When considering an applicant for a job, one of the first things employers do is run a background check. These can be as informal as a Google search or as formal as hiring a private screening company, but the goal is the same—to figure out whether or not an applicant could be a risk to the employer. The typical results of these investigations are arrest records, but they usually don’t tell the full story.

Over the past several decades, overall crime across the U.S. has been going down, and the situation is no different in Florida; the state is at its lowest crime rate since the 1960s. Despite this decrease in crime the number of people with criminal records in Florida (and the nation) has continued to grow rapidly, which raises the question “what’s going on here?”