Segment 1 — The Cold Open

Segment 2 — The Good Intention

The first ban-the-box law appeared in Hawaii in 1998. Legislators there wanted to reduce the automatic exclusion of applicants who had served their sentences and could not get past the initial form. By the mid-2010s more than thirty states and the District of Columbia had passed versions that applied to public employers, government contractors, or all private firms. In 2015 the federal government removed the question from its own job applications. Proponents reasoned that if employers never saw the conviction until an interview had already begun, qualified candidates would have a chance to explain their record in person rather than being filtered out by a checkbox. The logic rested on the observation that many employers used the box as a quick screen even when the offense bore no relation to the job duties, and that people returning from prison faced unemployment rates several times the national average, increasing the chance they would reoffend simply because they lacked steady work.

Segment 3 — The Implementation

Cities and states adopted the rules at different times, creating natural experiments. New Jersey and New York City both changed their requirements in the years covered by the Agan and Starr study. Early reports from advocates noted that more applicants with records reached the interview stage. Supporters pointed to the growing number of jurisdictions that had acted and to the Obama administration’s decision as evidence that the approach was workable and humane. Few contemporaneous accounts examined whether employers would substitute other signals once the conviction question was gone. The staggered timing across places meant researchers could compare the same employers before and after the change while holding constant the local labor market, which is why the field experiment could isolate the effect of removing the box rather than attributing differences to broader economic conditions.

Segment 4 — The Unintended Consequences

Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr’s correspondence study, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2018, documented what happened next. Before the laws, employers that used the box called back white applicants with records at lower rates than Black applicants without records; after the box was removed, the Black-White callback gap among applicants without records widened dramatically at those same employers. A separate analysis by Jennifer Doleac and Benjamin Hansen, using Current Population Survey data from 2004 to 2014, found that ban-the-box policies reduced employment probabilities by 3.4 percentage points for young Black men without college degrees and by 2.3 percentage points for young Hispanic men in the same group. The researchers interpreted the pattern as statistical discrimination: without the record, some employers used race as a proxy for the likelihood of a criminal history. The Quarterly Journal of Economics paper showed the effect concentrated among employers that had previously asked the question, supporting the idea that the policy itself changed the information environment in which hiring decisions were made. In the experiment the fictitious applicants were young men whose names signaled race, and the applications were otherwise identical in education, experience, and address; the only variable that changed systematically after the policy was the absence of the conviction question, so the widening gap could not be explained by differences in applicant quality. One way to see the arithmetic is that a 7-percentage-point gap means white applicants received callbacks at a rate roughly 1.07 times that of Black applicants; at 43 percentage points the ratio rises to 1.43 times, more than doubling the relative advantage. Because the study tracked the same set of employers across the policy change, it ruled out the possibility that firms newly entering the market or leaving it were driving the result. The employment drops found by Doleac and Hansen were largest precisely in the demographic group—young men without college degrees—where criminal-record prevalence differs most across racial lines in national data, which is consistent with employers updating their beliefs about the probability that an applicant in that group has a record once the direct information is withheld.

Segment 5 — The Aftermath

Sonja Starr told Jezebel in 2016 that the findings were “not necessarily” an indictment of the policy, because removing the box still helped some applicants with records and because addressing racial bias directly remained difficult. No large-scale repeal followed. Some jurisdictions later added requirements that employers consider the relevance and age of convictions or that they delay the question until a conditional offer. The core mechanism—hiding one verifiable fact and leaving employers to rely on other signals—remains in place in dozens of cities and states. Later versions of the policy therefore layered additional rules on top of the original disclosure change rather than restoring the box, which preserved the information asymmetry while trying to constrain how employers could act on the remaining signals.

Segment 6 — The Lesson

When New Jersey and New York City removed the conviction question from early applications, employers responded by widening the callback difference between white and Black applicants without records, exactly as measured in the Agan and Starr experiment. When the same policy reached additional jurisdictions, employment rates fell for young Black men without college degrees, as shown in the Doleac and Hansen Current Population Survey analysis. Any rule that withholds a single piece of information therefore invites decision-makers to substitute the next most available signal, and that substitution can be tracked in the same data that later evaluate the rule’s success. The pattern invites anyone designing a disclosure requirement to ask what observable trait will stand in for the withheld fact once the form changes.

Sources

• academic.oup.com — Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment
• dataverse.harvard.edu — Replication Data for: "Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment"
• jezebel.com — Ban the box: Why laws to stop hiring discrimination actually make it worse
• papers.ssrn.com — Does “Ban the Box” Help or Hurt Low-Skilled Workers? Statistical Discrimination and Employment Outcomes When Criminal Histories are Hidden
• papers.ssrn.com — Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Statistical Discrimination: A Field Experiment
• beta.dol.gov — The unintended consequences of 'ban the box': Statistical discrimination and employment outcomes when criminal histories are hidden

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