Fair or Unfair ?

On October 4th, 2013, The New York Times published the article "A Second Chance in California" under the editorial section. In this article, the Editorial Board informs us that California passed a bill which prevents employers from performing background checks before applicants have met the minimum job requirement. This bill is intended to remove unfair obstructions that might keep applicants with a criminal record out of the job market.
The Editorial Board department is made up of 17 journalists and is considered separate from the newsroom. The primary audience are people with criminal records that have trouble getting the job they seek. Second, I believe the author is also targeting employers which don't always take consequences into account.
It might be true that 65 million Americans have criminal records, but I don't agree that it shuts them out of work. Most job applications only require you to state felonies you have been convicted of, not minor misdemeanors. So this wouldn't nearly affect as many people as stated in this article. I do think it's biased to perform background checks before the interview process, because the primary purpose would be to weed out candidates rather than finding out if the applicant is harmful to the agency. I feel the board is exaggerating when they state that many released prisoners tend to fall back. They don't provide statistics that prove that the majority of ex-criminals relapse or if any of them were attending rehabilitation programs. It's also not mentioned that there's a possibility that some of these applicants might be more hazardous in the workplace than to society. So in conclusion, I agree that it's acceptable to perform background checks if the conviction is applicable in a specific scenario. Otherwise it would be unfair to applicants that decided to turn their lives around and aren't given a second chance.