economy, of the right to have a full and fair picture of prospective employees from Square One simply because of some twisted sense of fairness.

Because that's what's really at the heart of all of this. We tend to believe that certain demographics are more heavily represented in the criminal justice system, and the statistics do bear that out. So, the thinking goes, we are actually discriminating against a whole group of individuals (namely, African-American men) when we make it harder for ex-cons to find a job. It's the de facto theory of discrimination, where you don't actually go out to harm someone but a law or act has that indirect effect.

This is all just another strange experiment in social engineering. I personally don't think that an ex-felon has any less right to a job than a law-abiding citizen, but I'm not the one doing the offering. If I have a business, I'm entitled to fill it with the kind of people who I deem less likely to break my trust (and that sure as heck doesn't involve hot-wiring a car, for example).

It's arrant nonsense for Council and our mayor to tell people with jobs to fill that we're going to blindfold you at the beginning of the process because we don't trust you to make a fair decision based on full disclosure of the facts. (And just another example of the political class, as they've done for decades, making the city actually less likely to attract businesses offering new jobs.)

If the police and prison system deserve to eliminate from contention people who've violated the law, why aren't we giving the same consideration to other employers?

Does the manager of a fast-food restaurant have less of a right to protect his employees and customers from the threat posed by an ex-con than, say, Commissioner Ramsey?

As far as I'm concerned, this new policy is, well, criminal.

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer. E-mail

cflowers1961@yahoo.com. She blogs at philly.com/philly/blogs/flowersshow.