I don’t care about discrimination of former criminals per se, but making them visibly different might lead to all kinds of secondary crime.
For example, if someone is visibly marked as a known thief, it would be tempting for another person to steal something in a situation where only the two of them had access to the stolen thing, and then exclaim “hey, the other guy is a known thief, so going by the priors, it is obvious that he did it”.
This could be further leveraged into blackmail; if you know that you can use this trick to put the former thief in prison with high probability, and the thief knows it too… then you can make the former thief do various kinds of illegal things, giving them a choice between a chance of getting caught doing the actual crime, and an almost certainty of going to prison for something they didn’t do.
Shortly, whenever you make a person vulnerable (whether they deserved it or not), you are potentially creating a tool for some predator.
Well of course this is illegal under current US laws, however this would help against being unjustly accused as in your example of secondary crime. It would also be helpful against repeat offences for a whole range of other crimes.
I don’t care about discrimination of former criminals per se, but making them visibly different might lead to all kinds of secondary crime.
For example, if someone is visibly marked as a known thief, it would be tempting for another person to steal something in a situation where only the two of them had access to the stolen thing, and then exclaim “hey, the other guy is a known thief, so going by the priors, it is obvious that he did it”.
This could be further leveraged into blackmail; if you know that you can use this trick to put the former thief in prison with high probability, and the thief knows it too… then you can make the former thief do various kinds of illegal things, giving them a choice between a chance of getting caught doing the actual crime, and an almost certainty of going to prison for something they didn’t do.
Shortly, whenever you make a person vulnerable (whether they deserved it or not), you are potentially creating a tool for some predator.
The follow-up post has a very relevant comment:
Well of course this is illegal under current US laws, however this would help against being unjustly accused as in your example of secondary crime. It would also be helpful against repeat offences for a whole range of other crimes.