As an Australian, I find that perspective awful. Going to jail is the punishment society has chosen for the crime. Once you've served your time, you rejoin society on an equal footing. Denying jobs to ex-cons makes it much harder for them to integrate back into society, and increases the recidivism rate. (Which you pay for via taxes.)

The equation isn't "bad person -> steals". Its "person maladapted to society / with unhealthy community -> steals". Why would someone be a thief if they have a stable job and community?

And how do you expect someone fresh out of jail, with no connections and community, to make a stable life for themselves if nobody will give them a job?

Not "nobody should give them a job", just not a job with ability to do harm. But that's for every employer to decide for themselves.

If you don't think somebody having done X before makes them more likely to do it again than normal people, I don't know. (More accurately, people who did X are more likely to be people who would do X again). We just have to disagree - but you can not enshrine such beliefs in law.

As I said, trust has to be regained, merely doing something you are forced to do anyways does not prove anything about your real attitudes.

In "How To Change Your Life In 7 Steps", the founder of the homeless magazine "The Big Issue" John Bird describes what he had to do to be able to have homeless people work for him. I have high respect for people like him.

The issue is risk. Hiring someone with a criminal record is riskier than hiring someone with a clean record. There is no upside to mitigate that risk either. So it shouldn't be surprising that hiring managers discriminate on anything they can legally get away with.