New field research from University of Michigan Law School professor Sonja Starr and Princeton post-doc Amanda Agan shows that hiding job applicants’ criminal records until the final stages of the hiring process—known as “banning the box”—doesn’t work so well.

Last November, President Obama, largely in the name of racial justice,
ordered a bouquet of criminal justice reforms. Chief among them was Ban the Box, which is intended to ease ex-cons’ transitions back to free society by nixing the “check here if you have a criminal record” box, a common feature of many job applications. Obama’s BTB, citing imbalance in the hirings of ex-cons, bans that box from job applications for federal employees.