I think you actually have that backwards. You can't ban public mugshots and have a free and open society. If arrests can be secret then there is no executive or judicial oversight.
But you can make charged and convicted statuses a protected class, and ban its consideration in any context as has been done for other protected classes. After all, if we believe that the process of justice rectifies wrongs, then the matter should be closed when the process has been completed. If we do not believe that the process of justice functionally rehabilitates and fairly rectifies, such that consideration of history beyond the closure of a matter is necessary, then what exactly is the aim of that process?
We could also educate the public about the purpose of the justice system, moral complexity in the assignment of responsibility in the light of historical/social/environmental/economic factors, psychology of criminality and rehabilitation, and the frequency of successful rehabilitation and subsequent significant contribution.
Pixels aren't the problem, the behavior of dehumanization is the problem.
The way I see it, you can either pass a law "banning the pixels" or try to change human nature. Which will be easier and which one will address the issue sooner?
Either way you're ignoring human nature. The other human nature is the nature of power to corrupt, ignored in reducing the transparency of the judicial and executive processes. I can't think of a single historical or contemporary example of government secrecy which has produced morally consistent outcomes. I do not think such things can exist without eventually corrupting the process they serve.
As I said below in another thread, banning discrimination on the basis of judicial and criminal history would immediately and obviously "change human nature" because the practice of discrimination on the basis of these histories occurs openly as a best practice under standing precedent in almost every area of society.
It's literally on application forms -- how can you NOT think that requiring "the question" to be absent from the form would change the conversation about this kind of discrimination?
You can still have this information be publicly available without it being easily accessible on the internet. That's the key. I think we need to return to a system where this information is accessible on request, but not something that's easy to find online.
