A Survey of Employment Sanctions Imposed Upon Ex-Offenders By California Law

Abstract

One of the most important aspects of an ex-offender's re-integration into society is his or her ability to find and keep employment. However, because of his or her status as an ex-offender, the ex-offender may find both informal and informal barriers to employment. The informal barriers may include such things as the unwillingness of employers to hire the ex-offender based upon the stigma of a criminal conviction. Formal barriers go beyond social attitudes to include legal impediments to employment as a result of the status of ex-offender. This paper is an attempt to catalog the formal barriers to employment that exist in the form of employment sanctions imposed upon the ex- offender as a matter of California law. For the most part, this paper is not concerned with whether an individual sanction is just and necessary for the protection of the community, or if it is unjust and unduly burdensome upon the ex-offender, or if it is something in between. The main purpose is to simply see what employment sanctions currently exist, to provide a road-map of the barriers that are out there for an ex-offender. The core of the paper is the compilation of these sanctions into a table. As a precursor to this table, the methodology is described, along with a summary of the findings that briefly incorporates questions of policy raised by these findings and suggestions for further research.