Melissa Burch’s The Criminal Record Complex takes us inside the world of those seeking employment after a criminal conviction, the “middlemen” who attempt to assist their efforts, and the employers who consider hiring them. In a rich, detailed, and nuanced account of this twin companion to the carceral state, Burch unveils the layers that constitute one of its most pernicious collateral consequences: the (mostly) legalized discrimination faced by those seeking employment after having been convicted of a felony and/or having served prison time. Readers are reminded throughout of familiar tropes, yet also occasionally jolted out of their comfort zone through analytical interventions that require thinking well beyond received wisdom. She employs the keen eye of a skilled ethnographer, bringing alive an engaging narrative with painstaking attention to detail—and most of all, attentiveness to the very real human beings whose lives and experiences constitute its subject matter. The book is a must-read for the light it sheds on this central mechanism by which the carceral complex exacerbates racial and socioeconomic inequities.
Throughout the book, we encounter dominant tropes of individual responsibility and personal choice, which continue to shape much of American discourse about who ends up in prison and why, thereby eliding the role of systemic and structural inequity. But there are also layers to Burch’s account that disrupt our conventional understandings in unexpected ways. The book teaches us, for instance, that blanket exclusion based on conviction history is in fact legally prohibited (even if, to some extent, encouraged); that law enforcement was historically mostly opposed, at least initially, to the sharing of data relating to criminal convictions; that while many employers do reflexively consider a background check to be closely correlated with the character or trustworthiness of a prospective employee, a significant proportion of employers do not hold that view; and that a long time served in prison can sometimes paradoxically work in favor of criminalized job-seekers, for a number of reasons.
Burch immerses herself in the world of job-seeking in Southern California’s Inland Empire, a region east of Los Angeles, known for its social and political conservatism as well as its high preponderance of system-impacted individuals. Her ethnographic work occurs primarily at a “job developer” organization that plays a kind of middleman role, assisting those with criminal convictions to find and maintain employment. She shadows key staff members to learn their perspectives and practices, but Burch also pitches in with everyday needs, helping job seekers build resumes, practice mock interview scripts, learn how to navigate online applications via email, and perform many other tasks. She becomes a fixture, privy to the often-difficult life stories and employment histories of many of those the organization seeks to help. Burch brings the reader inside their world with great care. Her participation in this world extends, too, to attending seminars for HR professionals and shadowing owners of a family business, so as to learn more about prospective employers who do often hire people with convictions.
The job seekers Burch profiles are more than just research participants; they are fully humanized characters with whom we journey through the affective experiences of stigma, shame, and humiliation. The book provides evocative retellings of sanity-destroying attempts to create email accounts while navigating online job submissions in endless loops of errors, glitches, and passwords reset—a technological world that can become a source of great frustration after being locked away for so long. Meanwhile, Burch shows the role that transportation plays in exacerbating inequality by detailing agonizingly long commutes with job seekers who take multiple buses and trains over several hours for what would have been a 20-minute drive. Burch’s narrative draws readers into the exhausting, demoralizing, and exasperating nature of the job-seeking experience, which requires a level of “inner resolve” to withstand what amounts to a consistent assault on the self. Yet the book also offers small glimpses of hope, in the form of job seekers who regain licenses through appeals or employers who refuse to judge people with convictions a priori because “we’ve all screwed up” (p. 124), reminding us that not all experiences or views are uniform.
The baseline assumption that people with records pose a risk has no evidence or data to support it. Yet it reigns as conventional wisdom among employers, supported by an entire legal, policy, financial, technological, and political apparatus. In Chapter 2, Burch traces the long history of how background checks came to be a normalized feature of the recruitment landscape. She shows that new risk industries and modeling, increased litigiousness, the expansion of employer liability by the courts, expanded police surveillance through the 60s and 70s, the emergence of new technologies, and finally, September 11, which amplified the idea of racialized risk, all coalesced to produce a reflexive attachment to the unsubstantiated idea that background checks prevent harm, avoid violence, and protect employers from liability. From today’s perspective, it is jarring to read that lawmakers and federal agencies all agreed, as recently as 50 years ago, that criminal history data was private and not to be shared for any purpose—or with any organizations—outside of law enforcement.
One of the book’s most revelatory threads is its emphasis on the prohibition of blanket exclusions as a matter of law. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) specifically requires employers to conduct “individualized assessments” and prohibits the use of background checks to deny employment in a blanket manner. States like California have also enacted legislation designed specifically to underscore this. In principle, discrimination on the basis of a conviction is therefore illegal. Yet in practice, pernicious discrimination is widespread, and violations of both EEOC guidance and state laws are routine, whether because of ignorance or job seekers’ reluctance to hold potential employers accountable through litigation.
In her chapter delving into the perspective of job developers, Burch skillfully outlines the differential politics and standing of various actors in this world. She contrasts, for instance, “Kristen”—the white, middle-class woman who identifies with the business community—with “Sasha,” the Latina with a social-justice orientation who identifies more with working-class job seekers and exhibits far more attunement to the dynamics of race. Yet no matter how relentlessly job developers work on behalf of system-impacted people, they must also navigate a nuanced, intricate “politics of helping,” as Burch puts it, which often involves an accommodation of employers’ concerns, even when employers’ attitudes are problematic, disrespectful, or entitled toward criminalized job seekers. Because job developers are ultimately lending their social capital to job seekers, they must regularly acquiesce to an industry’s dominant logics and put forth candidates who meet the conventional expectations of being sufficiently penitent, reformed, worthy, docile, or deserving.
In turn, Burch’s chapter on the inner workings of a mid-sized family-owned trucking company and its hiring policies shows that an employer need not have leftist politics to be open-minded about hiring formerly convicted employees. We meet business owners who openly identify as conservative or right-wing, yet hire many people with records, including many job seekers of color. As another employer notes, “the more serious the conviction, the better the worker. One big mistake is better than a bunch of small ones” (p. 140). The chapter ends on a bleak note, however, as the company is forced to downsize, abandoning its former commitment to heart-and-gut instinct hiring practices in favor of textbook evaluations and management according to the logics of big capital. This reinforces one of the book’s main themes: while individual attitudes and goodwill are crucial, they are not sufficient to overcome the structural, procedural, technical, administrative, and regulatory imperatives that push increasingly in the direction of employer “risk-management” practices that ostensibly require background checks.
A highlight of the book is Burch’s careful attention to the ethnographic imperative of reflexivity about authorial positionality. Burch is transparent about naming her own race and gender positioning and its implications with the subject matter, as well as how she herself is being read or perceived. She is candid, too, about acknowledging the skepticism—even resistance—she often encounters to both her research questions and, in some instances, to her very presence. Burch seems unfazed—at least in her own retelling—by these tensions, calling them “productive” (p. 100). One does wish, however, that the tensions underlying issues of access were addressed in an equally head-on manner. While Burch acknowledges that job seekers “graciously allow[ed]” (p. 6) her to document their struggles, one is left wondering about how Burch gained access to the worlds she describes, and what facilitated or obstructed it.
Ultimately, the book concludes by calling for eliminating background checks and making privacy the default for data. While she falls back on a generic call for organizing and collective movements, this is a book that leaves the reader, on the whole, both challenged and edified. Burch has peeled back yet another layer of the carceral complex for us, giving us a window into a world that few have ventured into. She accomplishes that rare task of combining fine-grained, human-centered ethnographic analysis with the long sweep of historical and structural analysis. The Criminal Record Complex should take its place as a companion volume alongside some of the most canonical texts on the study of contemporary punishment, as required reading for anyone interested in fully grasping the contours of America’s carceral state.
