Back in the day, it was hard to figure out if a person had ever been convicted of a crime -- you'd have to go down to the right courthouse and look through a bunch of dusty paper files. Public records were open, but you'd need to care enough to spend a lot of time if you wanted to snoop on whether a particular individual had a criminal history -- and the right records would have been even harder to find if they'd been convicted in a different county or a different state.<p>Now that we have computers that can index all those public records, doing background checks on individuals has become easy enough to do it. I think I've seen applications for even fast food jobs which ask if you've ever been convicted of a felony.<p>The result of this is that, in addition to prison time, our society is <i>de facto</i> penalizing felons for the rest of their lives by making it a lot harder to get many necessities -- such as employment, housing, and education. Not because any law has made it so, but because of new behavior patterns enabled by new technologies. It's not surprising that many one-time offenders turn to a life of crime -- not because they want to, but because they feel that's the only path left open to them.<p>The timeline in the article seems to fit with this narrative.