In our society, adults must live with their records. We collect records on sport, contests, web-forums, marriage, school, jobs, crimes, debt, taxes, etc. Such records help others who want to interact with those adults, by helping them guess the consequences of such choices. Such records also help those who have good-looking records.
1) Employers can't take a rational account of the risks that a felon poses, because they must signal to clients and employees that they have a safe environment. Third parties can't be bothered to do an accurate assessment; they rely on noisy signals.
2) Hiding all childhood records and making public all adult ones is bad. Suppose 17-year-old Joe commits an awful crime, while 18-year-old Mark commits a petty crime. Mark may be screwed for life; Joe escapes unscathed.
The correlation between bad behavior in childhood and criminal activity of adults might very well be due to stigma. I know I've heard it very often in school that children are being told that they'll never become functioning adults when they misbehave. Keeping childhood records would worsen the effect.
One reason is that the pleasure+reward circuitry in the basal ganglia mature at about 13, but the pre-frontal cortex (responsible for evaluating consequences) doesn't develop fully until about 23, which is one reason why teenagers do stupid things. In a real sense, they are brain-damaged and not yet able to be fully responsible for their actions.
An analogy is a person who has just started a new job. It's expected that they will make some mistakes during the learning period (as long as they're not material mistakes) and not be punished for them. Conversely, after say five years on the job, making rookie mistakes *ought to* be held against you because you *ought to* know better.
Conversely, the kid who bullied me mercilessly in high school jumped into the middle of a bar brawl in my mid 20s and saved my butt when I was home visiting.
You haven't described the other side of the coin. The social interaction comprises of the bully bullying the bullied. Yes in many cases it is written off because the child could be just learning. In historical times, however, the solution was to encourage the bullied child to find a way to defend himself/herself and the outcome was that the bully learned that it wasn't beneficial to bully. Today we discourage the bullied child from fighting back in addition to not punishing the bully and I believe *this* is another part of the reason why prevention of bullying fails.
What about being attacked by a "bad kid" who is armed by a golf club and you happen to be playing baseball and use it in self defense but the emotional intensity and childhood lack of self-control leads to the "bad kid" having to take a trip to hospital? In an adult situation that would be "failure to show sufficient restraint" and would likely earn you a jail term. While I agree that there are certain behaviours that are likely red flags (especially if they are repeated and the kid shows no remorse), many (if not the majority) of children go through a learning process of self control. Holding them responsible thirty years fast forward is to me, far too harsh and I want no part of a world like that.
The "good" deeds of children are indeed not an airtight predictor of their later behavior either. But grades aren't about good deeds, they are about intelligence and knowledge and those won't disappear as a child matures.
For children, however, we tend to go out of our way to prevent the collection and sharing of records. We often expunge childhood criminal records, and we make sure public schools don’t save or share records of grades and misconduct.
I don't think this is quite right; and putting it right strengthens your argument. Childhood isn't erased; only events that detract from the child's reputation. (Grades are misleading because the only realistic way not to share bad grades is to avoid showing the good. Still, let's not overlook the obvious: high-school record determine college admissions.)
Children's achievements aren't shrouded. (Some have been heard to boast of 7th grade test scores.)
In this light, the so-called erasure of childhood (sic) is really more obviously irrational. (If children aren't fully responsible for their misdeeds, they aren't for their good deeds.)
Apart from good reasons that do exist, the reason for shielding children, in this light, seems to express something like instinctive protectiveness.
I was asking why we ban race-based hiring that is analogous to juvenile-record-based-hiring: that is, there is a correlation between having a juvenile record/being of a particular race and criminality, and employers don't want to hire potential criminals. This sort of hiring is not "based on animosity", but based on a real statistical correlation.
Why do we forbid this? If you can answer that, you have your answer of why we don't let employers use juvenile records either.
I might view it in terms of breaking cycles of poverty. Children from disadvantaged households are more likely to have done stupid things than children from privileged ones. An individual employer never has incentive to go for the candidate that looks worse. Since childhood behaviour is a little less predictive of adult behaviour than adult behaviour is of subsequent adult behaviour (because people change a lot between childhood and adulthood), hiding childhood records seems like a good place to introduce some noise into the decision-making process of the employers who, if they had more data, would never hire the higher-risk candidate. It's not perfect, but I think that's where it comes from.
