Judge Corriero discusses collateral consequences of criminal convictions incurred by youth at EEOC conference

Posted: August 19th, 2013 | by Yuval Sheer

On June 25, 2013, Judge Corriero was a featured speaker at a conference organized by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Attending the conference were employers and human resource professionals from across the state. The topic of the presentation was the exposure of youth in New York to criminalization due to our state’s low age of criminal responsibility.

The topic is both timely and compelling: In 2010 alone, more than 2,500 criminal convictions were incurred by youth in New York, and more than half of these convictions were for misdemeanor offenses. The broad impact of these convictions is that they remain on the youth’s record and follow that youth for the rest of his/her life. By encumbering so many youth with lifetime criminal records for mistakes made at a young age, our state fundamentally undermines the potential of youth to recover from their transgressions, thereby weakening the competitiveness of its workforce.

The Center calls upon employers to be sensitive to the difficult circumstance facing New York’s children who are exposed to criminalization due to our state’s low age of criminal responsibility. We also ask employers to support the efforts to ensure that our state judges its children rationally, as the children they are.

 

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