Criminal Record = No Future?

A criminal record is often spoken about as a consequence: something earned, something deserved, something that sits quietly in a file after a sentence is served. In practice, it is less a record of the past than a permanent mark on the future. Long after punishment is complete, a criminal record continues to shape where people can work, where they can live, and whether they are allowed to fully rejoin the society they are told they owe their debt to. While it may be applicable for heinous crimes, the mark of a criminal record lingers for lesser offences as well.

Sociologist Devah Pager showed how having a criminal record can hurt someone’s chances of getting a job. In her well-known study, she sent out pairs of job applicants who were the same in every way except for their race and whether they had a criminal record. The results were clear: people with a criminal record got far fewer callbacks than those without one. Even more surprising, a white person with a criminal record was often more likely to get a callback than a Black person with a clean record. This means that having a criminal record doesn’t just make it harder to find work; it also makes existing inequalities worse.

Pager’s research stripped away the comforting myth that discrimination against people with records is rare or justified by safety concerns. Employers were not responding to specific offences, or risks. They were responding to a label. A checkbox. A signal that allowed them to quietly exclude someone without further consideration.

Employment is the most obvious casualty of a criminal record, and perhaps the most damaging. Work is not only a paycheque; it is stability, routine, dignity, and connection. When people are locked out of the labour market, the consequences ripple outward: to families, to communities, and to public systems that must absorb the costs of unemployment and instability. We should not be surprised that the rates of reoffending rise when legitimate pathways to survival are blocked.

Housing is the second major fault line. Landlords routinely deny applicants with criminal records, often through blanket policies that make no distinction between a decades-old offence and a recent one, or between violent and non-violent conduct. Without stable housing, everything else becomes precarious: employment is harder to maintain, health deteriorates, and family reunification becomes more complicated. In this way, a criminal record operates as a kind of civic exclusion, pushing people into the margins where the very conditions we claim to fear are more likely to emerge.

Criminal justice and prison reform advocates, including Gail Bury, emphasize that the exclusion faced by individuals with criminal records is not a coincidence, but rather a defining feature of the system itself. Together with Madeline Bury, Gail Bury co-hosts the insightful podcast, The Prison Family Podcast, where they highlight how criminal records serve as a form of invisible punishment; one not imposed by a judge, but perpetuated daily through policies, practices, and prevailing social attitudes. This punishment has no expiration date; it is quietly enforced by employers, landlords, insurers, and licensing bodies, often lacking transparency, or any avenue for appeal.

Supporters of the status quo often respond with a familiar refrain: people should face the consequences of their actions, but consequences are meant to be finite. A sentence has a beginning and an end. When a record becomes a lifelong barrier to basic necessities, it stops being accountability and starts becoming permanent exclusion. The question is no longer about public safety, but about how comfortable we are with creating a class of people who can never fully return.

This is not an argument for ignoring harm or erasing responsibility. It is an argument for proportionality and possibility. If we say we believe in rehabilitation, then our systems must reflect that belief. That means fair chance hiring, sensible limits on criminal record checks, and housing policies that assess real risk rather than relying on fear and stigma.

The true mark of a criminal record is not the offence itself. It is the quiet, persistent narrowing of opportunity long after the sentence is complete. As Pager’s research and advocates like Bury remind us, that mark does not fall evenly. If we are serious about justice, we must decide whether a criminal record is meant to document the past or permanently define a person’s future.