You don't need to spend a month to get to know someone. People can appeal with personal statements regarding their criminality when they meet barriers for education, apprenticeships, funding or what have you in our own country's institutions and it gets reviewed and investigated by a person who can overturn it.

I.E: My friend wanted an apprenticeship and wrote a personal statement about how he wasn't actually involved in the fight, but the police charged him and everyone else remotely involved at the time. That he had a stable job, a family and felt like he'd be punished enough for a single mistake.

If you think that the government is incapable of making judgments on these issues, then I don't know how you expect them to manage anything in general. Not to mention, for the majority of people, their first encounter with the justice system is usually their last.

I have no issue working with people convicted of drugs, assault or other violent offences. It's only severe offences like pedophilia, rape and such that I have ever had a red line on and, from my experience, that usually ends with the person getting the shit kicked out of them in the yard anyway.