BTB laws have differing requirements. Most mandate the removal of questions about arrests and/or convictions from job applications but do not prohibit the use of this information in making a hiring decision after reviewing a background check. Many BTB laws allow consideration of arrests and convictions only after an initial screening, such as when choosing among finalists. Some have broader requirements, such as a mandate to incorporate best practices for hiring suggested by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. BTB laws do not apply to jobs with required background checks, including public school and public safety employees.
BTB laws have been widely adopted—research from 2021 shows that 37 states and 150 cities and counties have adopted some type of BTB law. In 2017, the Obama administration adopted BTB policies for hiring federal employees. Congress passed the Fair Chance to Compete Act in 2019, which became effective in 2021. This law prohibits federal agencies and contractors from asking applicants about their criminal history before making a conditional offer of employment.
For our research, we used data from the Current Population Survey between 2004 and 2019 on men aged 25–44 without a college degree; we focused on this group because it has a relatively high rate of criminal records. Additionally, we used data on every federal, state, and local BTB law as documented by the National Employment Law Project in October 2021.
For non-Hispanic black men, the data indicate that BTB laws decreased the employment of black men aged 25–34 by 4 percent between 2004 and 2014 and increased employment of this group by 3 percent between 2014 and 2019. Our findings suggest that over this entire period, BTB laws may have decreased the employment of this group by 3 percent, though this finding is uncertain, and it is possible that the laws had no effect. The varying effects over time may reflect changing labor market conditions, as the later period had a lower unemployment rate than the earlier period.
Our research separately examines the effect of BTB laws depending on whether each law applies to state public-sector jobs, local public-sector jobs, or private employers. Analysis of each type of law yields no consistent evidence that BTB laws affected the employment of less-educated black men. However, findings from these analyses indicate that the negative effect of BTB laws on the employment of black men aged 25–34 from 2004 to 2014 is driven by BTB laws that apply only to state workers. However, this effect is unusually large, suggesting it may be spurious.
Similarly, our findings imply that BTB laws did not affect the employment of less-educated white or Hispanic men. The only exception is BTB laws that apply to all state and local public-sector employees, which decrease the employment of less-educated Hispanic men aged 25–34 by 4 percent.
The main takeaway of our study is that prior evidence that BTB laws have significant effects on employment—positive or negative—does not appear to be true in later periods when these laws became more widespread and increasingly applied to private employers. No type of BTB law, regardless of the sector to which it applied, had meaningful effects on the employment of less-educated men from 2004 to 2019. These findings suggest that BTB laws have neither helped nor harmed the employment prospects of less-educated men.