My experience is counter to what you posit. Most of the people who where assholes when they were kids are actually pretty decent human beings now.
1) Employers can't take a rational account of the risks that a felon poses, because they must signal to clients and employees that they have a safe environment. Third parties can't be bothered to do an accurate assessment; they rely on noisy signals.
2) Hiding all childhood records and making public all adult ones is bad. Suppose 17-year-old Joe commits an awful crime, while 18-year-old Mark commits a petty crime. Mark may be screwed for life; Joe escapes unscathed.
The correlation between bad behavior in childhood and criminal activity of adults might very well be due to stigma. I know I've heard it very often in school that children are being told that they'll never become functioning adults when they misbehave. Keeping childhood records would worsen the effect.
One reason is that the pleasure+reward circuitry in the basal ganglia mature at about 13, but the pre-frontal cortex (responsible for evaluating consequences) doesn't develop fully until about 23, which is one reason why teenagers do stupid things. In a real sense, they are brain-damaged and not yet able to be fully responsible for their actions.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...
What's good about it?
An analogy is a person who has just started a new job. It's expected that they will make some mistakes during the learning period (as long as they're not material mistakes) and not be punished for them. Conversely, after say five years on the job, making rookie mistakes *ought to* be held against you because you *ought to* know better.
Conversely, the kid who bullied me mercilessly in high school jumped into the middle of a bar brawl in my mid 20s and saved my butt when I was home visiting.
Good post
You haven't described the other side of the coin. The social interaction comprises of the bully bullying the bullied. Yes in many cases it is written off because the child could be just learning. In historical times, however, the solution was to encourage the bullied child to find a way to defend himself/herself and the outcome was that the bully learned that it wasn't beneficial to bully. Today we discourage the bullied child from fighting back in addition to not punishing the bully and I believe *this* is another part of the reason why prevention of bullying fails.
What about being attacked by a "bad kid" who is armed by a golf club and you happen to be playing baseball and use it in self defense but the emotional intensity and childhood lack of self-control leads to the "bad kid" having to take a trip to hospital? In an adult situation that would be "failure to show sufficient restraint" and would likely earn you a jail term. While I agree that there are certain behaviours that are likely red flags (especially if they are repeated and the kid shows no remorse), many (if not the majority) of children go through a learning process of self control. Holding them responsible thirty years fast forward is to me, far too harsh and I want no part of a world like that.
The "good" deeds of children are indeed not an airtight predictor of their later behavior either. But grades aren't about good deeds, they are about intelligence and knowledge and those won't disappear as a child matures.
Yes, that is a good point.
For children, however, we tend to go out of our way to prevent the collection and sharing of records. We often expunge childhood criminal records, and we make sure public schools don’t save or share records of grades and misconduct.
I don't think this is quite right; and putting it right strengthens your argument. Childhood isn't erased; only events that detract from the child's reputation. (Grades are misleading because the only realistic way not to share bad grades is to avoid showing the good. Still, let's not overlook the obvious: high-school record determine college admissions.)
Children's achievements aren't shrouded. (Some have been heard to boast of 7th grade test scores.)
In this light, the so-called erasure of childhood (sic) is really more obviously irrational. (If children aren't fully responsible for their misdeeds, they aren't for their good deeds.)
Apart from good reasons that do exist, the reason for shielding children, in this light, seems to express something like instinctive protectiveness.
I was asking why we ban race-based hiring that is analogous to juvenile-record-based-hiring: that is, there is a correlation between having a juvenile record/being of a particular race and criminality, and employers don't want to hire potential criminals. This sort of hiring is not "based on animosity", but based on a real statistical correlation.
Why do we forbid this? If you can answer that, you have your answer of why we don't let employers use juvenile records either.
I might view it in terms of breaking cycles of poverty. Children from disadvantaged households are more likely to have done stupid things than children from privileged ones. An individual employer never has incentive to go for the candidate that looks worse. Since childhood behaviour is a little less predictive of adult behaviour than adult behaviour is of subsequent adult behaviour (because people change a lot between childhood and adulthood), hiding childhood records seems like a good place to introduce some noise into the decision-making process of the employers who, if they had more data, would never hire the higher-risk candidate. It's not perfect, but I think that's where it comes from.
That's not real constructive mk.