If you believe in rehabilitation, you should support this school in employing somebody with a serious criminal record (and question the media’s approach)

A school in Tower Hamlets has been criticised for employing somebody with a criminal record.

Nothing new there perhaps, but when I looked at the original article in The Independent and the BBC News article that followed, a number of things struck me.

First, if we believe in rehabilitation, we should the support the school involved. It was good to see the school’s headteacher strongly defended the person involved:

“Ian Devlin has worked at the school for the last five years. He has been an excellent example of how a rehabilitated offender can contribute to his community and he is a valued member of our school community.

“The school took all appropriate checks and advice in appointing Mr Devlin and wish to support him in continuing to do the work which he has been legally appointed to perform.”

In my comment on behalf of Unlock, I said that we should encourage more employers to do the same:

“We speak to people with criminal convictions every day who are struggling to find work many years after they have served their sentence. With over a quarter of people out-of-work having received a criminal record in the last 10 years, it’s in society’s interest to enable people who have offended in the past to become contributors to society rather than burdens on the state.

“With over 10.5 million people in the UK with a criminal record, we need to encourage employers to treat every applicant on a case-by-case basis and not have blanket exclusions towards people with criminal records. That’s why campaigns like Ban the Box, and the recent commitment by David Cameron to apply this approach to the civil service, are so important in changing the attitudes of employers towards people with a criminal record.

“People who have committed crime cannot change the past, but they can focus on what they do in the future. Ian Devlin looks to have done everything he can since he was released from prison to become an active, positive member of society. The school clearly recognised this in their recruitment process. We should encourage more employers to do the same.”

Another thing that struck me was the suggestion that the issue in this case is that Ian Devlin had been employed at a school near to where the offence he committed over 15 years ago (when he was 17) took place. Some comments online suggest that while that while he’s got a right to a job, it shouldn’t be near to where the offence committed. That seems to be a natural instinctive reaction, but personally I think this fails to address to underlying issue.

As a society, we rightly want people to be called to account for what they’ve done wrong. This should involve a combination of both punishment and rehabilitation. Yet, once that’s done, are we saying that there’s a further ‘public’ debt that cannot be repaid, or damage that cannot be repaired.

Clearly, where the offence involves the death of the victim (as in this case) the damage can never be repaired, but the recognition of rehabilitation and reform can go some way towards accepting people from prison back into the community. This is perhaps where restorative justice (in its broadest sense) has a role.

It seems from the articles that, given the location, there’s fears of a rise in racial tension in response to this. If that’s the case, the focus should not be on the fact that somebody has got a job with a criminal record, but that the underlying tensions haven’t been addressed. To simply suggest that Ian Devlin goes and get a job elsewhere misses the point.

A final thing that struck me was the media’s approach to this story. Again, this is not something new to me — the idea of the media ‘outing’ somebody with a criminal record that is working. Sometimes, this is because they’ve tried to hide or evade their criminal record — but that’s clearly not the case here.

So what message does this send? The idea that a school (or any other employer for that matter) should be concerned about the media ‘outing’ their recruitment decision many years later is one that I feel deeply uncomfortable about. We’ve got to be careful not to create a society where, on the one hand, we try to encourage employers to employ people with a criminal record, and then on the other, outing them when they do.