We’ve noted in recent posts the numerous states that, just in the past three or four months, have enacted broad occupational licensing reforms affecting people with a criminal record. Many of these new laws have been influenced by a model developed by the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm that has been litigating and lobbying to reduce barriers to work for more than two decades. In turn, states like Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee and Wisconsin have built upon IJ’s model to enact even more progressive schemes intended to ensure that people with the requisite professional qualifications will not be unfairly excluded based on a record of arrest or conviction.
Now IJ has incorporated many of these progressive refinements into its original model licensing law, the Occupational Licensing Review Act (OLRA), and broken out the provisions relating to criminal records into a free-standing model act specifically directed at managing collateral consequences in the occupational licensing context, the new Collateral Consequences in Occupational Licensing Act (CCOLA).
…Agencies may consider violent felonies and sexual offenses at any time, although even these records must still be tested against the “public safety” standard:
Destroying opportunities for registrants via professional licensing laws would be exponentially harmful considering we live in a mostly service based economy. I train people for in barbershop and hair salon jobs for servicing and sales of scissors. I also train using that job and relationships (apart from ACSOL) to leverage impacting elections. A good friend and highly skilled professional RC that lost his license bc of being an RC became trained by me and now has a new field of income. This gentleman lets call him Julio (well being his name) was in court rescued by Janice and had received back his license. Thank you Janice!!! This was no small thing ladies and gentlemen!!! So be it known that these matters are and have been addressed by Janice and this organization..but as Janice has said many times this is not a sprint but a marathon. So we should in her words: “Show up, Stand up and Speak up”…
Excellent, Excellent, Excellent! Robert, thank you for sharing. Let’s be strong. Eventually the constitution will have our back. I’m sure we are all extremely remorseful & hurt by what we have done, but we have to live, move on and that means fight!!!
When I applied for a contractor’s license way back in 2000, they only considered “construction related crimes.” That was reasonable. I know they are trying to protect the public from all unforseen harm, but the real problem is unlicensed contractors that people hire because they under bid, pay laborers under the counter to avoid taxes, don’t carry liability or workers comp insurance, charge large up front down payments and may leave the job undone and dissapear. The licensing boards original job was to judge who is skilled and who knows the laws and who doesn’t. Now they are also judging who is worthy or not. This is mission creep in my opinion and does nothing for public safety. The narrower the eye of the needle becomes, the more skilled, well meaning people will be left to work unlicensed to put bread on the table. All people make mistakes and some generally good people make some awful ones. Does that mean they should only have the worst jobs? I think licensing has this purpose: you agree to follow all the rules and treat people fairly, in return, the state legitimizes your business. I mean making the restrictions so broad has the same counter productive effect as residency restrictions on registrants. Some just go underground, where their actions are a mystery. Registrants especially need to have self employment options, because getting hired is so hard. Legitimacy is also valuable for self esteem, which can arm one against reoffense.