That would solve the employer discrimination problem, but it creates a whole host of other problems that sound much worse. Our whole legal system rests on the foundation of public access to everything. Anybody can find out: who has been arrested by the police, what they've been charged with, where they're being held, what the outcome of the arraignment and trial is, what evidence and arguments were presented at the trial if there was one, what they were sentenced with, where they are serving their sentence, and how much time they've served.

You can't prevent people from knowing who's an ex-con without making all of that stuff secret. But if all of that stuff is secret, then anyone who the police arrest would essentially disappear. Nobody would be able to find out if they were even arrested in the first place, much less what they've been charged with, what the evidence is to substantiate that charge, where they're being held and in what conditions, etc. So nothing prevents the police from arresting anybody they feel like on no evidence, and keeping them anywhere they want for as long as they want, because nobody would know about it in the first place. Even the much maligned Guantanamo Bay prison isn't that secret, and it's still widely considered an outrage. We've seen a lot of abuse of existing law enforcement powers lately; I'm not willing to essentially give them a massive level of new powers for the sake of giving ex-cons better opportunities.