In the peer workforce, we talk a lot about lived experience. We say it matters.
We say people who have been through hard things can use what they have learned to support someone else. We build whole roles around that belief.
And then, too often, we turn around and create or perpetuate hiring, certification, contracting and employment systems that still treat a criminal record like it tells us everything we need to know about a person.
It does not.
A new 2026 study, Safe to Hire: Predicting Recidivism Risk for Job Candidates with Criminal Records, looked at criminal record data from seven states, including Texas, to examine whether employers can accurately predict future re-conviction risk.
One of the clearest findings was this: Most people with criminal records are not re-convicted within ten years.
Across the states studied, more than two-thirds of potential job seekers with a criminal record were not re-convicted within 10 years. In some states, that number was closer to eight out of 10.
Even among people only one year removed from their most recent conviction, more than half had a predicted chance of re-conviction in the following year of less than 5 percent. That risk continued to fall as more time passed. That should matter to anyone building or supervising a peer workforce.
Because if we say lived experience is valuable, we have to be willing to look at the whole person.
The peer workforce is built on growth
Peer support rests on a pretty basic idea: People can change. We do recover.
People can rebuild relationships, develop stability, learn from what happened and use that experience in service of someone else.
For many peer specialists, their lived experience includes substance use, mental health challenges, family separation, homelessness or other experiences that may have involved the criminal legal system.
That history is what makes someone effective in peer specialist work.
And yet the same history can become the thing that keeps them out of the workforce. That makes no sense. We cannot celebrate lived experience in theory while punishing it in practice.
Blanket rules do not tell us much about who someone is today
The study found that simple criminal history rules, such as whether someone had a felony or violent conviction within the previous 10 years, were worse at predicting reconviction than the statistical models the researchers tested. And after 10 years, even the stronger models became much less useful.
The researchers suggest that, particularly as more time passes, decision-makers should look at more individualized information such as rehabilitation, employment history, references, and current circumstances.
That makes sense in peer work.
Someone’s record can tell you something about what happened years ago. But the record is static. The person is not. It doesn’t tell you whether they understand peer values. Or whether they can build trust.
It cannot tell you whether they can hold boundaries.
Or whether they show up, keep commitments, reflect on impact or support someone without judgment. Those are the things we should actually be assessing.
We are not very consistent when we judge criminal records anyway
The study also reviewed research showing how differently people interpret the exact same criminal history.
In one example, reviewers looking at the same record for the same job came to very different conclusions. Twenty percent said they would reject the applicant. Thirty percent said the record posed no problem at all. Same person; same record; same job. Different decision depending on who happened to be looking at it.
That should concern us.
Because once a process becomes heavily dependent on individual judgment, bias and personal beliefs can easily enter the room.
Federal guidance has long emphasized looking at factors such as the nature of the offense, how much time has passed, age at the time, relevance to the actual job and evidence of rehabilitation rather than relying only on broad exclusions.
That kind of individualized review is especially important in a workforce built around recovery and transformation.
The barriers do not fall evenly
The study also found racial differences when it compared its models with a 10-year felony screening threshold. Under the researchers’ statistical models, Black men with criminal records were about 98 percent as likely as White women with criminal records to be classified as safe to hire.
Under a 10-year felony threshold, that figure fell to between 74 percent and 78 percent, below the EEOC’s four-fifths benchmark for identifying potential disparate impact.
The researchers are also clear that their own models are not free from bias.
Criminal justice data come from systems already shaped by differences in policing, prosecution, employment, wealth, neighborhood conditions and other social factors. Those inequities do not go away simply because the information gets placed into a formula.
So, this is not an argument for replacing people with an algorithm, but rather an argument for being much more careful about what we think a criminal record tells us.
Peer workforce systems should reflect peer values
The peer workforce asks people to believe in possibility. Hope is part of the work. Self-determination is part of the work. Recovery is part of the work.
So is seeing a person as more than a diagnosis, a crisis, a return to use, a hospitalization, an incarceration or the worst day (or days) in their lives. And our workforce systems should reflect those same principles.
That does not mean every conviction is irrelevant to every role.
It does not mean employers, certifying bodies or organizations should wholly ignore legitimate safety concerns. It means those concerns should be connected to the actual job, the actual circumstances and the person standing in front of us now.
Because a criminal record is not a risk score. And in peer support especially, it should never become a substitute for seeing the whole person.
If we truly believe lived experience has value, then our hiring and workforce systems have to make room for what happened after the worst chapter too.
