Convicted felons in the workforce vs human resource management - Research Paper Example

This paper is about individuals who possess criminal records, and how their chance to work in the workforce is a notch more difficult than their other peers who have a clean record. In this paper, the researcher would like to focus on a certain type of individual who has been excluded from the rest of society because of their misbehaviour. In legal systems, a felon is someone who has been accused of performing a serious crime and has been legally condemned of doing so. There exist a long list of crimes that can brand a person a criminal, and the ones that are considered to be felonies are not restricted to the following- grand theft, tax evasion, robbery, rape, murder, fraud, kidnapping, violent assaults, treason, arson, illegal drug abuse and drug trafficking, and espionage.

Felonies can be considered as a felony under various circumstances, and a convicted felon can only be convicted by a person of legal authority such as a judge (Eisenstein and Jacob, 1991). In this paper, the researcher would like to discuss the reasons regarding preferred characteristics of a potential employee. In the case of felons who decide to join the workforce after serving their time in prison, the researcher would like to investigate how the human resource department in organizations deal with such cases, should they decide to hire a felon.

Naturally, hiring a previously convicted criminal can affect an organization’s operations, so companies must be extremely cautious in such cases. For instance, planning employee activities might have to be planned in a different way, or controlling such employees might have to be done in a different manner. The researcher would like to investigate social views on such a controversial topic, and also what can be done to help these felons find their own niche in the workforce. In 2007, reports were made that there are en estimate of 2 million convicted persons in prison serving their time.