[yellowsnow]

My next door neighbor(who has since moved) was labeled as a sex offender. First thing I was told when I moved in... Well he was an older man and he was very kind. Not just to me but to everyone. He was always the first one to help if he saw you struggling in the yard or with heavy bags, etc. A genuinely nice guy. He happened to be Hispanic and he did have some tattoos. His whole family was wonderful. If they knew I was at the house alone they would quite often send over breakfast or lunch for me.

I have pretty good 'spider sense' and he never tripped my alarms. Finally one day I just came out and asked him about it. Turned out he had been discharged from the military(he was 22 and it was an honorable discharge) and was on his way home. He stopped in Wyoming to visit some relatives and met a woman in a bar who was drinking alcoholic beverages and chatting up the bartender. He asked her out, she was agreeable and they ended up having sex. He was arrested 4 days later for statutory rape. He DID have sex with a person who was underage and he was convicted. It followed him for the rest of his life. The only time he had a good job was the 7 years he worked at Ocean Spray. He lied about his conviction to get the job and 7 years later they finally got around to doing his background investigation and fired him. He spent most of his life doing hard labor construction jobs where they didn't check too closely.

He paid for that mistake all his life. One thing many ex-felons don't know is that they can escape the lifelong prison of a felony conviction. All it takes is money. The qualifications vary from state to state and they consider the severity of the crime as well. If you stay clean for X years, you can ask the court to expunge your conviction and get it off your record. It can be done. My neighbor would have had a totally different life if he had known. And had the money for court/lawyer/etc.

Here there are a lot of applicants for relatively few jobs. So employers can pick and choose and they don't want to hire felons or people with bad credit if others are available. And lots of jobs here handle Other People's Money so it's logical for them to avoid hiring people with criminal records or the desperately poor. It's not fair but that's the way it is. Things change, they always do, but that won't help you today.