Charlotte is trying to open job opportunities to people overcoming troubled pasts

Several have re-examined their policies on when they ask job candidates about their legal history. Others have trained their human resources departments on how to properly evaluate whether somebody with a criminal past could still be a good fit.

Corporate executives are also taking the lead in new campaign to address disparities, called One Charlotte.

Still, roadblocks remain. The city of Charlotte’s efforts to offer employment to more people with criminal backgrounds have gone without a review. And several of Charlotte’s large employers are in industries that make it difficult to employ people who have had brushes with the law.

“These are the things, economic opportunities, that we didn’t talk about for a long time because of the recession, and the numbness of the last eight years,” said Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Vi Lyles. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”

‘The barriers to employment are real’

This issue has been on the minds of Charlotte civic leaders for several years. In 2014, the City Council OK’d a plan to “Ban the Box” on its job applications, following a national trend. Banning the box means removing the question on initial applications about whether a candidate has been convicted of a crime. Instead, these discussions happen after interviews.

The conversation has been renewed in the wake of protests over the shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott at the hands of a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officer. Some of the demonstrations bubbled over as a result of ongoing tensions over economic divisions in Charlotte. Several academic studies have put Charlotte and Mecklenburg-County as among the toughest for economic mobility.

“The barriers to employment are real,” said Karen Kovach, executive director of Changed Choices, a nonprofit that helps women transition from prison to jobs. “We lose in so many ways when we don’t provide legal ways for people to provide for their family.”

The concern is described as both a safety issue and one of race.

On the first count, if someone who is convicted of a crime can no longer find a job, they’re more likely to turn back to crime. The state court system puts the recidivism rate at 40 percent of people arrested and about 20 percent of people convicted.

“After that first offense, they’re a lot less likely to gain employment,” said Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Chief Kerr Putney. “They’re put right back into the position where they’re having to break into cars.”

Putney said the CMPD is in the early stages of a new program targeted at people between the age of 18 and 24, working with private employers to get people into jobs before they feel the need to turn to crime to make ends meet.

“We’re trying to break the cycle of criminality,” Chief Putney said. “A part of that is making people gainfully employed.”

But there is also an element of economic and social justice. Though about 22 percent of North Carolinians are black, 45 percent of state prisoners are African-American, according to the N.C. Justice Center.

“There are a disproportionate number of people of color who have records because of the way policing happens — not necessarily because they’re more likely to be commit crimes, but they’re more likely to be caught,” Kovach said.

“If we give more people of color and more people who are poor criminal records, and then we use those criminal records as a reason not to rent to them, not to employ them, not to move into that neighborhood or live next door to them … it’s adding to an already unfair burden.”

The next step

Despite progress, there are still significant hurdles even among governments and businesses who are taking steps.

When asked, the city of Charlotte could not give any data about how the “Ban the Box” effort has worked. There has not been any analysis on whether it has led to more diversity in hiring.

Still, Lyles, the mayor pro tem, said it was a good first step.

“The idea is to remove that first barrier, which is an automatic filter to say no,” Lyles said. At that point, she said, “It’s a person, not just a piece of paper with a box checked.”

Lyles is pushing for the city to extend this further, to companies that are obtaining lucrative city contracts and those who are getting grants using taxpayer dollars.

And she lauded the efforts of Carolinas Healthcare and Novant Health — two of Charlotte’s largest employers — to revisit their policies on asking about criminal backgrounds while hiring.

“I think the next step for advocates of ban the box is to figure out whether this is actually translating to any jobs,” Kovach said.

Kovich said she knows of one woman in Charlotte who had been a habitual felon but had pulled her life together, earned an MBA and rose through the ranks of a large organization. She interviewed and accepted a job at another large company in town, and quit her previous job to take it. Just before she was about to start, her background check came through and the new employer discovered her offenses, by then more than 20 years old. She wasn’t allowed to keep the position.

“For us, the challenge is finding a person within these large companies who has the ability to make change,” Kovich said.

Here’s a run-down of hiring policies at some of Charlotte’s largest private employers.

The banks

Charlotte is a banking town, and Bank of America and Wells Fargo are two of the city’s largest employers. The federal government creates a significant barrier to employment for people with criminal records.

The FDIC prohibits insured banks from hiring or maintaining employment of people who have a conviction or were in a pre-trial diversion program for crimes related to “dishonesty, breach of trust, money laundering, or the distribution, manufacturing, or trafficking in controlled substances.” In certain cases, with very low-level offenses, the FDIC will accept a candidate.

At Wells Fargo, if a background check turns up violent or sexual offenses, “an individualized review is conducted to assess whether the individual presents an unacceptable risk to our team members and/or customers and considers applicable EEOC guidance and other statutory considerations that apply,” spokesman Josh Dunn said.

American Airlines

The airline was one of 19 companies to sign a pledge with the White House to remove barriers to employment for people with criminal records, spokeswoman Katie Cody said. The pledge involves moving questions about criminal backgrounds until much later in the hiring process, and in training human resources personnel on how to make fair decisions on applicants with records.

American Airlines no longer asks questions about criminal background until a candidate has accepted a job offer. “We are also conducting consistent, reliable, and fair-minded background checks as part of our hiring process and will continue to meet all regulatory requirements,” Cody said.

Duke Energy

Duke Energy says it has no blanket policy against hiring people with a conviction in their past. The company says it takes each applicant case-by case and evaluates the nature of the job and the nature of the criminal record.

“Duke Energy is strongly committed to equal employment opportunity, and takes affirmative action to ensure that its applicant pools are diverse and representative of the communities served by the company,” the company said.

On a brochure with information about entry-level lineworker jobs, the company says that a criminal background will not rule out being hired, but hiding information about a record could.

The hospitals

Background checks that cover the previous seven years are conducted after a job offer is made and accepted, said Robin Baltimore. She said that there are no automatic disqualifiers to employment at Novant.

“Decisions are made based on the specific details provided by the candidate, the length of time since the conviction, the duties and responsibilities of the position, and potential risks to patient and team member safety,” she said.

Jesse Cureton, the company’s chief consumer officer, is one of the leaders of One Charlotte.